SPACE – TIME DIMENSION IN THE COGNITION OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE

• The categories of sensibility: space and time
              The faculty of the human mind that is responsible for our perceiving of the world of experience (the phenomenal world) is the faculty of intuition or sensibility. According to Kant, sensibility or intuition is the faculty of the mind which shows man’s dependence on the five senses; whose function is to provide us with immediate a-posteriori knowledge of things. However, the perception of the phenomenal world would not be possible without the two categories of sensibility, which are space and time; 
  •   Space as the outer sense
  Kant classifies space as the outer sense. By this, he understands space to mean the mental factor that gives us the ability to be aware of an objective world outside of us. This objective world is the same as the phenomenal world (the world of experience) which needs us to inspect it. Hence, the ability to inspect and understand this objective world is what constitutes of the realm we call space.
  •   Time as the inner sense
  Kant describes time as the inner sense and by this he means that mental element which gives us the ability to perceive moments, successions and sequence of events; as well as the ability to serialize (date) them. Hence, the ability to perceive and understand this mental movement of activities in the objective world is what constitutes the realm we call time.
  
  
            It is made clear that sensibility or intuition shows the power of the human mind to empirically represent objects or worldly events to itself in space and time. Once we understand this fact, we will come to realize that we possess the abilities to perceive things, perform activities, and cognize and record events in space and time; for space and time are the categories of the mind. What this shows us is that “history happens in space and time”. Without these abilities of man to openly represent what he perceives and to gather information about the outer world, history will be impossible. This is because sensibility grants us the power to cognitively relate with the world of experience which constitutes the domain of history.
  
  
  Human Transcendental Imagination as Synthesizer of Historical Knowledge
              Beyond the primary levels of cognizing history via the mind categories of space and time, there are the intermediate and tertiary levels of being able to image and envision history in order to conceptualize it. Here, the transcendental imagination of man becomes the mediator and the synthesizer of historical knowledge.
  Thus, whenever we create ideas of history in the forms of images or concepts, what we have done is to apply the powers of the imagination and thought to organize the events and data that makes up history. And since we must imagine and conceptualize in the process of critically evaluating and ascertaining the claims we have of history, it is clear that there is no other editor of historical reality greater or second to the human thought.
  Therefore, whereas human a-posteriori abilities enable man to perceive events and gather data in space and time, human a-priori abilities enable man to organize and edit these events and data that now then constitute historical knowledge.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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