SENSIBILITY

the faculty concerned with passively receiving objects. This is accomplished primarily in the form of physical and mental sensations (via 'outer sense' and 'inner sense', respectively). However, such sensations are possible only if the objects are intuited, and intuition depends on space and time existing in their pure form as well. (Cf. understanding.)

[L:11] The faculty of intuitions, opposed to the faculty of concepts, the understanding. [L:40] Sensibility can also be viewed as the faculty of receptivity (i.e., to the action of affecting objects on our minds), in which case it is opposed to the understanding as the faculty of spontaneity. There are "laws of sensibility" which presumably limit our possible experience according to the way in which we are receptive, i.e. which determine "laws of intuition" which intuitions possible for us must fulfil. Thus, the sensibility is one source constituting our ability to make and have representations; the other is the understanding (that is, both supply the limits of our possible experience). Cf. Affinity. [A19/B34] Thus, in the beginning of the Aesthetic, sensibility is defined as "the capacity (receptivity) for receiving representations through the mode in which we are affected by objects". Kant's idea is that objects are given through the sensibility (in intuitions), they are thought through the understanding (through concepts), and our experience of them comes from judgments (which involve the synthesis of intuitions and concepts in the unity of apperception). (For Kant, intuitions are representations of empirical objects, as--indeterminate--appearances.)