Kant was the philosopher who first, fully and explicitly, introduced into phi losophy the conception of an ac t of experience as a constructive functioning, transforming subjectivity into objectivity. The purpose of the schematism of the world was to make this functioning reciprocal and more dynamic; for the subjective idealist the process whereby there is experience is a transition from subjectivity to apparent objectivity only; Tanabe complements this analysis with the inverse affectation of the world on an individual and also explains the process as proceeding from objectivity to subjectivity as well, thus making the relation between an individual and the world completely dialectical.
Independent of Heidegger and Tanabe, Whitehead stresses both the epoch-making character of the temporary ego and the importance of its environmental world in this way: (53)
Decartes' "cogito ergo sum"was wrongly translated, "I think, therefore I am." It is never bare thought or bare existence that we are aware of. I find myself as essentially a unity of emotions, enjoyments, hopes, fears, regrets, valuations of alternatives, decisions---all of them subjective reactions to the environment as active in my nature. My unity---which is Descartes' "I am"---is my process of shaping this welter of material into a consistent pattern of feelings. The individual enjoyment is what I am in my role of a natural activity, as I shape the activities of the environment into a new creation, which is myself at this moment; and yet, as being myself, it is a continuation of the antecedent world.
Whitehead characterizes the philosophy of organism as the inversion of Kant's philosophy. Whitehead "seeks to describe how objective data pass into subjective satisfaction, and how order in the objective data provides intensity in the subjective satisfaction; for Kant, the world emerges from the subject: for the philosophy of organism the subject emerges from the world---a superject rather than a subject".(54) The word "object" thus means an entity which is a potentiality for being a component of feeling; the word "subject" means the entity constituted by the process of feeling, and includes this feeling. This inversion of Kant would be meaningless unless the concept of transcendental subjectivity in the Kantian schematism of time is replaced by the Whiteheadian concept of subject-superjectivity in the schematism of the world, i.e., the extensive continuum.
The extensive continuum is a necessary prerequisite of Whitehead's concept of society as a spatio-temporal nexus of actual occations; "a set of entities is a society in virtue of a defining characteristic shared by its members, and in virtue of the presence of the defining characteristic being due to the environment provided by the society itself." (55) The point here is that a society mediates temporal subjectivity with spatial objectivity in such a way that the nexus of actual occasions constitute "public matters of fact". In the same way the schematism of the world is closely related with "the logic of species" which Tanabe first launched in the celebrated paper, "The Logic of Species and the Schematism of the World". What Tanabe means by the logic of species is "the logic of social being" which dialectically mediates individual existence and universal topos. The temporalistic analysis of the subjectivity of an individual existence should be combined with the topological synthesis of the subject-superjectivity of the same individual essentially as a social being.
