A Companion to Kant's ''Critique of Pure Reason''

A COMPANION TO KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON

Transcendental Aesthetic and Analytic Karl Aschenbrenner university of California, Berkeley

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF AMERICA

LANHAM • NEW YORK • LONDOM

Copyright © 1983 by University Press of America,"" Inc. 4720 Boston Way Lanham, MD 20706 3 Henrietta Street London WC2E 8LU England All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America ISBN (Perfect): 0-8191-3230-6 ISBN (Cloth): 0-8191-3229-2

What are meanings? or What is it for an expression to have a certain sense? Until fairly recently philosophers have not stepped back from their easels to consider what philosophy is, or how doing philosophy differs from doing science, or doing theology, or doing mathematics. Kant was the first modern thinker to see or try to answer this question--and a very good beginning of an answer he gave. Gilbert Ryle "The Theory of Meaning"

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Acknowledgements I acknowledge with thanks permission that has been granted to reprint excerpts from two papers published for the Mainz Kant Kongress by, respectively, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, New York, 1974 ("The Derivation and Completeness of the Analogies of Experience"); and Bouvier Verlag, Herbert Grundmann, Bonn, 1981 ("Kant's Transcendental Deduction in A: A Newer Perspective") .

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Table of Contents Page

Introduction I.

The Difference Between Pure and Empirical Knowledge.

We are in Possession of Certain Forms of A Priori Knowledge and Even Common Understanding is Never Without Them. III. Philosophy Stands in Need of a Science Which Can Determine the Possibility, the Principles and the Extent of All Our A Priori Knowledge. IV. The Distinction Between Analytic and Synthetic Judgments. V. All Theoretical Sciences of Reason Contain Synthetic A Priori Judgment as Principles. VI. The General Task Which Confronts Pure Reason. VII. The Idea of and the Divisions Under a Special Science Bearing the Name of a Critique of Pure Reason.

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II.

Transcendental Doctrine of Elements First Part:

The Transcendental Aesthetic §1

Section I. Space Metaphysical Exposition of the Concept of Space §2 Transcendental Exposition of the Concept of Space §3 Conclusions from the Above Concepts Section II. Time Metaphysical Exposition of the Concept of Time §4 Transcendental Exposition of the Concept of Time §5

CKC Conclusions from These Concepts §6 Elucidation §7 General Observations on the Transcendental Aesthetic §8 Conclusion of the Transcendental Aesthetic Second Part:

The Transcendental Logic

Idea of a Transcendental Logic I. Logic in General II. Concerning Transcendental Logic III. The Division of General Logic into Analytic and Dialectic IV. The Division of Transcendental Logic into Transcendental Analytic and Dialectic First Division: Transcendental Analytic

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Introduction:

Book I:

Analytic of Concepts

Chapter I: The Clue to the Discovery of all Pure Concepts of the Understanding Section 1 : The Logical Employment of the Understanding Section 2 : The Logical Function of the Understanding in Judgments §9 Section 3 : The Pure Concepts of the Understanding or Categories §10-12 Chapter II: The Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding Section 1 : The Principles of Any Transcendental Deduction §13 Transition to the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories § 14

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The Relation of the Understanding to Objects in General, and the Possibility of Knowing These A Priori 158

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(Transcendental Deduction: Edition A) Section 2: On the A Priori Grounds of the Possibility of Experience Preliminary Reminder 1: Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition 2: Synthesis of Reproduction in Imagination 3: Synthesis of Recognition in the Concept 4. Preliminary Explanation of the Possibility of the Categories as A Priori Knowledge Section 3:

Summary Representation of the Correctness of this Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding, and of its Being the Only Possible Deduction (Transcendental Deduction: Edition B) Section 2:

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Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding On the Possibility of Combining in General §15

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Of the Original Synthetic Unity of Apperception §16

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All Sensate Intuitions are Subject to the Categories as Conditions Under Which Alone They in Their Multiplicity Can Enter into a Single Consciousness §20

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Supplementary Remark §21

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The Only Use of the Category Looking Toward Knowledge is its Application to Objects of Experience §22 -- §23

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The Application of the Categories to Objects of Senses in General §24

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The Fundamental Principles of the Synthetic Unity of Apperception is the Supreme Principle of All Employment of the Understanding §17 What Objective Unity of SelfConsciousness Is §18 The Logical Form of All Judgments Consists in the Objective Unity of the Apperception of the Concepts Contained Therein §19

Page -- § 25 The Transcendental Deduction of the Universally Possible Use in Experience of Pure Concepts of Understanding §26 Outcome of this Deduction of the Concepts of Understanding §27 Brief Formulation of This Deduction Book II:

Analytic of Principles

Transcendental Judgment in General Chapter I: The Schematism of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding Chapter II: System of All Principles of Understanding Section 1: The Highest Principle of all Analytic Judgments Section 2: The Highest Principle of all Synthetic Judgments Section 3: Systematic Representation of all Synthetic Principles of Pure Understanding

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Introduction:

1. 2. 3.

Axioms of Intuition Anticipations of Perception Analogies of Experience

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First Analogy: Substance Second Analogy: Causality Third Analogy: Community Postulates of Empirical Thought Possibility Actuality Refutation of Idealism Necessity

General Note on the System of Principles Chapter III. On the Ground of the Distinction of the Objects in General into Phenomena and Noumena Appendix:

The Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection

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Preface

The description 'Comment' is probably more appropriate to this effort than 'Commentary'. For this one may turn to the enormous literature on Kant. I have sought rather to emphasize the importance of Kant to us and his relevance to the place that philosophy has now reached. To ask about his value for us means to take him in a manner he himself could not have anticipated and thus in some degree to distort him. But Kant's historical place is far too secure for it to be injured by our effort to see what use he can be to us. I am inclined to think this is far greater than we may have supposed, even considering the recent revival of interest in Kant. Comment with this kind of emphasis may diverge from what may be deemed historically accurate. Resolute Kantians may be disappointed or offended. But Kant is truly only now coming into his own. It is a serious error to read Kant only as a precursor of the German idealist school. I believe he might have thought some of its famous figures often slightly mad. His problems are those of Leibniz and Hume, yes, and of Russell and Wittgenstein, more than those of Hegel and Fichte. Twentieth century philosophy really proceeds on from Kant without a break. It is a pity one must make allowance for Kant's passing before the great achievements of chemistry, physics, and mathematics in the nineteenth century, of logic and methodology in the twentieth were known to him, every one of which he would have followed with a voracious intellectual appetite. With Kant the modern intellect cuts every last link with the Middle Ages. That past had finally passed, and not without his help. He faces resolutely a limitless universe in space and time and possibility: it is what we make of it, intellectually and morally, no more, no less. Like Russell, Kant is a man for our season, a clear-headed realist, above all a philosopher of common sense, despite the apparatus of his architectonic, which must not distract us. The twentieth century philosophers are like Kant too in that they turned their backs on the Romantic age in all its forms: Kant never had to undergo the Romantic agony.

Since one must learn to divide the Critique in order to command it, we must ask how this is to be done. If we consider Kant to have undertaken some three tasks, analytical, dialectical and methodological, the Critique may be separated into three rather unequal parts. Analytical. First, the Prefaces may be detached in order to be read with the dialectic. This leaves us with the first part of the Critique running from the Introduction nearly to the end of the Analytic of Principles.The interest here is analytical, concerned with the nature, foundations and limits of empirical knowledge. Dialectical. Second, the Prefaces, having been written when Kant had the whole Critique before him, turn to its larger and final questions. Kant treated with a compassion unknown to Hume those desperate hopes of mankind and pretensions to transcendence that have been encoded in religion and moral systems. No one has more earnestly sought to do justice to them "within the bounds of reason alone" than Kant. The material in the Critique that bears the weight of this great concern begins with the two prefaces, resumes at the chapter on the distinction between phenomena and noumena and then occupies most of the Transcendental Dialectic. Methodological. The sequel to the foregoing, the Transcendental Methodology, concerns the manner in which the command of the system of knowledge may become operative. Kant retains this didactic feature of the baroque systems of thought of Wolff, Baumgarten, and others. The preceptors of the Enlightenment were all engagees and held it their duty to show how one could use what one had just learned. The methodological material in the Critique, however, is brief and uneven: what was needed was not more and more Erkenntnistheorie but a vast expansion of empirical knowledge, the very result that the nineteenth century produced. The present study provides comment on Kant's contribution in the Critique to the first of these great topics, the analytical. Every sectional and subsectional division of the Critique is carefully observed. I have hoped not merely to rehash the original, but rather to discuss it in such a way that it may be read with rather more ready profit than its difficult idiom usually affords the reader. But as for that,

there is really no such thing as reading Kant, only re-reading. This study of Kant's Critique is offered as a tribute to the late Professor Jacob Loewenberg who taught the Kant course at Berkeley for more than twenty-five years and was my teacher and an inspiration to me for years afterward. His lectures were models of organization and argument and made a pleasure of the hard work and careful thought required by him. I could not have believed that I was destined to be his chosen successor in teaching the Critique and other works of Kant. This Companion was prepared over some thirty years while teaching at Berkeley and is equally a tribute to Kant, Hume and the other masters of Eighteenth Century thought.

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Companion to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: Transcendental Aesthetic and Analytic

INTRODUCTION The Introduction is undoubtedly the most lucid portion in all of the Critique and stands in little need of further exposition. This is not to say that it does not stimulate questions. One could wish that Kant had dwelt at even greater length and with the same clarity on its well-known topics : the terms 'analytic' and 'synthetic' in application to propositions, the nature of a priori knowledge and of synthetic a priori propositions, the need to determine the limits which knowledge obtained through pure reason may reach — and may seek to exceed. With great care he works up to the question which he thinks should be foremost in our thought in the investigation of pure reason: How are synthetic judgments possible a priori? The subject matter of the Critique from the Introduction through the Analytic of Principles covers Kant's answer to this question, and more besides. Thereafter, in the Dialectic, he turns to the pathology of pure reason: the penalties, and even in a way the rewards, that await pure reason in following its inherent bent to ask insoluble questions and demand answers to them. Its reach always exceeds its grasp and, Kant concludes with Browning, that's what a Heaven's for. The Introduction is considerably recast in B. There are several substitutions and additions in the earlier sections. The thought remains essentially the same, but B adds some turns of phrase that are memorably Kantian, for example, "All our knowledge begins with experience ... but it does not all arise out of experience." If the Critique can be reduced to an apothegm, it is this. I.

Of the Difference Between Pure and Empirical Knowledge

The difference which Kant describes is of course not a creation of his own since it goes back to ancient philosophy. Its mention prominently at the beginning of the Critierue does, however, underline a difference between himself and Locke and Hume, for example, especially the latter. Kant is taking pains to affirm the difference between two sources of our knowledge, whereas Locke sought from the outset to show that, although we might

be tempted to think otherwise, all our knowledge is derived from experience. Locke adds immediately that under experience there are two sources of our ideas: sensation and reflection. But the identification of the second source here does not at all serve to make the point Kant is making, for it is described as internal sense. Kant's reply to this would be that sense, whether internal or external (and a distinction bearing at least this name is also made by Kant) is but one source of our knowledge, one "place" where it begins, and that a second kind of knowledge and a second source must also be allowed for, that is, speaking generally, a priori knowledge and an appropriate source of this which the Critique proposes to lay bare. The response to Hume is similar. Hume regards imressions, of sensation and of reflection, as the ultimate source of all ideas in an even more radical fashion than Locke. His program is one either of denying that ideas have any validity if they cannot be traced to this source, or of saying that although we may often think we have ideas from some other source the fact is we do not have them at all in that case, and we are deluding ourselves. What Kant is saying on the other hand is that some ideas can be traced to intuitions, or as Hume would say, impressions, and some must be traced to an altogether different source. Kant's standpoint is one that in effect agrees with rationalism, however much of his explanation diverges from that of the supporters of innate ideas. He insists that a priori ideas are not innate at B 167 (in the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories). He has a different explanation of their inherence in the human mind. One should notice what powers Kant here attributes to objects, Gegenstande: they stir our sense into activity and produce, in some sense, .representations Vorstellungen; they set the understanding into motion to compare, connect and distinguish representations; and thus work them up into "that knowledge of objects which we call experience." At this point he has not yet made clear to us in what sense 'objects' is to be understood. Things themselves? Appearances? It is most likely he means the first of these; the second are in part a result of the activity of the first. The first two paragraphs are united by the contrast of "beginning with" and "arising out of experience."

The latter has of course important implications for what is to be said later in the Critique• We should not, however, read it altogether in the light of what follows. All that Kant is saying here is that we must be prepared to find experience to be a much more complex affair than the empiricists supposed. Of course all knowledge begins with experience, but it is a thing of such complexity that there may very well be elements in it that do not arise from the impressions of sense and that we may not be able at a glance, and without skill and practice in analysis, to trace to their origins. This is, in fact, the very contingency we had better prepare ourselves for. If there is an ingredient in our empirical knowledge that does not owe its presence solely to impressions of the senses we may call it a priori. It is not yet taken as established that there is such a component: the proof of this is to come in the very next section, as we see from its title, "We are in possession of certain kinds of a priori knowledge, and even common understanding is never without them." The remainder of the section is meant to make the idea 'a priori1 clear, distinguishing it from mere predictions about phenomenal trains of events, such as what is said to be bound to happen if one undermines the foundations of a house. The a priori knowledge which the Critique is investigating is to be understood as knowledge in which there is no appeal to experience but is such as to apply to the world of experience, and indeed to make it possible. These are uniquely Kantian theses that we do well to have in mind from the very outset. It should be noted that the sections marked I and II in B were added in that edition replacing the two paragraphs with which section I of A began. As noted, B adds the phrases about the Anfang and the Entsprung, that is, beginning with and arising out of experience, and it contributes a welcome, but still insufficient exposition of the notion of necessity as applied particularly to propositions such as causal laws. II. We are in possession of certain kinds of a priori knowledge and even common understanding is never without them.

We learn presently that the task of a critique of pure reason is to show how synthetic judgments are possible a priori. If we overhear someone asking how it is possible for someone to steal the gold in Fort Knox, having just entered the conversation at that point, our first or prior question is likely to be: What? Has someone stolen the gold? So here before we ask how it is possible for there to be so and so we need to know that there are examples of so and so. What then is pure or a priori knowledge and how is it recognized or1acquired? It is not to be acquired through experience, which can at most tell us what is the case as a matter of fact but not that it must be as it is. As we have already noted, we also use the term 'a priori1 in a relative sense of the future when we say that if we undermine a house we know a priori , that is in advance, that it will fall. But this rests merely on previously confirmed empirical knowledge. What then characterizes a judgment that is absolutely a priori? The first mark of such a judgment is that it is necessary. Kant adds that if the judgment is not only necessary but itself deducible from a necessary judgment then it is valid absolutely a priori. But it is not clear what this can add to its simply being a priori. The second mark of an a priori judgment is that it is universal in its range. Again, we must look beyond mere experience. In the sense of an inductive accumulation of positive instances, experience can never lend the character of strict universality to any proposition, for this is merely to know that there have been no exceptions hitherto. A proposition that is strictly universal, says Kant, is one to which no exceptions will be permitted (dass gar keine Ausnahme als möglich verstattet wird!. This clause should be carefully stored in memory, since it is relevant to Kant's view of the peculiar necessity attaching to synthetic a priori principles of science, considered in the Analytic of Principles, but of course also much in view before then. We shall recur to it. Examples of these judgments are now brought forward. The propositions of mathematics and the causal law are mentioned prominentlyNecessity and unlimited universality have been treated as practically synonymous in this section though Kant has not given a real explanation of necessity as yet. Indeed one of the major shortcomings of the Critique is Kant's failure to give an adequate

explanation of what he means by the necessity of the principles which it is the main purpose of the Critique to enunciate and prove. So far we have been told that they are of unrestricted universality and that we will not permit exceptions to them. He now adds a kind of third property that pertains to them, that they are jjrii spensable(unentbehrlich) for the possibility of experience and therefore, he says (or it might be better to say "in that sense" instead of "therefore") a priori. The question he has not yet addressed himself to is how they differ from analytic a priori propositions. Once this has been done we shall have to return to the question as to what he means by saying that certain _^nnnepts are a priori. At the end of the present section he devotes a paragraph to exemplifying such concepts. It is no accident that he here uses almost the very same notion and procedure that Descartes resorted to with the ball of wax and also arrives at the same result. If we think away the color, weight, impenetrability and other properties of a body we inevitably arrive at an irreducible minimum, namely the space occupied by the body. And, says Kant, the same process should lead us to the notion that there is a support of all the qualities of a body in a substratum or substance. This is also characteristic of Locke's approach to the idea of substance. Many more such echoes from the past are to be discerned in the Critique, but as we shall see, Kant renovates radically the notions he borrows. The two sections just finished thus first make the distinction between pure and empirical knowledge and then assert that pure or a priori knowledge is not a mere abstract possibility but that we do in fact possess such knowledge. III. Philosophy stands in need of a science which can determine the possibility, the principles and the extent of all our a priori knowledge. The next question then is where these a priori propositions are to be found. Kant points out that certain metaphysical propositions are particularly to be numbered among them and that they go beyond everything empirical. Up to now Kant has taken examples of "transempirical" propositions only from mathematics and the causal law. In a paragraph added to the text in the second edition (paragraph 3 in III) Kant

particularly identifies the subject matter of metaphysics as the ideas of God, freedom and immortality. He has not yet pointed out that metaphysics has several senses for him. The sense in which God, freedom and immortality are the subject matter of metaphysics is quite different from that in which causality is. Ideas such as the former in his view inevitably lead to illusion and confusion though they have some redeeming features in the end; causality on the other hand is an absolutely indispensable notion for both science and common experience. Nothing in Kant's critical philosophy is more important than the line he draws between these two different sets of notions. Both of them readily lead us beyond experience, but the needs they serve are utterly different. Our success in mathematics in seeming to leave experience behind us emboldens us, says Kant, to undertake even bolder transempirical researches. We tend to overlook the fact that the notions of mathematics must in principle be illustrable or exemplifiable in intuition, but we confuse this kind of intuition with conceptual thought. The metaphysician is like a dove that feels the resistance and pressure of the atmosphere upon its wings and supposes that its flight may be easier in a space wholly devoid of air. Just so Plato left the world of the senses and took flight with the wings of ideas into the inane atmosphere of the pure understanding. He failed to notice that the understanding can really advance nowhere in such a flight: to transcend is necessarily to go beyond snmpt-.h i ng and to measure one's distance from it. The inclination of human reason is to ignore this, to give no thought to the foundations of its speculative structures. The source of the illusion that palpable progress is being made in metaphysical researches lies in misunderstanding the nature of the propositions being formulated, particularly those that are a priori. The mere analysis of what is contained in concepts is useful and informative, but it actually does not materially advance our thought, although it may falsely be construed to do so. We must distinguish a priori knowledge which expounds what is already implicit in our thought from a priori knowledge which does in fact advance to new truths. To understand the difference, Kant deems it necessary to undertake a study of the form of propositions which express our various kinds of knowledge . 8

IV.

The distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments.

We now arrive at the acknowledged locus classicus of this celebrated distinction. Two pairs of distinctions are put forward in the Critique: analyticsynthetic, and a priori-a posteriori, but only the first of these receives any extensive discussion here. The second has in effect already been taken up in the earlier sections. Kant first explains the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments offering examples of each, and then discusses an example of judgments that are both synthetic and a priori. The analytic-synthetic distinction is based upon formal considerations and is regarded as exhaustive. In an analytic(judgment the predicate is said to be ;fintained in the subject, and in a hidden or covert fashion (versteckterweise). In a synthetic judgment the predicate is not contained in the subject but is connected with the subject, since in fact we have said that A _i_s B. An explanation of defining phrase is added by Kant to the effect that the two kinds of propositions are "thought through identity" and "without identity," respectively. He also calls them explicative and augmentative judgments (Erlauterungsurteile and Erweiterunqsurteile) . All judgments of experience are synthetic. The predicate is not to be discovered or confirmed by confining ourselves to an analysis of the subject, as in the analytic judgment. We must look beyond the subject, acquaint ourselves with its relations toward other things. If such judgments are confirmed by experience we have extended our knowledge. Although the predicate is not contained in the subject, the two do form a unity which Kant characterizes as a "whole of experience itself a synthetic unity of intuitions." But although all judgments of experience are synthetic, the reverse is not the case. There are also synthetic judgments which are a priori. In these there is a necessary connection between subject and predicate, but not by virtue of the fact that the predicate is contained in the subject or logically related to it. The best example is "everything that happens has a cause." This illustrates our a priori speculative knowledge. Propositions of this sort are at the very center of the concerns of the Critique.

In order that we may be as faithful as possible to what Kant actually thought and said about the analyticsynthetic distinction it may be well to quote the text. In doing so, I shall also suggest a possible way of distinguishing what seem to be several strands of Kant's thought on the subject. I suggest that there are some four rather different but overlapping ways that Kant tries to make the distinction. (I shall quote almost verbatim from Kemp Smith's translation, so that the English-speaking reader can readily locate these passages particularly in IV and V of Kant's Introduction.)

(1) Containment. The first and most apparent way Kant makes the distinction is to say that in an analytic proposition the predicate is contained in the subject. There are various ways he expresses this. The concept of the predicate is covertly contained in the subject. We need merely analyze the subject through the predicate. We add nothing to the subject through the predicate. In the analytic proposition our knowledge is not extended. Appropriate modifications or negations are made for the synthetic proposition in these and the other quotations. (2)

Dependence on the principle of contradiction or of identity. We can extract the predicate from the subject in accordance with the principle of contradiction . The judgment is thought through identity. We proceed in accordance with the principle of contradiction. The predicate is bound up with the subject. The predicate belongs to the subject. In these expressions nothing is said that literally requires the containment of the predicate in the subject. Rather, there is said to be a necessary connection between the two that may be revealed or demonstrated through appeal to logic or the "laws of thought." (3)

Psychological connection between subject and predicate. I must be careful to explain this style of connection. I think it is doubtful that Kant actually intended to interpret the connection as psychological in nature. One may, however, come to the 10

conclusion that what Kant says about the relation may in the end come down to, amount to a psychological explanation of the connection. Certainly his prima facie characterization of the relationship sounds psychological: I must become conscious to myself of the manifold which I always think in the subject. In the analytic proposition, the question is whether I actually think the predicate in the representation of the subject (Axioms of Intuition, A164/B205). The question is not what we ought to join in thought to the given concept but what we actually think in it, even if only obscurely (Kant's emphasis). There is still more that suggests that Kant was close to a psychological version in the Introduction, as we have already noted. If we think it a little implausible to regard 7 + 5=1.2 as synthetic, Kant asks us to think of large numbers, e.g., 104,787,223 + 888,926,415 + 688,923,147 = 1,682,636,785, Of course, for most persons the sum here will be a "psychological novelty" arrived at through careful arithmetical calculation. But we also believe there is a right and a wrong about addition regardless of how perfectly or imperfectly individual calculators may add, regardless of their thought processes. It should be apparent that Kant might have been willing to correct the impression that the analytic relation was only psychological. If so we are thrown back on (1) or (2). There is, however, a revision of (3) that suggests itself: (4) Relationship of concepts. This we might call Kant's conceptualism, since Kant from the outset commits himself to the distinction between concepts and intuitions. What enters into the subjects and predicates of judgments such as appear in the theoretical generalizations of science is concepts (particularly in predicates). It is quite possible to interpret judgment and thought in Kant as being the work of a wholly different part of the human Geist from intuitions. Intuition is what confronts us in inner sense, in introspection ,• and is the subject-matter of psychology. But thought must in some way be exempted from the jurisdiction of psychology, although of course, thinking has to be done with intuitional aids. If one can accept this division of labor, the 11

reduction of the connection between subject and predicate to something psychological becomes less inevitable. I am not certain that it is wholly set aside inasmuch as Kant in V once more insists that the question is not one of how we ought to relate predicates to concepts but how we actually think (B17). But I think we must not equate "how we actually think" with what we have called "psychological reduction", even though it is tempting. The emphasis should be on think or thought, on what actually is included in the thought of the subject, and we should remember that thought is never in Kant reducible to intuition. With this in mind we may now reflect on the following passages which present the relation in "conceptualistic" terms: The concept of the predicate is contained in the subject. We must go outside the concept of the subject in the synthetic judgment (but not in the analytic). All the conditions for the (analytic) judgment are present in the concept of the subject. I must analyze the subject to reveal the predicate. I must become conscious to myself of the manifold which I always think in the subject. It will be noted that we repeat the last of these from (3) above, thus underscoring the problem of whether we are to regard it as psychological or conceptualistic in character. Of course the passages we have quoted under (1) and (2) also lend themselves indirectly to interpretation under (4). The issue must ultimately come down to what we are to understand by 'thought' and 'concept'. I do not think Kant has anything original to< say on this matter or to help us solve the puzzles that have been endemic to it since Plato. We may in the end exonerate Kant of the charge of psychologizing logical matters but it is not so clear how we are to understand his "ontology of thought". Our impression of Kant's "psychologizing" may stem from his tendency to think not in terms of propositions and sentences but of judgments. It is easy to regard the former as objects or "objectives" of some sort and it is a wrench to think of them as acts of mind. This characterization, however, suits judgment and Urteil perfectly and the objective style is correspondingly alien. Possibly the "content" of 12

every judgment could be regarded as a kind of adverb, that is, "A judges thus: snow is white." A judgment is a kind of performance characterized by what we think of as the assertion. Seen in this way, as an act of mind, it is natural in using the idiom of judgment and Urteil to speak of it in those terms which, under (3) above, sound psychological or psychologistic. The discussion introducing the synthetic a priori judgment in the last paragraph of IV briefly defines and illustrates this judgment. In Section V Kant asserts that there actually are such judgments and locates them in the several fields of knowledge. An exemplary synthetic a priori judgment is, "whatever happens has its cause". This cannot be known on the evidence of experience; it is to be thought of as a necessary truth; and yet it is not true because it is analytic. It is well to note the phraseology which Kant uses of this type of judgment. In it the predicate is joined to the subject completely a priori " on the basis of mere concepts" (aus blossen Begriffen). Usually Kant says that logical or analytic a priori judgments join their predicates to their subjects on the basis of blosse Begriffe, for without going either to experience or to any fundamental preconditions for experience we can decide their truth simply by the inspection of concepts alone. Since that is Kant's customary and even emphatic phrase to characterize analytic judgments and procedures, the present wording may be construed as the result of an oversight or inadvertence. If Kant is certain of anything, it is that the causal principle is not analytic. I believe that Kant's view of the role of analytic a priori judgments is altogether modern, or at least compatible with typical thought of our century on the subject. Kant in principle regards the conditionals corresponding to the valid forms of the syllogism as analytic and regards other logical operations in a similar light. Of course premises and conclusions may themselves be synthetic, but the principles guiding the inference are analytic. "Pure logic," he remarks a t A54/B68 "is a body of demonstrated doctrine, and everything in it must be entirely a priori." It is also worthy of remark as early as possible that Kant cer tainly intends to separate logic from psychology ]ust a g fundamentally as Frege, Peirce, or Russell 13

have done, in spite of the fact that, as noted above, his analysis of judgment is not altogether free of a psychologizing tendency. He parts company with one of the major current viewpoints when it comes to the homogeneity of mathematics and logic, since he regards mathematical propositions as synthetic and a priori. Hence they could not be derived from logic. V.

All theoretical sciences of reason contain synthetic a priori judgment as principles.

Although the nature of synthetic a priori judgments has been as yet only sketched out by Kant, he now affirms that there are such judgments. He has cited a few examples but said little about the domains in which these examples, and others of their kind, are to be found. We now learn that three domains contain such judgments: all mathematical judgments are synthetic; natural science , and in particular physics, contains synthetic a priori judgments as principles,- and at least in intent (ihrem Zwecke nach), all propositions of transcendent metaphysics, are synthetic and a priori. Even in this section we must permit Kant a considerable latitude: he will not in a matter of moments be able to show us that there are synthetic a priori judgments, nor that those of mathematics, pure natural science, and metaphysics are of this kind. We may therefore regard the present section as enunciating his principal thesis rather than proving it. The Critique as a whole must be appealed to for proof, if it is forthcoming. In the next section (VI), we learn that the question to which the Critique addresses itself is: How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?

2

We have already remarked that we need to ask the question, how p can be true (or possible), only if we already know that indeed p, or p is true. Kant did not in practice separate clearly the two questions whether there are such propositions, and how they are possible, although he explicitly recognizes in VI a difference that is close to it: we may properly ask how there can be pure mathematics and pure natural science, for that there are such enterprises is shown by their actually existing (B20-21). When one scans the whole expanse of the Critique in detail there is probably as much of an answer to each question as one may hope to find. 14

One must not dismiss the whole program of the Critique by saying, there are in fact no synthetic a priori truths and therefore a campaign to discover how they are possible is doomed from the beginning. The real questions are such as these: how can there be necessary truths in geometry and arithmetic; what is the basis of our (assertedly unshakeable) belief that every event has a cause; are we compelled to believe that there must be a first cause if we believe that every event has a cause? Kant believes his predecessors have given inadequate answers to such questions, and his own answers to them deserve serious consideration even if it could be shown that the key propositions involved are not synthetic and a priori in nature. The first area that Kant identified as containing synthetic a priori judgments is judgments of mathematics.^ He says that it was erroneously supposed that the Grundsätze (axioms) of mathematics were analytically true because the proof of them proceeded by means of principles that were analytically true. We can also find support among earlier thinkers for the view that mathematical propositions are true on the ground that they are instantiations of the law of contradiction and are thus analytic. Kant offers but two examples in support of his view about mathematical propositions. The first is the arithmetical truth that 7+5=12. This Kant declares to be synthetic on the ground that it cannot be regarded as analytic. Why then may it not be thought to be analytic? The reason he cites sounds even more explicitly "psychological" than was the account given of the nature of analytical propositions in IV. He is arguing that if thinking of whatever is thought in 7+5 were somehow identical with thinking 12, or if one could not think the one without thinking the other, then the statement would be necessarily and analytically true. If on the other hand one can think of one without the other the statement of their equality is synthetic. It is now said that the concept of the sum of 7 and 5 contains nothing more than the combination (or rather the combining) of the two numbers but that it does not contain what issues from the process of combining, that is, 12. The term Vereinigung (unification, combination) is just as tolerant of being interpreted as an act in process as it is as the product of an a ct completed. The English term 'combination' on the 15

other hand leans heavily in the second direction. He may therefore be saying that we must not identify the act of combining 7 and 5 with the result of the act, 12. Would it be compatible with what Kant says to regard 7+5 as a kind of command, thus: "Combine 7 and 5"? This would not at the outset reveal the outcome, which might in principle be novel or surprising. Only the carrying out of the task would reveal the result. Unfortunately, this interpretation, while seeming to account for the difference of the two members, (7+5) and 12, would be useless, since obeying an imperative yields nothing one can judge to be true. The rest of the exposition may in fact be psychological, but it also lends itself to the kind of conceptualistic interpretation developed above. The difficulty with this is that it would require more of a theory of concepts and conceptual thought than Kant offers. But more importantly, it is incompatible with Kant's firm conviction that the necessity of mathematical judgments is based on a priori intuitions and not concepts. So far as the psychological aspect of mathematical operations is concerned, one may readily concede that a sum may not be readily recognizable in a series of addends. But the mere fact that a sum turns out to be a psychological novelty is an inadequate ground for regarding the judgment as not analytic. We must also remember that any psychological process takes place in time. When we interpret the left hand member of an arithmetical formula as an operation to be carried out, the result will not be "inevitable" until the operation is carried out. Kant does in fact rather courageously consider an intimate connection between arithmetic and time, for example in the Prolegomena• But it can scarcely be thought to lead to anything except unwelcome results. Kant's second mathematical example is of course drawn from geometry: the straight line is the shortest distance between two points. What Kant says on this subject is altogether insufficient to prove that the proposition is synthetic. It rests on the assertion that 'straight' is a qualitative and 'shortest' is a quantitative term. But how this yields the conclusion in question is not explained. If we consider a near equivalent of this proposiiton, namely Theorem 20 in the first book of Euclid, we find a demonstration that makes no appeal to a distinction of quantity and 16

quality. Euclid's proposition reads: "Any two sides of a triangle are greater than the third side." This is proved solely by appeal to the equality of the base angles of an isosceles triangle, to Axiom 9 which states that a whole is greater than its part, and to previous Theorem 19 which states that if one angle of a triangle is greater than another then the side opposite the greater angle is greater than the side opposite the lesser. To prove: AB+AC > BC Produce AB to D Join D, C Let AD=AC ißDC < IBCD

