ABSTRACT
We have just recognized that analysis has no justification for positing any stuff of knowledge as an ideally separable ‘moment’ and that this stuff, when brought into being by an act of reflection, already relates to the world. Reflection does not follow in the reverse direction a path already traced by the constitute act, and the natural reference of the stuff to the world leads us to a new conception of intentionality, since the classical conception,1 which treats the experience of the world as a pure act of constituting consciousness, manages to do so only in so far as it defines consciousness as absolute non-being, and correspondingly consigns its contents to a ‘hyletic layer’ which belongs to opaque being. We must now approach this new intentionality in a more direct way by examining the symmetrical notion of a form of perception, and in particular the notion of space. Kant tried to draw a strict demarcation line between space as the form of external experience and the things given within that experience. There is naturally no question of a relationship of container to content, since this relationship exists only between objects, nor even a relationship of logical inclusion, like the one existing between the individual and the class, since space is anterior to its
alleged parts, which are always carved out of it. Space is not the setting (real or logical) in which things are arranged, but the means whereby the position of things becomes possible. This means that instead of imagining it as a sort of ether in which all things float, or conceiving it abstractly as a characteristic that they have in common, we must think of it as the universal power enabling them to be connected. Therefore, either I do not reflect, but live among things and vaguely regard space at one moment as the setting for things, at another as their common attribute-or else I do reflect: I catch space at its source, and now think the relationships which underlie this word, realizing then that they live only through the medium of a subject who traces out and sustains them; and pass from spatialized to spatializing space. In the first case, my body and things, their concrete relationships expressed in such terms as top and bottom, right and left, near and far, may appear to me as an irreducibly manifold variety, whereas in the second case I discover a single and indivisible ability to trace out space. In the first case, I am concerned with physical space, with its variously qualified regions: in the second with geometrical space having interchangeable dimensions, homogeneous and isotropic, and here I can at least think of a pure change of place which would leave the moving body unchanged, and consequently a pure position distinct from the situation of the object in its concrete context. We know how this distinction is blurred in modern conceptions of space, even at the level of scientific knowledge. Here we want to confront it, not with the technical instruments which modern physics has acquired, but with our experience of space, the ultimate court of appeal, according to Kant himself, of all knowledge connected with space. Is it true that we are faced with the alternative either of perceiving things in space, or (if we reflect and try to discover the significance of our own experiences) of conceiving space as the indivisible system governing the acts of unification performed by a constituting mind? Does not the experience of space provide a basis for its unity by means of an entirely different kind of synthesis?
