A well-known trilemma faces the interpretation of Kant’s theory of affection, namely whether the objects that affect us are empirical, noumenal, or both. I argue that according to Kant, the things that affect us and cause representations in us are not empirical objects. I articulate what I call the Causal Power Argument, according to which empirical objects cannot affect us because they do not have the right kind of power to cause representations. All the causal powers that empirical objects have (...) are moving powers, and such powers can only have spatial effects. According to Kant, however, the representations that arise in us as a result of the affection of our sensibility are non-spatial. I show that this argument is put forward by Kant in a number of passages, and figures as a decisive reason for rejecting empirical affection and instead endorsing affection by the things in themselves. (shrink)

Hans Vaihinger, in the late nineteenth century, posed a now famous trilemma for Immanuel Kant's theory of affection: If things-in-themselves are the affecting objects, then one must apply the categories beyond the conditions of their application . If one holds that appearances are the affecting objects, then one must hold that these appearances which are the effects of affection are themselves the causes of affection. If one holds that things-in-themselves affect the noumenal self in parallel with appearances affecting the empirical (...) self, then that which is a representation for the noumenal self must serve as a causally efficacious thing-in-itself for the empirical self's production of an empirical representation of the very same object. (shrink)

In Critics of pure reason the notion of affection appears at first in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" and is unfolded on the notion of self-affection in the "Transcendental Analytic". Husserl, in manuscripts written from 1918, presents some developments of these Kantian notions. If by affection Kant explains that something can be given to the subject from the sensibility, that is, something that affects oneself from the external and the internal sense, however, Husserl extends the analysis of affection toward a broad spectrum (...) of underlying phenomena, such as volitive acts, imaginative acts, drives and affects. Husserl also analyzes from a phenomenological point of view the Kantian implicit condition that, if anything is given to the subject in the internal consciousness of time, the relationship to itself must be thought as a temporal process. I intend to show that Husserl’s analysis of affection and its modulations unveil possible theoretical directions departing from Kant, but in this step, involving a change of focus on the transcendental field, more specifically on the transcendental foundation of temporality. (shrink)