BD > BC, etc. Without reference to a concrete case such as this Kant simply states that intuition must be called to our aid to effect the synthesis, between the key notions in the subject and predicate (straight and shorte st) . Kant emphasizes what we may speak of as our thoughtprocesses in geometry and presumably our mathematical thinking in general. We must, he says, attend to how we actually do think, and when we do, we shall see that we must appeal to intuition to effect a connection between subject and predicate. He does not explain why in fact intuition, even pure intuition, should yield an unassailable result. In any appeal to empirical intuition one would certainly be wise to draw conclusions with caution. Yet pure intuition is credited with yielding infallible results. One should remark finally that the notion of syntheticity touches not only the form of certain propositions, but is generally taken in the explicit sense that whenever a proposition is synthetic, there must occur a process of synthesis and an agent who performs the process of synthesis. This agent cannot, however, simply be said to be you or I, or Smith or Jones: we must look to something which we may designate the Paradigmatic self. With this phrase we may draw attention to the "we" to whom Kant assigns such momentous tasks as devising or applying the categories, 17

among several others. For example, speaking of the categories he says, "we ourselves introduce into appearances the order and regularity we call nature" (A125) and countless similar things. It is paradigmatic in the sense that it is not the local you or I that is doing any of this. (We shall explain the identity and function of this self in more detail as we proceed.) One should now observe that attributing the process of synthesis in 7+5=12 to a paradigmatic self would effectively remove the operation from being subject to the criticism in terms of psychologism. It would however do so at the expense of our trying to understand this operation in any familiar terms, since it would be, as it were, taking place "behind the scene." The second area that contains synthetic a priori judgments is natural science. The development of the concepts and the demonstration of the principles underlying science is referred to by Kant as metaphysics in a certain sense, what we can call natural metaphysics. True synthetic a priori judgments of natural metaphysics are necessary but unlike analytic propositions they are not necessarily true because their contradictories are self-contradictory. Neither are they highly probable or highly confirmed synthetic truths, to which there are no known exceptions. To say of them that they are necessarily true is to say that, come what may, we will not under any circumstances permit ourselves in speaking of this world the thought of their falsity, dass gar deine Ausnahme als mö'glich verstattet wird (Introduction II, and elsewhere). This suggests that we have adopted some kind of rule, one that inherently rules out the falsity of the rule. Kant has in fact, in the Transcendental Deduction and elsewhere, and very prominently, referred to these synthetic a priori propositions as rules. But, rules! Are we not seeking to find the truth about the world and how _i_t is? How can we prescribe rules to the order of nature? Does not nature go its own way in spite of us? Kant's answer is a radical revision of the received doctrines of empiricist philosophers. If we ask, how can VT£ prescribe to nature, Kant's answer is, because the order of things that we are ruling and ordering is a world partly of our own creation, the world of appearances, and must therefore tolerate our regulistic venturesomeness. This is the world we confront in perception and in all our scientific efforts to wring 18

the truth from nature. It is not a world of things themselves but as he says, appearances or phenomena (Erscheinungen). This then is what is at the bottom of the claim that there can be, and indeed there are, necessary truths about the world around us: because in fact it is, _iri its formal aspect, a world of our own creation. The fundamental truths about or the laws of this world are in fact rules governing it. It might seem to be a rather arbitrary and capricious state of affairs where we can make our own world. Kant's answer is that the "creation" which we here speak of is not yours or mine. The "creative agent" is the paradigmatic self. We must seek to lay bare the efforts and achievements of such a self, and the Critique is the record of doing just this. We should be prepared in reading the Critique for a shift in the "mode" of such a statement as the causal law. At the outset we are invited to rethink our "sentential categories," allowing for synthetic as well as analytic a priori propositions, and we are asked to regard these propositions, or at least certain of them, as necessarily true. In the Deduction we learn that they must be treated as rules: of course this is a wrench to our thought since we generally do not speak of a rule (nor does a German speak of a Regel) as true or false. As we go on to the farther reaches of the Critique, to the sections that follow upon the statement of the Antinomies of Pure Reason, we detect a reinterpretation of the rules in pragmatistic terms: the causal law is to be followed because it is scientifically good advice, because it leads us to material truths about the world which we would not know how to search for, or to find, if we proceeded without it. The third area containing synthetic a priori propositions or principles is that of transcendent metaphysics. It remains to be seen, however, whether they are true or even meaningful at all or whether they are merely so in the intention of the propounders of such principles. Their domain comprises rational Psychology, cosmology, and theology. It may be well to remark again that neither the theses of natural nor those of transcendent metaphysics are provable by appeal to experience, nor to concepts alone (that is, they are not analytically true). What 19

distinguishes them is that the theses of natural, but not those of transcendent metaphysics apply to experience and are needful to make experience possible. The proof of such principles can only be, as Kant says, transcendental. The defense of these contentions makes up the content of the transcendental analytic and dialectic . VI.

The general task which confronts pure reason

Having explained the nature of judgments, analytic and synthetic, and shown that certain sciences contain judgments that are not only synthetic but a priori, Kant now sets himself the task of setting forth explicitly a momentous problem that arises about them. We must ask the question how such judgments are possible, and this necessitates an undertaking that we may call a critique of pure reason. The examination of the pretensions of pure reason to knowledge outside or beyond experience, to a priori knowledge in short, comes down to just this question about the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments. We may make this clearer to ourselves if we raise similar questions about other judgments; Kant did not explicitly raise these questions since they answer themselves in the framework of the Critique. The questions are: How are synthetic a posteriori judgments possible? How are analytic a priori judgments possible? Whereas the comparable question ,about the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments occupies a book of nearly 900 pages (in B ) , one would think that these questions should be less difficult to answer. Synthetic a posteriori propositions are the day in and day out reports of our experience, inner or outer, accumulations of information, and generalizations about the world, both the most problematic and the most unexceptionable. If we ask how this knowledge, or at least information, is possible we must first say that it is because it is based upon experience. The rest of our task will be to offer interpretations of this as it applies to various areas of experience: the past, present, and future; the remote and the accessible; 20

the abstract and the concrete; the general and the particular; the theoretical and the actual; and so on. The task should not be as arduous as the one we have uncovered for synthetic a priori propositions. In fact, however, even a moment's reflection on the philosophical effort that has been expended on the question of the nature of truth should show us that the question is no less difficult than the one Kant puts at the center of the Critique. What is even more important is the involvement of the two questions with one another. Take a simple Kantian example of a judgment of experience , the sun warms the stone. Kant's point is that this and all such judgments of experience are possible only because certain synthetic a priori propositions are antecedently true. If we ask how analytic a priori propositions or judgments are possible, the answer Kant would propound is, they are possible because in some judgments predicates are already contained in their subjects. We can be a priori certain of whatever is asserted of these subjects whenever we know or can show that indeed the predicates are so contained. But can we be and, if so, how can we be a priori certain of any assertion when we find that its predicate is not contained in its subject, and that no accumulation of experience bears on the truth of it? The prior question is, are there any such .propositions. Though Kant has put forth no great effort to show this, he has satisfied himself that there are three areas in which they are found. These propositions are either mathematical or they set forth the basic propositions of natural science (call this natural metaphysics) or of transcendent metaphysics. This is the framework for the inquiry called the critique of pure reason. Kant says that metaphysics, whether natural or transcendent would not have fared as ill as it has in his time, if the problem of the synthetic a priori had been broached. Hume failed to do so with regard to natural metaphysics, in particular the causal axiom (every event has a cause), and in a sense rejected it along with the whole apparatus of "divinity or school metaphysics." Kant says that if Hume had hit on the problem he himself has uncovered about the synthetic a priori, he would have seen that his conclusions would equally invalidate or "liquidate" all of mathematics, a result Hume would certainly have abhorred. 21

We are thus said to be confronted by an unavoidable and most arduous bask, to see how we can justify necessary truths that are not analytic. If we fail» not only will school metaphysics collapse, but science and mathematics as well. Such a serious outcome must be avoided. Kant was ever a man to embrace his duty when he saw it, but he came to the realization of it only slowly. At a time when many men think of retiring from their labors, Kant had just begun the enormous labor of producing the Critique , and to this he found it necessary to add two others. The task he found to be that of providing a foundation for all knowledge and in the end he found this would have to include even that pretension of knowledge, metaphysics. It cannot be ignored as the sceptics have done. Its roots, Kant found, are far deeper than one might suppose. As he explains in this section, although metaphysics cannot claim to have arrived at any knowledge hitherto, we cannot doubt that there are certain deep-seated drives in man that insistently issue in questions of a metaphysical character. Hence we must try to discover how metaphysics as a natural human disposition is possible. This should enable us to learn whether metaphysics as science is possible. In this way we can answer the basic questions that must be addressed to pure reason, regarding mathematics, science, and metaphysics. Since this is an investigation of something entirely within our grasp, the powers of the human mind, and not of a subject matter that stretches on through inaccessible reaches of time and space, we can hope to complete the investigation, definitively. But we shall succeed only if we keep our eye on the question how, whether, and in what domains pure reason can hope to extend its knowledge materially.

VII. The idea of and the divisions under a special science bearing the name of a critique of pure reason The final section of the introduction presents little that is essential to the total economy of the critique that is now to unfold. It proposes to present a general summation of the tasks to be undertaken by such a critique but actually offers a rather confusing picture of it, hesitating between terms to characterize it such as organon, doctrine, and canon, all of them dear to the system-loving Kant. The principal 22

result, looking to what Kant has said here and elsewhere, is that a critique of pure reason is not coextensive with a system of pure reason, but "an examination of the faculty of reason in general in respect of all knowledge toward which it may strive independently of all experience? (A xii). Kant seems to have contemplated at one time the construction of the entire system of pure reason, but this proved to be a more ambitious program than he was ever able to carry out. We have, however, a fragment or sample of it in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science and in certain ethical writings. Although it does not present the system of pure reason thus contemplated, the Critique presents both more and less of it than we may expect. The principles in the Transcendental Analytic go a considerable way toward supplying a knowledge of the content of such a system. Thus we learn in considerable detail how the ideas of substance and causality are supplied by it. Yet if we look for a consequent analysis of these notions we are disappointed. We learn, for example, that a cause is said to be a materially necessary and sufficient condition of its effect, much in the manner of Hume's positive doctrine on the subject (Treatise I-IV-XV) but the many vexing questions which it occurred to Hume to raise are not raised by Kant. This cannot be because he had no appreciation of their reality and gravity, but because in a critique he thought himself justified in hastening on to all the other problems that a propaedeutic of pure reason must address itself to. The Critique proved to be an even more formidable and arduous task than he may have conceived it to be at the outset.

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TRANSCENDENTAL DOCTRINE OF ELEMENTS We proceed now to the body, though not yet the heart of the Critique, a term we must reserve for the doctrine of the categories and the categorial principles. It should be said at once that we cannot even mention all of the most important issues that have arisen about the Transcendental Aesthetic or Logic. We must restrict ourselves to a brief exposition and elucidation with such suggestions about further problems as can readily be exhibited within this framework. It is very well-known that Kant thought himself obliged to follow an expository plan that would suit a treatise on logic. Here we must think of logic both in a very general sort of way which applies to the Critique as a whole, and also in a more particular way that is illustrated in the distinction between Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Logic and in the divisions within the latter. Kant follows the general organization of logic prevailing in his day, the division of the subject into a Transcendental Doctrine of Elements (Elementarlehre) and a Transcendental Methodology (Methodenlehre), a distinction that he found precedents for in the ontologies and logics of the Leibniz-Wolff school which he himself had studied and which he used in his lecture courses. We may say that the Doctrine of Elements is intended to answer the question through what means synthetic a priori judgments are possible and the Methodology, through what methods they can be realized. If the model of logic is followed in further detail, the traditional divisions would be ConceptsJudgments-Inferences. In the transcendental doctrine of elements we ask about the possibility and authority of a priori concepts, judgments, and inferences. Here one must first pause over the term 'transcendental,1 and even more must be said of this by and by. Kant is saying that there are certain conceptions and principles of an a priori nature which are absolutely indispensable for human experience and for the larger and more formal extensions of such experience in science and theoretical endeavor in general. These conceptions and principles are limited, however, in that they must apply to experience and that they are not only irrelevant when applied beyond experience but in fact generate a peculiar set of intellectual errors when 25

they are so applied. Since they do not arise experience, they may be said to transcend it in a limited sense; the transcendence is not absolute. In order to make just this distinction, Kant uses 'transcendental' for concepts that do not arise from but yet apply to experience and make experience and science possible, and 'transcendent' for concepts that neither arise from experience nor are necessary as presuppositions of experience (Cf. A296/B352). With this definition, we must now look for the body of a priori conceptions, judgments (or principles), and reasonings. The conceptions comprise two broad areas that are essentially distinct from one another: first, space and time, and tuen,the twelve categories. It is best to employ the somewhat vague term 'conception' rather than 'concept' to cover these two families, because Kant holds that our representations of space and time are not concepts. It is true that he occasionally refers to them in this way, but only after he has driven home the distinction. What it means to say that they are not concepts is specifically explained in the Transcendental Aesthetic. Following this model of logic further we find a priori i udgments or principles considered in the second book of the Analytic, namely the Analytic of Principles. The clue to these is supposed to be provided by the four classes of categories, although the derivation is somewhat forced in several important respects, as we shall see. Finally the reasonings or inferences of an a priori nature that we engage in, or that we are likely to engage in, are to be found in the second large division under Transcendental Logic, called Transcendental Dialectic. The articulation of topics here has also been the subject of criticism, but Kant's intent is perfectly clear. Ordinarily, human beings are probably inclined to consult experience in their discourse about their affairs. But quite often they confront what is inaccessible, at least for the time being, to experience. They must make predictions about the future and hypotheses about the past. They must invent theories and explanations for what they have not experienced, and so on. The outcome is often readily introduced by the phrase "it stands to reason that." Reason, pursuing its ordinary tasks, is what we must rely on in such instances; it goes beyond the present into one or another more or less unknown area, but not 26

unknowable in principle. We are also inclined, or we may yield to the temptation to employ concepts and principles that are established in relation to experience in areas which lie beyond experience. The issue now is about the phrase 'beyond experience.' In the previous case this could mean unknown areas of space or time that we have never traversed but that are not in principle unknowable: there is no error in applying concepts of experience in these areas. But if 'beyond experience' means beyond all possibility of experience then reason is guilty of a most serious fallacy if it now employs concepts specifically devised to deal with experience. It has exceeded the proper limits within which the intellect in general may operate. Its reasoning now becomes dialectical. Of the many uses of this term Kant selects the one that equates it with a "logic of illusion." These are not ordinary illusions. They are the errors that underlie pseudo-sciences such as Rational Psychology (the doctrine about the immortal soul, its origin and destiny in a hereafter, its relation to a body and a physical world of space and time), Rational Cosmology (the doctrine that affirms an absolute origin of the causal series, a ground of freedom beyond determinism, and several other doctrines) and Rational Theology (the demonstration of the existence of a divine being from his concept or possibility alone). The last of these perhaps typifies the logic of illusion best, for it seeks to demonstrate a reality or fact of existence from concepts alone without even the most tenuous connection to experience. It is exemplified in St. Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God. We may now offer a glance at the whole territory to be surveyed. There is no better way to do this than to reproduce the Table of Contents that appeared in the first edition of the Critique in 1781. (The second edition presents all or most of the many often minute sectional divisions but makes a perspicuous view much more difficult.)

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I.

Transcendental Doctrine of Elements Part I

Part II

Transcendental Aesthetic Section 1

Space

Section 2

Time

Transcendental Logic Division I Book I

Analytic of Concepts

Book II

Analytic of Principles

Division II

II.

Transcendental Analytic

Transcendental Dialectic

Book I

The Concepts of Pure Reason

Book II

The Dialectical Inferences of Pure Reason

The Transcendental Methodology Chapter I

The Discipline of Pure Reason

Chapter II

The Canon of Pure Reason

Chapter III

The Architectonic of Pure Reason

Chapter IV

The History of Pure Reason

Part I and Part II through Book I supply the concepts or conceptions to be considered. Bpok II supplies the judgments or principles. Division II expounds the inferences of pure reason. In this way the general model of the divisions of formal logic has been followed. The Methodology at the end is supposed to show us how all of these "Elements" can now be put into operation to accomplish the task of gaining knowledge worthy of the name. As we shall have many occasions to observe, this "architectonic" often supplies Kant with rather poor justification for taking up certain subjects, but the subjects are almost invariably of momentous importance even when the justification appears faulty.

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TRANSCENDENTAL DOCTRINE OF ELEMENTS First Part §1

Transcendental Aesthetic^

Kant introduces the Transcendental Aesthetic with a preliminary section that amounts to a glossary of terms, among them the following: intuition (Anschauung) sensibility (Sinnlichkeit) , concept (Begriff) , sensation (Empfindung) , appearance (Erscheinung) , and matter and form. We may take these us in order somewhat different form his, not to improve upon it, but to proceed rather more plainly from the general to the particular. The most general terms are probably matter and form. This ancient Aristotelian distinction is frequently adverted to both here and in what follows. In one sense it cuts across the lines of the intuitiveconceptual. It cannot be simply equated with intuition and concept because of something which emerges from a further division that emerges particularly in § 8 of the present series of subsections:

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The pure concepts (of the understanding) are the categories, to which we shall come in due time. The pure intuitions, also called a priori intuitions, are space and time. The empirical concepts are classes and relations such as man, table, fire, to strike, drowning, magnetism. The empirical intuitions include the apprehension of what Kant's predecessors called the secondary qualities: color, sound, taste, feel, smell. -> But the conceptual and intuitive are not coextensive with the formal and the material, for Kant regards anything that is a source or domain of relations as formal. This puts the pure intuitions, space and time, among the formal notions. In general it is "we" who are responsible for the form of the objects and processes in our experience, for ordering them in the manner that they are. The empirical matter is a kind of brute reality which we cannot attribute to the activity of ourselves, of the paradigmatic self. Kant's account of this varies, but it is usually attributed in some manner to things themselves. When we ask after this "manner" one cannot help but think that Kant's answer owes more than a little to Locke : things-we-know-not-what leave effects upon us that we come to speak of in the language of empirical intuitions, color, sound, etc. These are given to us, he says in the present section; they are attributed to sensation, and we may speak of the capacity to receive them as sensibility. The whole complex of an experienced object or process comprises all of the four factors, conceptual and intuitive, empirical and pure. Organized in these terms, the ordinary object of our attention is what we may call an appearance or phenomenon (Erscheinung). In the Preface to B (B xxvii), Kant makes a hazardous inference to the effect that such an appearance justifies us in affirming that something appears, which is of course a thing in itself. It is hazardous, if not worse, since it is an empty inference based solely on the fact that we have called it an appearance. (Since x is an appearance, something must appear in it.) It is also a somewhat half-hearted inference, since we can only infer a thing itself as something that may be thought, rather than as anything known. We shall of course have to recur many times to this problem of the thing itself. An even more general term than any of the foregoing is representation (Vorstellung). This term 30

refers to anything whatever that may come before the mind, or of which we may be aware: intuition, concept, perception, category, etc. The distinctions Kant is working out in these early pages should be supplemented at once by reference to other terms that he employs from time to time. Thus the present section introducing the Transcendental Aesthetic should be compared with a parallel section that introduces the Transcendental Logic at A50/B74 and with a section that opens the so-called Metaphysical Deduction, A66/B91 ff. In the first passage he speaks of two sources of our knowledge: receptivity, which is of course the capacity of receiving impressions and is essentially co-extensive with sensibility in the Aesthetic; and spontaneity which is the power of conceptual thought. Intuitions and concepts are specifically identified as the two elements jointly indispensable to knowledge. Matter and form, terms which have appeared earlier, are alternative ways of speaking of receptivity and spontaneity . Another way of characterizing the same distinctions appears at A66/B91 where he speaks of intuitions resting upon affections, concepts upon functions. That is, in intuitions we are receptive, or affected by something other than ourselves. With concepts, the mind is itself active or spontaneous. If the term 'functor1 had been more readily to hand, Kant might well have employed it since to speak of a concept as a function seems to our ears a slight mixture of types. (I shall in fact later on speak of the categories, that is the pure concepts of the understanding, as functors• A functor may be understood as a kind of instrument or agent in the hands of the paradigmatic self performing a certain epistemic task.) Throughout we see a variety of terms employed, yet Kant is on the whole consistent. Problems of course arise when he comes to speak of narrower epistemological problems. What must particularly be remembered in the foregoing is that sensation must not be identified with intuition, since some intuitions are formal or pure while others are empirical, directed toward sensation. As Kant conceives of his problem in the last paragraph, in order to arrive at the pure or transcendental elements in knowledge we must look both toward intuition and conception. The Critique will be concerned very little with specific empirical concepts 31

and even less with empirical intuitions. In the Aesthetic Kant abstracts from all concern with such concepts and all concern with intuition narrowly construed as sensation. He confines his interest to Space and Time, that is, to non-empirical or pure intuitions. In accordance with Kant's own divisions, I shall in the course of this study treat the analytical portion of the Critique (the Aesthetic and Analytic) as a kind of effort to analyze experience, to "unpack" the object of experience of its various "contents" and to track them down to their sources. But when we put the matter so .we seem to need to say that one of the sources of experience ^LJJ experience. How can we divest this of its apparent vacuity? To answer this we need to observe a most important distinction which is nearly always perfectly clear in Kant (once we are made aware of it). Two different, though related, things are intended in the Critique by the term 'experience' in different circumstances. The two senses may be distinguished in the following manner. In the first sense, the term 'experience' is used to designate the having of empirical intuitions, whether of inner or outer sense. As functional parts of the total object of experience we should not properly say that we are aware of these in seeing, hearing and so on. What we see and hear are whole appearances: persons, houses, bells and dogs. Empirical intuitions are more nearly sense data, or perhaps the simple impressions Hume spoke of. We are perhaps sometimes aware of these by themselves: normally what philosophers such as Kant are speaking about as intuitions present themselves only after an effort to analyze the familiar objects of experience -- namely houses, dogs,;: etc. Intuitions are objects of experience in a narrow' sense and our apprehension of them as ingredients of appearances may be designated intuitional experience,

In the second and more familiar, pre-analytical, sense of experience, Kant means our apprehensions of what we are referring to with the familiar language of things and process, that is, appearances: persons, trees, houses, hats, planets, walking, flying, building. This we may call apparent or phenomenal experience , E2•

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The first sense is almost invariably present when Kant speaks in negative terms. When for example, he warns us of the penalties of attempting to employ the categories without reference to experience it is intuitional expereince that he has in mind, or E-j. It would not be E2, since apparent or phenomenal experience, or appearances themselves inherently involve the organization of the categories, and also space and time. Kant's analytical method, the method of "unpacking" is to subject what is present in E2 to analysis, to bring to light what it involves, contains or presupposes, that is, the pure concepts or categories, the pure intuitions, space and time, but before all of these, E.J , the data of empirical intuition. The order of our encounter with these is different in the two cases. In point of the order of time as ordinarily experienced, E2 precedes E-| : we do not first have sense data and then build rocks and trees of them nor does Kant think so. Rather, in this sense, we first find ourselves in a familiar world of phenomenal objects and processes and then by a process of analysis uncover various "ingredients" such as sense data. But in point of the order of ground, E. precedes E2. This is the order that the deduction of the categories lays bare : the order of the construction of the appearances in E2 proceeds from component,or ingredient intuitions through the processes of synthesis to objects and processes familiar to the light of day. I believe Kant adheres strictly to this division of senses of the term. Its most significant instances come to light after he proceeds to the Analytic of Concepts and Principles and it is central to the doctrine of the Dialectic. The purpose of the aptly named Analytic is to analyze phenomenal experience and its objects; the purpose of the Dialectic is to warn us of the disastrous consequences of proceeding without recursibility to intuitional experience. It is well also to have this distinction in mind in the Aesthetic.

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Transcendental Aesthetic Section I Space §2

Metaphysical Exposition of the Concept of Space

A high degree of modernity, meaning relevance to our philosophical affairs and our way of going about them, can be attributed to Kant from the fact that he is the first of the great philosophers who couches his problems in something approaching the so-called formal mode of speech. He asks about judgments (sometimes he says Satze, propositions or sentences), what they refer to, how we verify them, how they are possible. The failure of Hume to do so explicitly is one of the serious weaknesses of his approach. After Kant one must wait until the twentieth century to find philosophers who take hold of their problems in this manner. The material mode of speech asks how we acquire ideas, what ideas and objects are, how "we" build up complex ideas out of simple ones, and so on. Kant is a transitional figure and employs now the formal, and now the material mode. The point is, the new mode has been discovered and used. The general question of the Critique is, how are synthetic a priori judgments possible, and that of the Aesthetic is, how are the synthetic propositions of geometry and arithmetic or in general of mathematics possible. This question is not, however, precisely the question considered in the two sections of the aesthetic as a whole. Rather it is the question which is particularly raised by what, in B, is called the Transcendental Exposition, in both sections on space and on time. The Exposition for space raises the basic question in somewhat the following form: since geometry is concerned with space, what must our conception of space be to account for geometrical propositions being both necessary and synthetic. Kant is not concerned now with geometry itself, but what our notion of space must be to square with the fact that the propositions of geometry are of a certain sort. The Metaphysical Exposition has provided the answer: space is not an empirical concept; it is a necessary and a priori representation, and so on. (Time is treated in similar fashion.) Thus the Metaphysical Exposition is a kind 35

of "lemma" for the Transcendental: since, according to the Metaphysical Exposition, our conception of space is so and so, we can explain how the propositions of geometry can be such and such. The character of our geometry is determined by our view of space — a reasonable view if geometry i_s_ concerned with space. The term 'transcendental' may by now appear to be a fairly well-chosen term for what is said in § 3 (and in §5). The term 'metaphysical' is perhaps a little more obscure in application. It may be thought that the term is chosen because it is the nature of space or of time that is, in a very special sense, being expounded. But the question Kant asks in § 3 is what our representation of space must be if we are to explain how geometry is possible. Thus it is more nearly the conception (Begriff) of space, rather than space, that is being examined. Kant's own explanation in §3 is that "an exposition is metaphysical when it contains that which presents a concept as given a priori" ; but this is not far from what elsewhere he seems to mean by 'transcendental'. It is interesting to speculate on the analogy which Kant no doubt has in mind between the subsequent metaphysical deduction of the categories and the present metaphysical expositions of space and time, but we shall not pursue the matter further. It should be noted that in B Kant modified the sentence at the beginning of B38 from, "In order to enlighten ourselves on this matter, we shall first examine space," to "...first give an exposition of the concept of space." The term "concept" (Begriff) is only to be understood with qualifications. In the body of the four arguments about space, and this is re-affirmed later, we learn that our notion of space is precisely not a concept; 'space,' is not a class name. Space is in fact a kind of "individual" or "particular" for there is only one space (and one time). Our representation of space is emphatically an intuition and thus fully antithetical to a concept, but it is of a unique kind, an "a priori" or "formal" or "pure" intuition.^ 1. Turning now to the arguments themselves, Kant's exposition begins with the observation that space is not an empirical concept, where the emphasis is clearly on 'empirical'. The denial that it is a concept is taken up in §3. We cannot derive the representation of space from anything outside ourselves. Here 'experience' means empirical intuition. Thus 36

Kant means to say that the representation of space is not based upon visual and tactile sensations, since these are unthinkable without already presupposing some grasp of space. The issue is over 'outside' and 'based upon'. Kant's terms are ausser mir (outside m e ) , abgezogen (derived from),and bezogen (referred or related to). As to the first, if he means outside in a literal sense, the argument is not trivial. If he does not, it is indeterminate. The same must be said of bezogen , and of abgezogen, the first of which is the vague and abstract 'related to' and the second is built on the figure 'drawn from', again inviting speculation as to what is intended. But here another consideration must be introduced for which we should refer to the opening sections of the Transcendental Deduction, of the categories A85/B117 ff,(just prior to the section referred to in the footnote a moment ago). Here Kant makes a most important distinction, if not indeed, a concession. He says we must not confuse the process by means of which in actual psychological fact we learn or come to possess notions such as either space and time or the categories with their ground or, as he says, the principle of their possibility. The explanation of the first could be called an empirical deduction or an "explanation of possession," the second a transcendental deduction. This distinction is relevant here and will remove some of the doubts we have about Kant's first argument. He himself would have said, and did, that Locke and Hume provided for the first adequately (at least in intent) but never faced the second squarely. Let us suppose then that an empirical deduction, an explanation of possession, has been provided (in our day we might call for Piaget's aid, and perhaps that of the "cognitive psychologists") and let it give a functionally adequate psychological account of how we acquire the concept of space. What more are we entitled to ask? What falls outside it? For this we must see what enters into our conception of space and we need only point to the spatial infinite and infinitesimal to see that these involve us in concerns beyond psychology, because psychology at most may succeed in giving an account of our imagery (of the infinite) but scarcely whether our idea of it is true or false, clear or confused. 37

This expansion of Kant1s thought with the means he himself has provided serves to show that there is "more" to space and time than can be explained by any empirical deduction. What is needed in addition to such a deduction is to show that what we think under space and time must have objective validity (Gültigkeit). Similar considerations hold for the categories: an empirical account cannot answer philosophical questions. Kant wants to provide reasons why we may extend the notion of space beyond our personal and local imagery in the unrestricted manner that is necessary for geometry, as he conceives it. An analogous procedure will be followed in the deduction of the categories. If the deduction of the categories or a justification for the employment of the notions of space and time can be given in one sentence, it will be this, "The categories and space and time must be presupposed because otherwise knowledge and experience are impossible; since however, these are real, we may affirm the validity of the categories and space and time." It will now be said that this simply comes down to saying that we are justified in applying the categories and space and time to experience because without them there would be no experience, and that accordingly the whole argument is, as C.I. Lewis and others have said, question-begging. But there is another way to construe Kant's effort and we arrive at this when we see that his whole effort in the Critique was one of taking the limitlessly rich notions of "experience" and "knowledge" and progressively unpacking them of their contents, a process that would reveal not only the contents but in what circumstances they could be used. Looked at in this way, Kant's method may be spoken of as diremptive. "Presuppositions" such as the pure intuitions and concepts are progressively revealed in the Critique, enabling us to give an account of experience. Of course one first needs to know what counts as knowledge or as experience and what makes a mere pretense at it. Thereafter one needs a skillful philosopher to manage the analytical effort of "unpacking." This effort is already present in the Aesthetic. 2. in the second argument we learn that space is an a priori representation, that it underlies all outer intuitions. In a sense this simply reaffirms 38

what appeared in 1. In 1 the emphasis1 is on denying that our representation of space is empirical. In 2 it is on affirming the alternative to this, namely, that space is a priori. The two statements are essentially equivalent. If in 1 Kant could argue that space must be presupposed if we talk of anything outside us, this must also include what is said in 2 to the effect that if we have outer intuitions, space is a necessary condition of them. 2 goes on to say that objects presuppose space, but not vice versa. Since one can conceive of space from which objects have been removed, empty space is not nothing. in our thoughts about the world we inhabit, the world of appearance, space can never be absent. This may readily be granted, but it is far less convincing to be told that our representation of space is a priori (and not just that sentences about it are a priori) considering the consequences Kant will draw from this in the Transcendental Exposition: that only on the condition that our representation of space is a priori can we explain how synthetic a priori geometrical prepositions about space are possible. One of the serious omissions of the Critique is its failure to explain to us how we are to construe 'a priori' in two such different contexts as when we say first of our representations of space or time that they are a priori and then when we say this of propositions or judgments. Of course Kant wishes to have the phrase construed in such a way that space , or time, is logically, not temporally, prior to objects or events in it. But how can the representation of any thing or existent be a priori? There are alternative phrases such as zum Grunde liegen , that space or time must lie at the foundations, or must be presupposed, but what precisely are we to understand by such phrases? It should also be observed that what is meant by being able to conceive of is not made clear. Here he says one cannot think of what it may be like to think away space: Man kann sich niemals eine Vorstellung davon machen, dass kein Raum sei. If it means something like "one cannot picture to oneself..." the remark is trivially true since pictures are spatial. It cannot mean that one cannot make sense of "space does not exist" or that one cannot draw any consequences from such a proposition.

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More important, one is throughout advised that space and time and other a priori representations pertain only to the world of appearance. This certainly has the consequence that we are thought "to be able to conceive of" a world of things themsleves which do not lie in any space or time. How then does our not being able to think away space and time in the world of appearance relate to our being able to think them away in a "world" of things-themselves? The conceiva-. bility of that world is never adequately explained, although we are told several times in the Critique that we must be able to think it even if we cannot know it. Finally, a serious issue about time must be anticipated in the present argument. We will be told in 5, argument 2, that time (like space) can be thought void of events. But the first premise of the First Analogy is that time cannot be perceived in itself (kann für sich nicht wahrgenommen werden). We must be prepared for some differences in the problems of empty space and empty time. 3. The third and fourth arguments are also closely linked and in part overlapping. Both of them assert that the representation of space is one, and is not a concept. A concept is a representation (an object of thought or attention) that may have other concepts of lesser generality subsumed under it (unter sich). It is not a representation that holds within it (_in sich) these subordinates or that contains the individuals that may be classified under concepts. This amounts for Kant to saying that the representation of space must be an intuition rather than a concept — the division is exhaustive. May there be more than one space? Our thought of space is not of a multitude of spaces somehow sewn or joined together but of one seamless "particular" within which divisions can be made. If it were not such a seamless whole we would be able to say of it, as we do of other aggregates, that the whole of it is a summation of its parts. (One should read this section in conjunction with the Axioms of Intuition at A162/B202 ff.) We cannot think of space in terms of aggregates as if one might add encompassing shells bounded not by more space but by nothing. Rather we see that "spaces" must be encompassed by more "spaces" and thus we are merely subdividing one space with every advance in the exploration of it. I think this 40

j_s the trend of Kant's somewhat confusing line of thought here. If the representation of space by some such argument can be declared an intuition, since it is not a class concept that comprises a great many members, Kant thinks it must also be regarded as a priori since we see (intuitively, in a sense less technical than Kant's) that we grasp the whole of it without building What we grasp, u p our view through piecemeal research. what we lay hold of, in our intuition of infinite space, or space as infinite, is not just a generalization about "all space" from the spaces we are acquainted with. We suppose that this grasp of it may accomplish what piecemeal inspection and generalization cannot hope to do. We are not prepared to have to revise our view of it because of some future finding that may force us to alter our view. (Perhaps we could confidently think so at least until the twentieth century. But the interpretation of the "new physics" and of "bounded space" is by no means complete as yet.) 4. Kant's principal point is given in the last line, namely that the representation of space must be regarded as intuition not concept. His reason is that while the range of instances subsumable under a concept is potentially infinite a given space contains or is divisible into an infinite number of spaces. Since no concept contains its instances and space does contain them space is not a concept. The only alternative is to regard it as some kind of intuition. What is essentially new in 4 is that space is infinite, an "infinite given magnitude," (eine unendliche gegebene Grosse). I believe this interpretation may be given. To come to know what space is, as we emerge from infancy, is to see that there can be no end of it, for any alleged end would be a bound, and a bound would imply further space. Space cannot be bounded by nothing unless the nothing is itself space; but if it is, then it is simply a contiguous part of one space. And so on, and on. Common sense grasps something that it intuitively sees cannot be limited, cannot extend merely so far, and no farther. We are in command of something boundless, infinite when we grasp what space is; anything less than this would not be space. And since we cannot ordinarily conceive of any new fact" that would compel us to revise our notion and nothing that would nullify it, Kant feels justified in speaking of it as a priori. 41

These then are the arguments that are meant to establish that the notion of space is a priori, that it is an intuition, that it is not "based upon" experience although we come to "possess" it through experience, that it is not a concept of a "commodity" like tigers, windows, right hands, or grains of sand. This would not be too far from affording a notion of space that common sense could recognize as a clarification of its own thought on the matter and not a revision or correction of it except for the fundamental unclarity of what it means to say that space, not propositions about space, as in geometry, is a priori, that it somehow inhabits the soul as an original, not derived, possession. But if we could satisfy ourselves on this matter, the next question would be whether the notion of space so expounded could serve to demonstrate what Kant says it will in the next section, namely, the a priori and synthetic nature of the propositions of Euclidean geometry. §3

Transcendental Exposition of the Concept of Space

We have already alluded to the approach Kant adopts in the Transcendental Exposition. Its purpose is to explain how geometrical propositions can be synthetic and known a priori. We can explain how we can have such a priori knowledge only if the conception of space is understood in the terms of the foregoing Metaphysical Exposition as an intuition that can precede objects and determine the concept of them a priori. Space can be regarded as a priori because it is an aspect of the form of the object of appearance. The paradigmatic self is the author of the object of appearance insofar as its form is concerned, and this means first of all relations of space. The Aesthetic is meant to be the first fruits of Kant's "Copernican Revolution".9 Why are "outer" objects as they are? Because the observer is as he is and because the object is itself but an appearance, not a thing itself. When Kant's argument in the expositions, together with an assumption, is plainly stated we can see where current thought diverges from it. The propositions of geometry are a priori (1) The propositions of geometry are synthetic (2) 42

In addition Kant assumes, Geometry is descriptive of space or spatial figures. (3) The question is, what must be true if all of these are true? The answer is given in the Metaphysical Exposition : Space is an a priori represenation, not learned from experience. (4) Space is an intuition, not a concept. (5) These two say that space is a formal or a priori intuition. They may not be so much proved (or deduced) as expounded (hence, their exposition). We are also to understand, as we see in the next subsection, that the a priori nature of space means that: Space is the form of appearance, not a property of things themselves. (6) What now is the source of modern divergence from Kant? The challenge is to (2) and (3). The fact is, I think, that Kant did not offer adequate grounds for (2), and for rejecting the antithesis of (2), that they are analytic or true by virtue of their concepts alone. The two propositions seemed to him to go together. But the present-day repudiation of (2) has made (3) unnecessary. Since the alternative to (2) is that the propositions are analytic, (1) would of course immediately follow. It seems to me therefore, that what we have in the Aesthetic is a fairly clear account that simply begins from premises that are no longer acceptable. It is not confused or otherwise impossible. The situation in mathematics currently as it affects these matters is that geometry is not inherently about space, not even Euclidean geometry, that several other enterprises have asgood a claim to be known as geometries, and that in their current formulation the propositions of geometry deserve to be regarded an analytic. What made the Aesthetic appear necessary to Kant was that the propositions of geometry had to be interpreted as synthetic (this was to be explained by an appeal to some kind of intuition) and that they were nevertheless necessary truths, or as Kant said, a priori (this was to be explained by the fact that 43

they were about space , and that space was an a priori representation). It is not surprising that the Aesthetic is now thought to be superfluous, at least in respect to space. The concept of space must be considered in the light of three possible interpretations of the propositions of geometry: (a)

If geometrical propositions express and conform themselves to our visual intuition, then, for example, the postulate of parallels and its consequences, (if not the whole of Euclidean geometry) become at most merely probable; whether the described lines as extended do or do not meet in a point is a matter of probability only and subject to experience.

(b)

If geometrical propositions need not conform to visual intuition, they express only the logical consequences of the original ideas and the axioms expressed with their aid; neither the choice of these ideas nor of the axioms or their consequences reflect our notions of visual space.

(c)

Geometrical propositions are neither the consequences of arbitrary axioms nor are they empirical, conforming to visual intuition, but conform to an a priori intuition of space and of flgural relations in space.

Kant in effect proposes (c) as an alternative to either of the preceding alternatives. The points and lines spoken of in geometry are neither tubelets of ink on paper nor do 'line' and 'plane' merely signify sets of elements defined in a certain arbitrary manner. For Kant a geometrical line has no palpable breadth or weight as does the ink of a line drawing, but it is not a mere conceptual entity. The geometrical imagination is capable of grasping "perfect" and "abstract" notions though usually not without the rough stimulus to the imagination afforded by actual visual depiction. No eye of sense can grasp a line without breadth or a perfect solid, but the geometrical imagination, or as Kant calls it, a priori intuition can do so. That is how Kant sees the matter.

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But Kant's proposal of a third way between the empirical and the conceptual has the consequence that the a priori intuition proposed as the foundation of geometrical knowledge cannot serve to support geometry either as an empirical or as a theoretical science. The a priori intuition he supposes relies in effect upon our commonsense visual perceptions of space but then he hopes to be able to refine upon the visual meaning we attach to 'line', 'triangle', 'plane' and the like, and to divest them of crudity and inaccuracy. Such an intuition is impossible to identify either in experience or imagination and it is unnecessary to presuppose it for our gross commonsense use of geometrical notions. To demand "perfect" points, lines, planes in order to have a reference for geometry is like demanding a perfect horse or elephant to provide a perfect exemplification of the species type depicted in zoology. This would make the species preeminent and the individual specimens derivative instead of basing the species on the specimens. It thus pleases Platonists but no one else. Such a hypothesis of geometry would remove it from the area of scientific concern; its alleged perfection would be irrelevant to the development of empirical geometry and unduly restrict theoretical. If geometry is empirical (or in the respect in which it is), restrictions other than those imposed by the methods of inquiry employed are artificial. If it is theoretical, the constraints normally imposed by experience are irrelevent. Kant's a priori intuition offends in both senses: even if there were such intuitions, empirical and theoretical geometry would proceed without their aid. But we must not leave this matter under the impression that Kant has simply made a few blunders. Before we leave the discussion of space we must consider two further topics. The first is why Kant feels it necessary to propose the kind of solutions he did and thus why he gets into the situation just described, the second is just what he had in mind under "pure intuition." The questions that are agitating Kant are how this marvel of perfect science, geometry, is possible and how it can be provided with a sounder philosophical basis than those of the Platonists, Leibnizians, and Empiricists.

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We must call to mind the unusual position which geometry had come to occupy in men's thoughts. Here was a science that appeared to be empirically relevant to the world around us, that enjoyed in architecture, engineering, astronomy, and many other subject matters the most explicit practicality and confirmability conceivable, and that at the same time appeared to consist of nothing but the most self-evident and necessary truths conceivable. By the seventeenth century its triumph was so evident that it became the model of all truth: significant and relevant, not "empty" as logic appeared to be, and yet demonstrable in the most rigorous manner. It was celebrated for itself and the truth it contained and also for the method it used and exemplified. The method in particular came to be generalized and made a model for the presentation of all thought and possibly even for its discovery: the mos qeometricus was made even more famous by two celebrated practitioners, Spinoza and Leibniz. Suspicion of the Achilles' heel of Euclid's geometry, the postulate of parallels, had not yet raised any searching questions about its method or meaning although in Kant's own lifetime Saccheri had really raised such issues without knowing how serious their consequences would be. It is not surprising that Kant should wish to provide a firm ground for geometry. Its truths were indeed necessary, as everyone thought, but he thought they were not true solely from their concepts and definitions. They were moreover significant truths, relevant to the real world. Kant thought, and rightly, that there would be bound to be serious consequences unless an explanation were forthcoming for both purported facts about geometry: necessity and material truth. His uncovering, if not discovery, of the analytic-synthetic distinction appeared to him to explain the second, the doctrine of the a priori nature of space, already affirmed in the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770, contributed much of what was needed for the first. But it was only with his invention of the a_ priori or pure intuition that he felt that all the parts of the explanation fell into place. This raises the second topic we need to discuss here before continuing, namely what Kant means by pure intuition. First of all, pure intuitions must be distinguished from empirical intuitions. The latter would be what we would experience in using our eyes where visual contrasts of color, or light and shade, together 46

with other knowledge enable us to identify, let us say, a rectangle, a house, a table,a sheet of paper. We are not being entreated to turn up empirical intuitions of this sort, nor to make measurements upon round or square physical bodies when we are told by Kant that in mathematics one must go beyond mere concepts and their necessary relations to intuitions to clinch our insights and proofs. But if it is not to these fully concrete intuitions then what are we being asked to turn to? It should be noted that for much the same reasons as those Plato appealed to, Kant would say that empirical intuition could afford us examples of points, lines, planes, volumes, edges and so on only in a crude sense as visual aids. But what would they be aids to? It can only be supposed that it would be the imagination in one sense or another. Thus, what the imagination makes a n effort to grasp is the line with but one dimension and without the breadth or thickness that anything in the visible world possesses if it is at all visible; or the plane, or volume with similar perfections. The imagination may succeed in its effort but only under the stimulus of visible objects that are in themselves crude replicas of perfect lines, planes, and volumes. Hume had followed Berkeley in the rejection of the notion of abstract general ideas. " ' T I S usual with mathematicians to pretend, that those ideas, which are their objects, are of so refin'd and spiritual a nature, that they fall not under the conception o r the fancy, but must be comprehended by a pure and intellectual view, of which the superior faculties of the soul are alone capable. The same notion runs thro1 most parts of philosophy, and is principally made use of to explain our abstract ideas, and to show how we can form an idea of a triangle, for instance, which shall neither be an isosceles, nor scalenum, nor be confin'd to any particular length and proportion of sides." (Treatise I-III-I) Although in general Kant rarely echoes Plato's view, in this instance he is certainly closer to him than to Hume. What he is defending as pure or a priori intuition is in a sense a re-affirmation of the abstract ideas which Hume and Berkeley thought mathematicians 47

were in the habit of claiming to have, with the provision that they are to be regarded as intuitive, anschaulich, and not conceptual or "intellectual." Kant could not have foreseen that the requirement of the corroboration of some sort of inner vision would in the course of the development of mathematics be unnecessary or impossible to meet. But even so he might well have offered a direct response to the views of the British philosophers (assuming that he was acquainted with Berkeley's Principles and Hume's Treatise). His requirement of intuition to support mathematical demonstrations neither brings it closer to "experience" nor shows in consequent fashion why proof that resorts to concepts alone must be insufficient or invalid. There are better ways than Kant's to account for the empirical relevance and the necessity of geometrical propositions. But it is the development of mathematics rather than some inherent error on Kant's part that has shown this.

Conclusions from the Above Concepts Kant now draws a number of consequences from the foregoing exposition and places the idea of space in a larger framework. (a) Given that appearances and things themselves are exhaustive alternatives, if our representation of space must be declared a priori (in order for there to be, as is alleged, truths of a synthetic a priori nature in geometry), then space can be neither a thing itself nor any determination of such things, because we cannot assert anything a priori about things in themselves. (b) When Kant now says that "space is but the form of all appearances of outer sense," this is permitted by his "matter-form" terminology, since space, as well as time, falls to the side of form. He goes on to say that just as we must suppose that the subject's receptivity for intuitions must be presupposed for his having them so also must the form precede all appearances of outer sense. Whatever he can count to the side of form, of relation, is to be numbered among the stock of what we already possess — although who or what the "we" or " I " is in this connection is not, at this point at least, made clear. 48

The schools of Descartes and Leibniz are here unmistakable. Not only is Kant speaking in the manner of Leibniz of an original endowment of the mind, the process relating and forming that with which we are affected (afficiert), but we are also repeatedly reminded of Descartes' procedure with the ball of wax when he finds that only extension cannot be removed by doubt. And yet when Kant confronts himself with the doctrine we may call innatism, as at B167f., he rejects it out of hand. The term he uses there is "implanted" (eingepflanzt) and he argues that if categories were simply implanted dispositions to thought they would be robbed of their necessity. "I would not then be able to say, the effect is (necessarily) tied up in the object with the cause, but that I am so organized that I can only think this representation as so connected." But Kant does not think through the consequences of what he has here admitted, and he never fully clarifies the numerous phrases he uses throughout the Critique to describe our original posession of the categories and pure intuitions nor distinguishes this from innate or implanted posession. In the passage in the Aesthetic we are discussing the phraseology is vague: only from "the human standpoint" (Standpunkt eines Menschen) can we speak of space. The constant use of outer intuition and "receptivity" in contexts where things-themselves are the "givers" is never clarified, yet conclusions are as constantly drawn from assertions involving them. Until such clarification is forthcoming many sentences such as those in the early paragraphs of this section will appear to be question-begging, and there are many more of this kind elsewhere. Kant now introduces a distinction to which he adheres throughout the Critique, between the empirical reality of space (later also of time) or we might say its empirical reference, and its transcendental ideality. This is the coup of a master philosophical strategist. For he lays claim to the term 'real' ( a valuable piece of metaphysical property) and applies it to the object of appearance or experience which, as so far "unpacked" , contains empirical and formal intuitions and will later also prove to involve empirical and pure concepts. The supplemental phrase "transcendental ideality" adds the further provision that the class of assertions these four classes of representations make possible not only applies to human experience but is restricted to it. Elsewhere Kant allows that it is only a cautionary, not a necessary restriction.

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Transcendental Aesthetic Section II Time §4

Metaphysical Exposition of the Concept of Time

There is no concept that permeates the fabric of Critique quite in the manner that time does. At the very outset one should learn that the Aesthetic is but one place where it occupies the center of the discussion. The other places are the Schematism (A137/B176 ff.), the Analogies of Experience (A176/B218), and the First Antinomy (A426/B454), not to mention important encounters of lesser scope elsewhere. Moreover, these later references often seem to revise or even to conflict with what was said earlier. Not only does the Critique recur to the topic of time but it is also an emphatic part of its whole subject matter. Kant more than any philosopher before him including Leibniz and the empiricists placed natural scientific knowledge about a world generally in space, but invariably in time, at the center of the cognitive enterprise. His standpoint involves what George Boas in his Howison Lecture so aptly termed "the acceptance of time."1" But while Kant does not present a picture of the universe in the eternal and immutable terms that Plato, Leibniz and the rationalists used, neither does he exalt time, change, or process in the manner of Hegel, Marx, and others in the nineteenth century. He simply sees time as central to all cognitive concern with man's existing universe. Kant is moreover scrupulous in what he regards as outside the scope of time, notably logic. Even if his view of what logic is or does is traditional, he seeks to exclude from it all temporal, psychological, and rhetorical involvement. He has a clear view of the line between these two which emerges in his frequent and careful segregation of logical from temporal priority or sequence. This may be shown by referring to the form of judgment Kant adverts to in his derivation of the concept and principle of causality. Logically, an if-p-then-q proposition connotes nothing about the temporal priority or order of p in relation to q. But when we use this form to express a process in nature, 51

what p expresses may be a cause and q an effect where the one may report an earlier and the other a later event. Thus, unlike some rationalists, Kant sees clearly that causal relations differ from logical implication precisely because of the factor of time. In a similar manner a subject-predicate sentence is a mere form. When it is employed to express the fact that something has a certain property time enters the picture. We are now thinking in terms of a temporal series, a set of passing conditions or states (expressible as predicates) possessed by a permanent substance continuant in time (expressible by the subject). Kant sees that if we are talking about the world we attend to in daily experience and in science then we are dealing in time-suffused concepts. "Time," he says, "is the formal a priori condition of all appearances whatsoever." (A34/B50) We should be aware at the outset that while the principal concern of the Aesthetic is to establish the a priori character of space in order to explain the asserted synthetic a priori character of the propositions of geometry, the concern with time is not precisely parallel and indeed may even appear to diverge widely from it. There is no science of time comparable to geometry that one might call, let us say, 'chronometry' or perhaps 'chrononomy', and that must be explained by supposing or presupposing the a priori nature of time. Kant succeeds, however, in turning up two propositions about time: it has only one dimension; different times are not simultaneous but successive. In fact, however, it is not necessary that propositions be derived from a science about time. All that is required is that there be propositions of some sort that are synthetic and a priori that owe this character solely to the fact that time is an a priori representation. The propositions just mentioned are found in the third argument of the Metaphysical Exposition of the Concept of Time. In the Transcendental Exposition Kant argues also that certain concepts such as alteration and motion presuppose an a priori notion of time. The proposition about alteration that must be explained is that "only in time can two contradictorily opposed determinations be found in one thing, that is, by one of them succeeding the other." This would be a proposition of metaphysics, one would suppose. 52

In the Prolegomena (|10) Kant asserts a connection between time and arithmetic, virtually as a parallel to that between space and geometry, and in the Schematism he says that "the pure image (Bild) of all magnitudes for outer sense is space, that of all objects of the senses as such is time. The pure schema of magnitude as a concept of understanding is number which is a representation that gathers together the successive addition one to one of homogeneous elements." And in the Introduction he has said that in performing the operation of addition one must go beyond the mere concepts of the addends to call in the aid of intuition by referring successively in time to fingers or points. This is said in support of the notion that intuition must be called in to support our understanding of arithmetical operations. Presumably, as Kant says elsewhere, if we encounter larger numbers we can proceed in "decadic" fashion: we refer first to the ten fingers to make one decade, then again to the same source, if necessary to make further decades, and then a decade of decades to make a hundred, and so on. He does not elaborate but in the discussion later on of the antimonies he affirms the notion that quantities must be conceived of through a process of "successive synthesis." (e.g. A433/B461). It is not clear how Kant would think we proceed with irrational numbers such as t. On the whole one must agree with Kemp Smith's view that "in regard to the nature of arithmetical and algebraic construction he had never really attempted to arrive at any precision of view" (Commentary, p. 131). And he may further be right in saying that Kant probably omitted because of further reflection any effort in the second edition to define the intuitions that arithmetic is said to rest upon in terms of time (Commentary, p. 133). We may now turn to the arguments of the Metaphysical Exposition. In this exposition Kant undertakes to show that our representation of time is a priori not empirical, that it is an intuition not a concept, that it is a necessary, that is, an absolutely indispensable notion, that time is infinite, and that it is in some grand sense one, a kind of transcendental particular or individual. We turn now to the arguments. 1. The representation of space was said not to be derived from observation or from anything "outside me" (ausser mir) for this notion already necessarily involves space. In the present section we learn that the representation of time could not arise from any 53

source in experience for it would then either succeed or coexist with such a source: but either of these relations would itself be temporal, one of the "modi of time", as Kant calls them, and thus presuppose time. It is hard to see that such an argument deserves very much attention. What should we understand by such a phrase as 'derived from1 (abgezogen) as applied to time? If it means simply learned from~experience we should remind ourselves that Kant has generally allowed that even a priori notions must in some sense be learned or acquired although this process of learning cannot show us on what their a priori authority rests. Neither of course can the fact that they have to be learned rob them of such authority. What Kant in this connection calls empirical deduction is a psychological or as he puts it at B119, a "physiological" enterprise that may, as he later says, reveal to us how we acquire concepts and categories even though it may not provide evidence such as one may hope to attain in a transcendental deduction. (It is interesting to note that the characteristic Wittgensteinian gambit, "how do we learn...?" would not have seemed philosophically adequate to Kant; at least he rejected all of Hume's and Locke's efforts.of this sort -- not because their derivation of the ideas was false but because it could not also explain their a priori character.) Kant offered no examples of what a mere empirical deduction would be like, except to say it was what we have Locke to thank for. It would be particularly interesting to know what he would have had in mind as an empirical deduction of space and time. The corresponding point is made by Hume with an almost impudent brevity: "The table before me is alone sufficient by its view to give me the idea of extension" (Treatise, I-II-III). 2. Time is a necessary or indispensable condition for having any intuitions, says Kant. If we accept the ultimate difference between concepts and intuitions, between thought and sensation, as we are everywhere in the Critique asked to do, and if simultaneity is a modus of time, this proposition is acceptable. It would seem to say that two or more intuitions or parts of intuitions are always either successive or simultaneous. It also says much more than this. Time permeates all of what in a narrow sense is experienced. Would it also exist even if there were no intuitions? Is it prior or fundamental in that sense? This appears to be what Kant says, yet I think he does not mean that 54

there can be empty time. Kemp Smith's translation is very misleading here if not flatly wrong. What Kant says is, Man kann in Ansehung der Erscheinungen überhaupt die Zei~selbst nicht aTIflTeBen, ob man zwar ganz wohl die Erscheinungen aus der Zeit wegnehmen TTann: "Although one can quite well remove appearances "from time, one cannot eliminate time from appearances themselves." The dependent clause does not say "though we can quite well think time void of appearances" as Kemp Smith translates it. Kant does not mean that time may be empty, or that appearances a_s a_ whole may be removed from time, leaving an empty receptacle, but rather that any given appearance can be removed, in thought, from time. Of any given event we may say that its non-occurrence is conceivable. If it is asked, can one then conceive of all events as obliterated, leaving empty time, or is it a necessary truth that there be at least one event, or possibly, at least two, I think we must say that the supposition is void of significance: no one knows how to interpret the phrase 1 all events' . The degree to which time permeates all our thought about the material world is scarcely to be questioned. Rather, one must ask what Kant means in saying that time apart from our experience is nothing. We will return to this theme in connection with the empirical reality and transcendental ideality of time at the end of the Aesthetic. An even more difficult question i,s what we are to understand by the phrase 'time itself' which, as we have seen, is crucial in the Analogies, where it is said we cannot perceive (wahrnehmen) time in itself. To this theme we shall of course recur. One thing I believe we must say is that 'time itself' does not mean empty time. 3. As we have explained in the Metaphysical Exposition of Space (p.36 n.7) and as Kant himself concedes on the following page, argument 3 belongs in the Transcendental Exposition of Time and adds nothing not to be found there except examples of axioms of time, such as that time has but one dimension. We may therefore postpone discussion until we reach the Transcendental Exposition. 4. The fourth argument parallels argument 3 regarding space (in B ) . Its essential point is to say that time is a kind of particular or individual, not a class or a class concept. Our representation of this individual is an intuition. The one-ness of time 55

will scarcely need much argument if we confine our attention to events and processes in a world of things seen and felt. It is obvious that 4 is incompatible with what we must now think about time. The special theory of relativity led to a drastic revision of our views of space, time, and motion. "Before the advent of the theory of relativity," said Einstein, "it had always been assumed that the statement of time had an absolute significance, i.e. that it is independent of the state of motion of the body of reference." The anomalies resulting from the empirical confirmation of the constancy of the speed of light independent of the motion of its source led Einstein to abandon the fundamental tenet of classical mechanics that the "time-interval (and the space-interval) between two events (or two points on a rigid body) is independent of the condition of motion of the body of reference." One can no longer use the terms 'succession', 'simultaneity' and the rest of the time vocabulary in any absolute sense: there may be different times that are not part of one and the same time. According to classical mechanics if we have two uniformly moving coordinate systems devoid of rotation, then natural phenomena run their course in both of them in accordance with the same general laws. But if we are dealling with bodies that are moving with velocities much closer to the speed of light than those of terrestrial or even planetary bodies, then times and distances will be significantly different for them than for ourselves. At most then the Kantian doctrines of space and time can retain their significance only for a confined, although important, area of physical science. But this is incompatible with their absolute or transcendental character for experience as a whole. 5. The final argument asserts that the infinitude of time signifies that all determinate times are but limitations of one such infinite time. Time is an intuition and it is not constructed by the successive addition of parts in the way we progressively probe with ever more powerful telescopes the depths of the world in space to expand the cognitive empire. It is important to distinguish between space and time themselves, each seen to be infinite, and the physical world in space and time. Kant is here speaking only of the former. Even a fairly young child early comes to see that what he thinks of as space 56

and as time can inherently have no limits, either in large or small, for space can only be bounded by space, and time by time. But the world in space and time is something else again. When Kant comes to the solution of the antinomies, the difference becomes more apparent. We cannot speak a priori of the limitless extent in either space or time of the universe, and can neither affirm it nor deny it, for to do so is to go beyond the limits of application of space, time, and the categories, that is, perception or intuitive experience. Here we must work for every meter we advance into the unknown. This world is not an already-given, that is, gegeben, it is assigned to us (by ourselves of course) ü"s i task, aufgegeben. At no point is Kant asking whether time has a beginning — we already grasp its limitless character, if we grasp it at all. Nor does he ask whether space has an outer edge — even a child sees this to be senseless. What he asks is what notions are necessary to facilitate our progressive advance into the unknown reaches of the world, into the remote and the minute. Two such necessities are the notions of limitless space and time, and then also categories and principles.

§5

Transcendental Exposition of the Concept of Time

The term or concept 'time' by itself seems nearly as baffling as 'eternity' so that one scarcely knows what he is being asked with the questions what he thinks time is or whether it is real or illusory. The prior question should rather be whether one understands the time vocabulary: 'duration', 'period', 'interval', 'while', 'before', 'after', 'hitherto', etc. One must know the "modi of time" and must be able to employ the vocabulary in the most specific manner. Only when we approach time so, may we be said to know what time is in the primary sense, though of course not exhaustively. If we do, we know for example that if t precedes u and u precedes v, then t precedes v. This proposition is evidently synthetic, certainly not merely conventional. Its necessity rests upon a grasp of a whole scalar system and not merely upon "the meaning of the word 'precede'." If this is so I would conclude that in this particular the Transcendental Exposition is correct: this theorem of chrononomy, if we may so call it, is synthetic and its syntheticity rests upon something one might wish to call an a priori intuition, as Kant does. To this extent his contentions are Plausible. 57

The purpose of the Transcendental Exposition'3 is to show that only if the generalizations about time in the Metaphysical Exposition are accepted can we explain the truth of the following propositions, which are presumed to be synthetic and a priori: Time has only one dimension.(1) Different times are successive not coexistent.(2) In addition it is said: (3) that only presupposing an a priori notion of time is it possible to explain how alteration in the state and the properties of anything is possible. Propositions (1) and (2) are merely cited as examples. Offering one or two examples in the foregoing sections on space is sufficient for the purpose, since we may be referred to Euclidean geometry for many more examples if we demand them. But the examples for time are altogether too few since there is no body of propositions known as a science of time to which we may be referred for the purpose. If we produce more examples it is at our own risk if we assert that they are synthetic and a priori. Here as elsewhere Kant's procedure is probably to be explained by saying that he was in some haste to compose the Critique and was therefore concerned to abbreviate examples and expositions wherever he thought the reader might be spared them. But one might well prefer to have more time devoted to the elucidation of concepts such as time or the categories and less to other matters such as the Amphiboly or the Transcendental Methodology at the end of the Critique. (At A82/B108 we are told that "in this treatise, I purposely omit the definitions of the categories, although I may be in possession of them." The want of a true analysis of such notions is itself one of the severest obstacles to our acceptance of the deduction of the categories.) In the present section the want of examples is a serious matter: we are being asked to grant the a priori character of time not because there is a whole science such as geometry that cannot be accounted for without it but merely a few propositions that may well have other explanations. It is one of the ostensible purposes of the Transcendental Exposition to account for the concept of alteration. But this is scarcely in order, since the exposition is originally said to have been necessitated by the fact that there are synthetic a priori judgments (or propositions) . At the beginning of § 3 we are told that a certain kind of knowledge is what ; 58

necessitates the Transcendental Exposition. Of course the mere concepts of alteration and motion are scarcely knowledge. As it stands, all that §5 contributes on this subject is that time is an analytic component of alteration and of motion. This is plausible no doubt but it is not apparent why the notion of time that is necessitated must be an a priori representation characterized in the manner just shown in the Metaphysical Exposition of time. It should be noted that Kant does cite a body of knowledge as that which necessitates the Transcendental Exposition namely general phoronomy (allgemeine Bewegungslehre). It is not clear, however, what he has in mind here: mechanics, Newton's Principia, or theses such as those of the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Mechanics is an empirical not an a priori science and thus not in need of a transcendental exposition (by §3). Parts of the Principia may well deserve such an exposition (as well as the deduction that the conservation, causality and reciprocity principles receive in the Analogies) but it is not apparent why the notion of time as expounded in § 4 is necessitated. One of the most interesting consequences of this section is perhaps the stimulus it affords to present our knowledge of time in a systematic fashion. But we may concede that the Transcendental Exposition of Time is not a very potent portion of the Critique, considering what an important role time plays later on. §6

Conclusions from these Concepts

The intended outcome of the foregoing exposition of time is that time is to be considered as an a priori representation. Clarification of this assertion is the purpose of the present subsection. It is safe to say that no philosopher before Kant had said (or denied) precisely this before and so the need to expand upon it is apparent. It had been said, and denied, that notions like time were innate, but Kant's view of time and space is more subtle and complex than this. What then are we to understand by his characterizing space and time, not only propositions about them, as a priori? (a) Time is not something which might exist of itself or as an attribute or relation of things in 59

themselves. It is in fact not objective but subjective, a feature of our apparatus of thought about ourselves and the world. This is sufficiently startling in itself but the manner of expressing it is more startling. Time (or space) is said to be not simply a subjective representation but an a priori representation, and the two expressions are intended to make the very same statement. Why then is the characterization 'a priori1 preferred? For the reason that Kant wishes to be entirely sure that no one understands him to mean by the representation time only a psychological entity -subjective in that sense. Time and space and certain other notions are presented by Hume as such constructs and an elaborate apparatus of their psychological origin and functioning is worked out. But for Kant this could never enable us to see how, for example, each of these is a system that is necessarily infinite in scope. The "laws of chrononomy" are in that event merely contingent generalizations about how "time passes" in our subjective world: but then the use of either space or time for intellectual or scientific purposes is destroyed. This Kant meant to avoid at all costs. The cost was to present time as many things at once: subjective but not psychological, real but not transcendent, abstract but not intellectual, intuitive but not sensate, and so on. It is the subjective framework for all our empirical intuitions, it is the form of inner intuition. The emphasis here is upon "form." These are the traits of time that Kant tries to pack into the assertion that it is an a priori intuition. (b) Kant now endeavors to combine these several near-paradoxes into a consistent picture of time itself. Time is the form of inner sense, a set of relations that holds together in one system our mental life, abstracting from all content. But introspection suggests no kind of shape for them -- Kant says Gestalt. We are forced to resort to analogy. We hit on the device of a line extending without limit fore and aft. It is easy to forget that all our intellectual devices have had to be invented. The idea of time on the analogy of a divisible, extendable line, so trite to ourselves, was likewise one of man's triumphs of discovery, possibly as significant as counting itself. 60

The aptness of a good analogy is not only that it codifies what we already know but facilitates intellectual venturesomeness and leads us reliably to new truths. This is the consequence of the line analogy for time. As soon as we grasp it we find an application for the fact that a line is extendable without limit, divisible without limit, that we may pass smoothly from one "point" to the "next", that we may number the points, grouping them at will as we proceed. The projection of one line upon another also has a useful application to time. Thus,

A B for every point in A' B1 there is a corresponding point in. A B, so that if A B is a segment of the time series representing a set of experiences (A B ) , then some other longer line A' B' may represent a "richer" experience (A' B 1 ) concurrent with it and be coordinated to it. Any further sets of events or experiences (e.g., M N) can be coordinated in the same manner, so that A B , A1 B', M N, and so on, are not different times but coordinated to one time (as Kant says, "different times are not simultaneous times but successive", and thus simultaneous times are not different, 4 ) . There is, however, one exception, says Kant. The points of the line are simultaneous, whereas the moments of time are successive. This reminds us of a fundamental and unsolved mystery in time: how we can "hold experience together" without the arrest of time. But such an arrest must be meaningless. Strictly speaking, all that is real in time is the present moment, but if we are forever hovering on this moment (it is of course not an identical "this") we do not have the time experience. The completely irreducible intuitive component of the experience of time is what we grasp as the Passage of time, ranging from the few seconds of the specious present William James spoke of to the "ein-mein" experience of a whole lifetime (B132). In order to analyze fully this feature of time we must go beyond the one-dimensional figure. In the Analogies Kant seeks to show that permanence,

61

succession, and simultaneity presuppose three intellectual (as against intuitive) constructs, the categories of relation. As he there shows, we must try to do what is strictly impossible, that is, grasp "time itself" and we can do this only by taking a step beyond intuition. Hence, the need for categories or their principles. The Aesthetic must be supplemented by the Analytic. Kant has drawn an interesting picture of our view of time. Physics has not revised it. Our experience of time has in no sense undergone any alteration, and experience is what Kant is analyzing. (c) The third generalization Kant permits himself is that time is the formal condition of all appearances, inner or outer. We cannot fail to notice the apparent conflict between statements in (b) and (c) that "time cannot be the determination (Bestimmung) of outer appearances" and that time is "the immediate condition (Bedingung) of inner and the mediate condition also of outer appearances." The statements are equally obscure. If the first one is taken to mean that events in space cannot be ordered in time, the statement seems certainly false even if space has only the qualified "objectivity" Kant accords it. We may then suppose that it is Kant's intention to see time as determining only inner sense. Then if outer events are mediately inner events, as may be asserted by (c), they too are conditioned by time. This would be to take time in a very "subjective" sense, something like an "experience of duration" which we do doubtless have. But it is to seriously weaken, if not destroy, the idea of equably flowing time that Newtonian physics presupposes. We shall recur to these themes of "inner" and- "outer" below. The emphasis upon time as the condition of all appearances (c) makes explicit Kant's "acceptance of time". All things in heaven or earth are ultimately subject to human "interpretation" and thus to formal determinants in our experience. The most pervasive of these Kant now declares to be time. This seemingly innocent statement may, and I for my part think that it does, contain the seeds of disaster in the Kantian system. We shall see this emerge even more clearly as we proceed to the doctrine of synthesis later on. Kant here states explicitly that the time experience is the fundamental framework of all experience. 62

All representations are inner before they are anything else. There is a want of any definition of 'inner' and 'outer': obviously their one- or threedimensionality is insufficient for this purpose. We are left with the bare assertion that all experience is inner experience -- including outer experience. The inner is inner and the outer is inner too! We cannot here employ the ordinary naive use of these terms : only an extra-ordinary use and definition would obviate the paradox, and this is nowhere proposed. Kant's purpose is to make a broad generalization about experience. We commonly suppose ourselves able to distinguish between experience about ourselves, our aches, pains, sensations and do on, and about the things around us, trees, houses, chairs, hats, and shoes. Kant is pointing out that the latter are first of all sensations, or intuitions, before they receive the more complex organization of causal laws afforded through the categories and are experienced in a broader sense of the term. This distinction is incidentally of the utmost importance in Kant. Experience in a kind of rudimentary sense, we may call it experience^ (E. ) , is simply having sensations, sense data, more or less what Kant calls empirical intuitions. Experience of objects and processes regarded as and treated as objective and fully organized by the categories is experience in the more familiar sense; we may designate it experience, (E2). Kant's point now is that we have E-j in either the inner (subjective) or the outer (objective) sense only within the framework of time. Thus as he says, "Time is an a priori condition of all appearance whatsoever." Notice that he says a condition (eine Bedingung) , for there are others, such as empirical concepts and also the categories. (Appearances are objects and processes fully organized by pure and empirical intuitions and pure and empirical concepts.) But not only is time, as a pure intuition, a necessary condition of intuitions, but the reverse is also true: if we abstract from intuitions time is nothing at all. If we try to think of time outside the framework of an organized active and receptive mind it vanishes. "Time is solely a subjective condition of human intuition." If we now recall that things themselves are purported entities totally other than appearances, it follows that we cannot ascribe temporal attributes 63

to them. The phrase transcendental ideality of time is meant to convey just this. Time is an indefeasible aspect of the world of phenomena. Kant does not claim that a world of things themselves would be one of "nontime" or "anti-time." He merely warns us that time cannot be ascribed except where conditions of inner or outer intuition are met. At the same time, by a bold stroke, as we remarked earlier, he claims the fullest right to speak of the empirical reality of time. He throws out a challenge to anyone who, like Berkeley's Hylas, locates the truly real in an inaccessible substratum, mental or physical. The first question to be addressed to such a philosopher would be what warrant of experience enables him to attribute meaningfulness to assertions about substrata. None of course. By this, the foremost relevant test, time is certainly real. First, as Berkeley himself (or Philonous) has reason to speak of himself as a realist (had he chosen to do so), so Kant may claim to be a realist and in a closely similar sense, although his misreading of Berkeley made him think; Berkeley an "idealist", a confusion that continued through the nineteenth into our own century. There is also a further interpretation that brings Kant even closer to ourselves. The transcendental ideality of space and time is meant first of all to exclude the substratum metaphysicians for whom reality is everywhere except in our experience. But in a less metaphysical sense it also liberates as well as restricts. There is no reason why physical research which finds itself forced to speak in such terms as curved space, reversible time, and converging parallel lines must be regarded by the Kantian as uttering nonsense. "Apart from experience, space and time are nothing"; this means, if the conditions of ordinary "terrestrial" intuition cannot be met, then the absolute coordinates of space and time are no longer applicable. The metaphysician may here fall into paradox and confusion. But the theoretical physicist is no metaphysician who reaches into a world of things-themselves when he employs his bizarre concepts: he is simply compelled to resort to a more complex language which appears to defy geometry but is in fact only something other than familiar geometry. No one experiences anything that is denoted by 'curved space' and 'reversible time 1 ; hence space and time are in this sense "nothing."

64

What Kant wishes to exclude is metaphysical nonsense, not theoretical novelty. It is inconceivable that with his lifelong enthusiasm for and unusual competence in science, he could have wished to set metaphysical bounds to physical explanation. We must expand our knowledge by the orderly progressive development of the laws of nature, provided that we can always recur to an experienced world of space and time. The Kantian view is hospitable to the progressive expansion of the scientific view of the world. But we cannot ignore the authority of naive space and time. What is the world in total abstraction from them? Kant does not say with more recent positivists that the question is meaningless. He merely answers that it can be nothing for us. §7

Elucidation

This subsection proceeds from the immediately preceding topic, the transcendental ideality and empirical reality of time (TIER), to considerations touching not only on time but space as well. Kant begins by attending to an objection which proceeds as if it were uttered by someone who believes him to have said something such as "time is not real." Change, alteration, it will be said, is undoubtedly real and it is impossible unless time elapses. Hence time must be real. Of course, replies Kant, I grant the whole argument, and goes o n to reaffirm the position just developed of the empirical reality of time. He adds that it is only "absolute reality", reality as pertaining to a substratum or thing itself, that cannot be accorded to time (kann ihr nicht zugestanden werden). In the latter phrase, Kemp Smith's "has to be denied" exceeds what Kant says: it is one thing to deny reality to time, another to be unable to attribute reality to it. Defenders of this "objection" will propound it specifically regarding time but not space, says Kant, because while inner experience will appear to entail the reality of time, nothing will so convincingly entail the reality of space: we are thought to be intuitively certain of and to immediately confront the self, whereas the external world is thought to be "problematic." Kant of course boldly sweeps all of this aside. The "self" is just as problematic as the outer world, and also just as little. What we are dealing with are representations, the psychological 65

phenomena of the inner and the physical phenomena of the outer world, that is, the world of appearance. The forms of appearance, time and space, do "really and necessarily" belong to this world. After a glance back at the ideas of the transcendental expositions Kant turns to the defense of TIKR. He sketches out where he stands in reference to the supporters of absolute space and time and relational space and time, typified respectively by the mathematische Naturforscher and the metaphysische Naturlehrer. In neither instance is it the actual content of physical science that is brought into question, since Kant was a Newtonian, but rather the metaphysical interpretation given to space and time. In other words, as far as physics itself was concerned Kant's adherence to the doctrine of fixed coordinates for space and for time was in no degree weakened by his interpretation of them as a priori intuitions: the Aesthetic was not proposing a revision of physics. What he now says is that the first of the above two views renders the synthetic a priori character of geometric propositions inexplicable since it presents space as only transcendentally real. The second view cannot account for the necessity of the propositions since on that view space is not a priori but derivative from experience. Kant argues that his own view disposes effectively of both difficulties. Finally, there are no other forms of pure intuition than these two, Kant states. All other physical notions, for example, motion and alteration, involve something empirical. Space and time are the only pure elements in experience and in its extension in science other than those that are pure concepts, that is, the categories. §8

General Observations on the Transcendental Aesthetic

I. The concluding division of the Aesthetic, particularly I, offers a rather lucid account and some further defense of the whole position that has been arrived at. It states in general the case for the a priori nature of space and time and assures us that this is now established beyond doubt. Alternative standpoints, particularly those of Leibniz and Wolff and less specifically Locke, are declared again to be untenable. In a word, the position defended is that 66

of TIER, which has been affirmed in § 3 and § 6 for both space and time and the doctrine of the Aesthetic that space and time are the a priori forms of intuition, of outer and inner sense. The distinction of appearance and things themselves must be maintained absolutely: Kant says toto coelo. One of the worst of errors, he says, would be to weaken this by supposing that a more assiduous scrutiny of appearances might at last reveal thingsthemselves. It is just possible to offer such an interpretation of Locke's view of physical inquiry into substance. The study of matter was progressing in his lifetime and was already foreseen to be likely to progress further almost without limit. It is difficult to discern a perfect distinction between Locke's idea of body or matter, over which the senses range, and what he called the philosophical idea of substance. But certainly at times Locke speaks as if the empirical advance of physical science in the former will diminish our ignorance of the latter, the "real constitution" of substances. This is what Kant disputes. He seeks to leave us in no doubt about the range of difference of appearances and things themselves. (Of course Kant's own use of the term 'substance' must not be set in place of Locke's or identified with that of 'things themselves': its reference is wholly to appearances.) Kant's distinction between appearance (comprising matter or substance) and things themselves is wholly philosophical and would remain in force even if in some manner we might plumb the depths of matter to an ultimate level, as in a certain sense science has done since Kant's time. His effort here is again a defense of science, giving it the assurance that no philosophical bounds can conceivably be imposed upon it. The Leibnizian view seems to Kant to have done just that. All notions based upon the senses, upon space and time, are declared essentially confused by the rationalist. Only clear and distinct, conceptual ideas present us with realities. Kant points out that the difference between clear and confused ideas is "merely logical" for by definition the content is the same, now confusedly, now clearly discriminated. For Kant, on the other hand, what is given in and through perception or related to it by confirmed physical laws is real. To locate realities in a realm grasped only by the intellect is to render the world of phenomena and phenomenal processes illusory and to grossly misunderstand the role of the intellect, the understanding, 67

in knowledge and its acquisition. Thus Kant on every ; occasion reaffirms the tenet that science is what is • definitively knowledge (not metaphysics, or mathematics: as Plato and perhaps also Descartes conceived it, or theology, still less, mysticism, poetry or other candidates that had been proposed). The rationalist does justice neither to intuition nor to the understanding, ; neither to the domain of sense nor to that of the in- ' tellect. "The Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy," says Kant, "has given an altogether wrong direction to the investigation of nature and the origin of knowledge," locating reality in a domain that transcends intuition and misconceiving the instruments by which knowledge is acquired. What is identified here as a world of reality is indeed a world, in some manner of speaking, of things themselves. But it is not a world that intuition somehow tries but fails to apprehend or know: it is not known at all in any manner, even by the intellect. The intellect, it is true, can think it, but it cannot know it, having ex hypothesi no support from the side of intuition: this must accompany all non-vacuous cognitive thought. It is of the utmost importance to see that Kant is truly revolutionary in the direction and method of his thought. He is not merely reshuffling the cards as between "rationalism" and "empiricism." The metaphysical period of philosophy has been brought to a definitive end. The roles of philosophy and of science have been interchanged: the paradigm of knowledge is science itself. The task of philosophy is critical. From here, after the divagations of the Hegelians in the nineteenth century, the way leads directly through the Neo-Kantians to the positivisms of the twentieth century. Kant's is the first philosophy of science and the first philosophy for science. He is wholly acclimated to the idea as even Hume was not, that science was henceforth to be the domain of truth. Returning to the Leibnizian distinction, Kant presents what amounts to a defense of sensibility. It is not to be treated as merely confused as against clear cognition, as if it were an obstacle to truth that needed to be removed. It differs not logically or formally from conceptual thought but materially. That is to say, sensibility and thought each contribute independently two necessities of knowledge. Moreover, to treat these as respectively the sources of error and truth (for this is what is being 68

done with the distinction of the confused and the clear) is to ignore the reliable, common sense methods of distinguishing these in the domain of sensibility itself. We know perfectly well, Kant is saying, how to tell what in appearances is valid for all human minds and what appears only incidentally in this mind or that or under certain conditions. Appearance is the domain of sensible knowledge; to identify truth with things-themselves is to remove it beyond our reach. Here Kant makes an important distinction in the use of the term 'appearance1. His own term is of course Erscheinung and can also be translated by •phenomenon'. He warns several times in the Critique that we must not confuse Erscheinung with Schein, that is appearance (phenomenon) with illusion; in English one might say we must not confuse appearance and apparition. In this primary sense, an appearance for Kant is, in the ordinary sense, first of all a genuine occurrence,a reality, a thing or event that is intersubjective, publicly verifiable, there for all to see. An appearance is, as the colloquial phrase goes, something that "puts in an appearance." With this, in the same ordinary sense, we often contrast what we say is a mere appearance. The rainbow, Kant says, may be regarded in this manner in comparing it with rain. Both the rain and the rainbow are, however, part of the world of nature as perceived, the world of appearance in Kant's primary sense (A45/B63). With appearance in this sense Kant now contrasts the world as thing in itself. We must not suppose that the latter is the real world and that the former is illusion. On the contrary, as just noted, the world of appearance is the world to which the term reality applies. Thus we must keep separate the distinction between appearance and reality in the ordinary sense (the rain as against the rainbow) from the distinction between appearance, the world of phenomena in general, and the world as thing-in-itself. The term appearance may therefore mean, occasionally, something which, as Kant says, belongs to intuition only accidentally; more commonly it means for him the world of experience generally as against the world of things themselves. "An appearance (in Particular) is simply an undetermined object of 69

empirical intuition" (A20/B34) . The term 'reality', correlated to the first of the foregoing uses of 'reality' is that which in common sense ways is distinguished from what are deemed illusions. In Kant's sense, these are empirically distinguishable in the world of nature to which the term 'reality' is primarily applicable. Finally, the unique philosophical use of 'reality' to refer to things in themselves as if these and not the world of nature were the world of reality is something which Kant invariably denounces as disastrous metaphysical confusion. Things themselves may be said to be transcendentally ideal. To attribute to them transcendental, or as he also says less felicitously, absolute reality, leads us directly into the errors of the so-called rational sciences. Finally, section I attempts yet another proof of the principal contention of the Aesthetic, that space and time must be regarded as a priori. In effect the transcendental expositions are repeated or reaffirmed: we must account for all synthetic and a priori judgments. We observe of certain judgments concerning time and space that they are necessary and universal truths. We ask whether we arrive at them through concepts or intuitions, and whether they are a priori or a posteriori. It is evident that no merely empirical or a posteriori source suffices. When we then ask whether the a priori source is that of concepts or intuitions we see that it cannot be the former. Appeal to mere concepts is for example, insufficient to convince us that two straight lines cannot enclose a space or that given three straight lines a figure is possible. We are forced to appeal to an intuition. When we ask whether it is an a priori or an a posteriori intuition, we see that it cannot be the latter, for here we are not at all prepared to undertake an empirical investigation. The intuition must be a priori. Since the question of what not just an a priori proposition or judgment is, but what an a priori intuition is, is altogether crucial, we may again ask whether on this occasion Kant has thrown any more light on the matter than he did in the Aesthetic. He asks, if there were no such intuition here, how could you say that that which is necessarily contained in the subjective conditions you are specifying for the construction of a triangle must also characterize the 70

triangle itself? (Wie k'önntet ihr sagen, dass, was in euren subj ektiven Bedingungen einen Triangel zu konstruiren notwendig liegt, auch dem Triangel an sich selbst zukommen müsse?) Or again, if it were not so, you could not a priori affirm anything of a synthetic nature about external objects (so k'önntet ihr a priori ganz und gar nichts über "äussere Objekte synthetisch ausmachen.) This of course reiterates one of the basic premises of the Aesthetic that it is impossible to offer fully consequential proofs of geometrical truths from concepts alone. As Russell observed in his Principles of Mathematics (p. 4) in the early years of the development of modern logic, the Aristotelian logic and its early successors in the nineteenth century were in fact "inadequate to mathematical reasoning... In this fact lay the strength of the Kantian view, which asserted that mathematical reasoning is not strictly formal, but always uses intuitions, i.e., a priori knowledge of space and time." Russell adds that "this part of the Kantian philosophy is now capable of final and irrevocable refutation." This undoubtedly still represents the prevailing view. II. The remaining sections are additions of edition B, and as so often happens in this edition, do not always succeed in improving on A. Kant first produces arguments in further support of the TIER of the appearances presented in outer and inner sense. Appearances, we must remind ourselves, are presentations fully structured by the mind's efforts, and all form, structure, or relation derives from this source. The matter of our knowledge, deriving from empirical intuition, enters into knowledge only in connection with our apprehension of structure, that is, the location of the relata, their change of location, and the laws about forces that determine such changes. Of the being of objects we know only that they are related to a subject. As things themselves they are transcendentally ideal: we know things only as they appear to us, not as they are. Kant argues that we are in a similar situation regarding inner sense. Here we have as little a direct apprehension of the self as we had of the external things themselves: we are not gifted with a direct or "intellectual intuition"1^ of a spontaneous, "self-active" self. It also is a world of appearance and we apprehend the self not as it is but only as it 71

appears. We have as little comprehension of a transcendentally real self as of a transcendentally real world of things themselves: our position towards these must be that of transcendental idealism. But if we agree with Kant that the obverse of this coin is the empirical reality of the physical world and of inner experience, it is not we but the defenders of TREI who have contented themselves with a phantom. We may at this point anticipate latter matters by sketching out Kant's threefold view of the self. The "inner world" of immediate consciousness, of introspection, may be called the empirical consciousness in order to distinguish it from what Kant by and by will characterize as the transcendental unity of apperception. The latter could properly be called the epistemic presupposition or epistemic self. The empirical consciousness and the epistemic self may be numerically identical, but in fact we can never know this. To have knowledge of x presupposes that we have appropriate intuitions of x, precisely what we do not have of the epistemic self. It is a necessary presupposition of knowledge not an object of knowledge. But our awareness in empirical consciouness affords the subject matter of empirical psychology, which with physics is one of the twin sciences basic to all others for Kant. One must also distinguish both of these from the soul of which theologians and rational psychologists (as against empirical) claim to be able to speak. Kant challenges their capacity to say anything whatsoever that is cognitively meaningful in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason further on. The theologian's mistake rests upon his neglecting to identify and distinguish the empirical consciousness and the epistemic self, as we shall see. III. The third topic discussed continues the second and simply adds the now familiar caution that while the worlds of inner and outer sense are transcendentally ideal (and of course empirically real) they are not illusions. On the contrary the alternative to this does render them illusory, since it locates reality not in the world of inner and outer sense (which it treats as empirically ideal) but in a world that is either inaccessible or is purported to be accessible only to the intellect but not to the senses. That way, says Kant, lies illusion, the inner and outer worlds both dissolving into nothingness with only the dubious 72

compensations of other worlds promised by Platonists and Leibnizians. We may here remark once again Kant's fundamental and irrevocable hostility to scepticism and to Platonism in most of its tenets, and his equally unshakeable commitment to common sense and to science as the prime locus of truth and knowledge. Not only is he hostile to scepticism he ignores it as a madness that is scarcely worth more than patronizing regard. His entire system is built on the premise that there is knowledge: the problem is to find what it is and "how it is possible." He is a descriptive metaphysician, in Strawson's phrase, leaving the world as he finds it and concerned to analyze or "criticize" our knowledge or purported knowledge of it. To the sceptic he says curtly, "Don't be a fool! Of course there is knowledge. Let us do all that is in our power to understand what it is, what its limits are, and how we must interpret what lies outside it." Kant's splendidly sane gesunder Menschenverstand is a tower of hope and optimism. This subsection shows, however, that Kant might have found allies in the very quarter in which he thought he saw sceptics. The "good Berkeley" is alleged to have denied the reality of bodies when in fact his standpoint in regard to outer sense is essentially identical with Kant's in various respects and compatible in others. Berkeley himself repelled charges that he was a sceptic by effectively turning them against his adversaries. Kant either misread Berkeley or, more likely, had inadequate opportunity to read him and spoke of him only on the basis of indirect report, for he knew little English. IV. The final argument in defense of TIER of space and time is theological and not likely to be of much interest to us since it speaks of nearly unintelligible attributes (intellectual or original intuition) of an unconfirmable being. If, says Kant, contrary to TIER we affirm TREI of time and space, they are then conditions of all things, even of God's existence. Surely this could not hold true of the primordial being, Urwesen. But if space and time cannot be TR they must be thought to be conditions of finite, derivative or sensible intuition, such as our own. A similar kind of intuition may be attributed to all finite beings including those, if any, that may be other than human. This argument concludes 73

the defense of the standpoint enunciated in the Aesthetic. Conclusion of the Transcendental Aesthetic The general task of the transcendental philosophy is to answer the question how synthetic propositions are possible a priori (on this occasion Kant says "propositions," Sätze, instead of "judgments"). In space and time we have two of the indispensable necessities for answering this question. If in a proposition the intention is to go beyond the concept of the subject, these a priori intuitions are precisely what is needed in order to effect a synthesis with the idea of the predicate. But the range of the propositions in which this is possible is the objects of the senses, objects of possible experience.

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TRANSCENDENTAL DOCTRINE OF ELEMENTS Second Part Transcendental Logic Introduction Idea of a Transcendental Logic I.

Logic in General

A fairly prevalent view holds that Kant's preoccupation with logic and especially his use of the formal logic of his day as a model for the organization of the Critique (indeed all three Critiques) are misleading and that they suggest to him and often seem to compel him to take up topics that have nothing much to do with the business at hand. The artificiality of the organization is said also to affect the content. This is not an altogether inappropriate criticism. Yet in the end it must be conceded that all of the topics Kant takes up are in some measure relevant. Even when Kant's reason for taking up a topic, being often dictated by the "architectonic", is not good, what he has to say on it is almost invariably significant. One must avoid constantly offering to rewrite an author's book for him. No philosophical author has had to endure so much advice on this matter as Kant. The short sections introducing the Transcendental Logic are relevant examples. We must frequently ask ourselves what role Kant assigns to logic in the structure of knowledge and in particular what he conceives a priori truth to be. The present sections help to answer such questions, on the whole clearly and much to the point. (The subject is taken up once more in a section preceding the Analytic of Principles, at A150/B189.) Kant's view of logic fortunately antedates the Hegelian and later conceptions of it and accords it a much more significant and proper place than the empiricists did. The developments of logic in our own century are almost wholly compatible with what Kant had to say about analytic a priori propositions. What he called transcendental logic is not, nor was ever 75

intended, to be an alternative or rival to formal logic: it is tied up rather with his philosophy of science. What is important in it is not in any very familiar sense transcendental and in fact most of what Kant speaks of as "transcendental" is expressible also in other more familiar terms. There is no doubt that Kant could accept the essential core of modern logic: question would arise only over such questions as whether he would insist on retaining his view of mathematics as synthetic and a priori or accept the views of those who see it as continuous with logic. He could however, without any offense to logic maintain his view that the basic principles of the metaphysics of science (e.g., the causal principle) are synthetic and a priori and demand a proof such as he thinks has been provided in his Deductions, for those are matters that lie outside of logic. We may be brief with his outline of logic since it presents no particular difficulties. What is archaic in it is essentially harmless and corrigible. Pure logic he tells us, "is a body of demonstrated doctrine and everything in it must be entirely certain a priori.' (A54/B78). It has nothing to do with empirical principles nor does it borrow anything from psychology. It abstracts from all content and is concerned altogether with the form of thought. His division of the subject illuminates the distinction between transcendental logic and what he calls common logic; certain divisions are not particularly well discriminated.

Transcendental Logic

Common Logic

General Special Logic (Rules or organon for a particular science) Applied Logic (A cathartic of the understanding the psychology of thought and persuasion : rhetoric)

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Logic

Pure Logic, Formal Logic (pure doctrine of reason)

It is somewhat obscure, but unimportant, precisely what Kant intends by "special logic." Perhaps he is alluding here simply to the procedures which practitioners of particular sciences, and arts too, employ and inculcate in order to advance knowledge. It is not apparent that these techniques or procedures of investigation are different from what is narrowly a part of logic, but in a provisional way allowance may be made for them. One thing is significantly missing here and if it had occurred to Kant to include it, his whole view of the deduction problem might have been different, namely a logic of induction, probability, or generalization. He might, that is to say, have conceived the problem of the Causal Principle in terms closer to both Hume and John Stuart Mill. They were all certainly speaking of the very same thing. What is unique in Kant is his proposed solution of the basic question of the ground of induction (or the uniformity of nature, or the unique "necessity of natural laws") by resting everything on the "possibility" of a special kind of proposition which is said to be both synthetic and a priori. It is almost superfluous to draw attention to the oft-quoted words of this section regarding the mutual necessity of sense and understanding. Since they require no explication we need merely read them and be prepared to reflect on them almost constantly from here to the end of the Transcendental Logic. "Our nature is such that intuition can never be other than sensate, being the mode in which we are affected by objects. The capacity to think objects of sensate intuition, on the other hand, is understanding. Neither one of these capacities is to be preferred to the other. Without sensibility no object would be given us, without understanding none would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. Hence it is as necessary to render our concepts sensate (that is, to support them with an object in intuition) as it is to make our intuitions intelligible (that is, to bring them under concepts). The understanding cannot intuit, the senses cannot think anything. Only through their union may knowledge arise." (A51/B75) 77

II.

Concerning Transcendental Logic

What Kant now proceeds to describe as "transcendental logic" is, as noted, in no sense a rival or alternative to formal logic. It is given the task of demonstrating certain truths that are indispensable to the pursuit of empirical knowledge. Formal logic performs a different kind of service, demonstrating the principles that must guide sound argument on any and all subject matters. Of course it would now be said that this is certainly not the only purpose of formal logic. Pure or formal logic, says Kant, considers only the form of judgments without regard to whether their content is empirical or a priori. The inquiry he calls transcendental logic abstracts not from all content whatsoever but only from all empirical content, thus confining itself first of all to a priori representations. But to this limitation another must immediately be added: not all a priori representations are transcendental. Only those considerations are to be called transcendental which are essentially "enabling" in character, making experience of objects and thus empirical knowledge possible. One of Kant's most unshakeable tenets is that experience is not something poured into our heads or our sense organs from the "outside": it is itself the product of conditions other than the functioning of intuition or sensation. This is shown by the fact that we are able to say some things a priori about the (inner or outer) world so experienced, and what we can say is not merely guided by the a priori procedures of logic as it is when we say that a cat being a mammal is a vertebrate. We must investigate this "enabling" power. The issue is in no sense a novelty but Kant has placed it into a comprehensive frame of reference. Hume's Treatise had set itself the problem: for what reason do we "pronounce it necessary, that every thing whose existence has a beginning, shou'd also have a cause." And Leibniz had deemed it necessary to propound a principle of sufficient reason in addition to that of identity to account for knowledge. The indispensable role of this ingredient in the economy of empirical knowledge is what Kant singles out for investigation. But his approach is somewhat closer to Leibniz than to Hume, for he is concerned more with why in general categorial notions are indispensable to knowledge than he is with what in detail they say -- and as we recall, 78

Hume's struggle with this issue is heroic, if anything philosophical can be so characterized. We are then in transcendental logic to examine what conceptual conditions are indispensable to knowledge, as in transcendental aesthetic we pursued comparable intuitional conditions. Such a science, says Kant, must study the "origin, extent, and objective validity" of these concepts. III.

The Division of General Logic into Analytic and Dialectic

The essential contemporaneity of Kant's views on logic is further confirmed in the present section which in three brief pages expounds the distinction between material and logical truth and expatiates on the use, or rather the misuse, of the latter. Here we must repudiate the caricature, of "mere game-playing", as the section has been characterized. The distinction of analytic and dialectic enables Kant to make the momentous distinction between non-empirically derived notions such as those named by the categories and rational cosmological, psychological, and theological notions such as the First Cause, the Immortal Soul, and God. Showing that the first class of notions is absolutely necessary and the second absolutely foreign to the economy of experience, and scientific knowledge occupies almost the rest of the Critique. It is a master stroke of philosophical strategy. Whatever shortcomings Kant's analysis of the categories and the categorial principles has, his specification of the criteria by which these "rational ideas" are to be excluded from the domain of empirical knowledge is still very generally respected. The issues which Kant is now on the verge of broaching are that of the real and the illusory in knowledge, of the meaningful and the meaningless, the verifiable and the unverifiable, although none of these notions is here taken in its whole extent. He will speak of unverifiable "rational ideas" in the compassionate manner of one who seeks to understand how and why they arise, what human significance their place in the history of thought betokens, and not with the obtuse pretensions of latter-day positivists who are satisfied only with a brutal Totschlag. Kant now seeks to show that one cannot do justice to science, morality, or religion without a careful distinction of their function and orientation. 79

The first thing Kant has to say about truth is that there can be no universal criterion (his term) of material truth and indeed that it is absurd (ungereimt) to look for one. What a proposition p claims is that some condition P exists, and P can render p and £u> other proposition true, unless it be some other sentence synonymous with p. To cite "correspondence" as what renders a proposition true is in effect merely to offer a definition or even a synonym but in no sense a material criterion of truth. May we then suppose that there is a formal criterion of truth? The answer is as follows. A monadic sentence may have a predicate which is identical with or "contained in" the subject, or incompatible with it, or neither identical nor incompatible with it. If the first situation prevails, the sentence is logically true; it has no material content and makes no material affirmation about anything. If the second, the sentence fails to make any affirmation at all. These are the situations in which formal considerations are alone decisive. For Kant we need go no farther than the concepts themselves to decide this. The truth of the third type of sentence lies wholly outside this scheme of things; material considerations alone are relevant. We may add, if we wish, that sentences of this sort must not contradict themselves but this is strictly unnecessary. It is merely cautionary, a conditio sine qua non; a necessary, not a sufficient condition; a canon of truth, not an organon • a negative touchstone of truth, Probirstein der Wahrheit. Kant's procedure then is this: (1) inspect the sentence to see if the predicate is formally identical with the subject; if it is, the sentence is true; (2) if the predicate is incompatible, that is, formally identical with the subject in all respects except that it negates the subject, the sentence is false; (3) all other predicates are compatible with their subjects (unless other criteria than logical are invoked: e.g., when we exclude, for example, 'red is rational'), being neither identical (1) nor incompatible (2). In this way, Kant, admittedly with some elaboration on our part of what he is saying, seeks to show that logical truths say nothing of a material nature and that logical criteria for sentences show us only which sentences need or do not need material corroborat ion. 80

Here as elsewhere it is not inappropriate to say of Kant's use of formal logic that its purpose is solely good housekeeping: it keeps the house of reason clean and efficient for its purpose, nothing more. Kant's view of logic while scarcely inspiring to the modern logician is at least acceptable on most essentials. There was no reason whatever to attribute very many virtues to logic as it stood in Kant's day. We may now be content to employ the logical criterion of identity in the manner and for the purposes described. We may, however, lose sight of these conditions and proceed as if we were able on the basis of mere logical considerations alone to determine truths without resorting to the empirical inspection of facts. When we do so, we employ formal logic as an organon and not merely as a canon of truth. We have used it as regards its subject not only for analytical purposes but dialectical as well. We may mention an example drawn from transcendental dialectic though it will also serve the purposes of general or formal dialectic, namely the Ontological Argument. The whole purpose of this argument is to show that solely on the basis of a concept, God, we can demonstrate a material truth, God's existence. The source of this fallacy Kant has definitively exposed in the Ideal of Pure Reason. There are also other examples of the misuse of logic, or indeed, of pure reason, as the very title of the Critique suggests. Kant's reason for adopting the term 'dialectical' in this connection to label a certain misuse of thought goes back to Aristotle. The distinction between demonstrative and dialectical reasoning is made in the Topics (100a25ff). The misuse of reason or at least its use for questionable or nefarious ends is a familiar topic in both Plato (cf. Gorgias) and Aristotle. Whatever the precedent may have been, Kant uses 'dialectic' to mean a logic of illusion, covering both the orator's comparatively trivial misuse of reason to impress an audience with pseudological stratagems or the serious effort, as in the Ontological Argument, to reach material truths solely through logical means. As we shall see, transcendental dialectical illusion is far different from and far more philosophically insidious than mere rhetorical deception.

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IV.

The Division of Transcendental Logic into Transcendental Analytic and Dialectic

The application of the distinction in the previous section can now be made very easily. We must again remember that the designation 'logic1 is not an absolute necessity for this portion of the Critique. It suits it only in the sense that intuitions and concepts may by a traditional distinction be assigned respectively to the area of the aesthetic and the logical, in a primary sense of the terms. 'Transcendental' may be defined as pertaining to that which does not arise from experience and so in a limited sense transcends it but applies to experience and makes it possible. In the Transcendental Logic we isolate "that part of thought which has its origin solely in the understanding" (A62/B87). In the preceding section we saw that we cannot with the help of logic alone or through mere conformity to it hope to establish material truth: conformity to material conditions is as necessary as logical circumspectness. So here we must be careful not to sever the bond Intuitions-Concepts. To suppose that knowledge may yet be possible when we employ the Pure Concepts which are now to be expounded in the Transcendental Analytic without providing a reference to intuitions is to be the victim of dialectical illusion. It is to employ such a body of concepts not merely as a canon but as an organon of knowledge. The results will be the evident transgressions of the metaphysical or "rational" sciences -- rational, that is, because they suppose that they may significantly employ transcendental concepts even without possible reference to empirical intuition to establish truths about God or the soul. With these explications, Kant is in a position to introduce the system of pure concepts, to show their provenance and demonstrate the validity of their application in experience, and to expose the errors of their inevitable misuse.

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Transcendental Logic First Division Transcendental Analytic Kant now launches the momentous program aimed at discovering the contribution of the understanding to our store of a priori knowledge having to his satisfaction exhibited the contribution of intuition to it. In both instances a transcendental justification is needed. In the present division of the Transcendental Logic we must first identify the pure concepts of the understanding and then its principles. In the second division we will observe the dialectical employment of these concepts and principles and thus the genesis of the "logic of illusion" and its cause and cure. The pure concepts are not to be picked up like pebbles: a clue, a Leitfaden, must first be turned up that will lead us to them. Kant is determined that the search be free of haphazardness, of groping here and there. Four guidelines are to be observed. First, the concepts we are seeking must be pure and not empirical. Little can be said now in regard to this since it is not yet fully apparent what the difference in fact is. If we focus attention on the question how synthetic propositions are possible a priori, we must of course begin by asking what concepts are employed in the formulation of such propositions. But it is well to be prepared as early as possible to learn that pure concepts are not somehow simply another species of concepts along with empirical concepts. Second, the concepts must be derived from thought and not intuition. Kant has already decided that certain a priori representations are intuitions, namely space and time. The transcendental logic will seek to identify those concepts that have their source in the understanding alone. Third, the concepts must be basic or elementary and not composite or derivative. In the sequel Kant devotes too little time to this matter. There is a want of rigor which he excuses by saying that instruction on the matter is easily found in the manuals of ontology or that he will devote his remaining energies 83

to setting up the system of pure reason as soon as the critique of pure reason is complete. Only the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science in some measure realizes this promise. In general, one wishes Kant had devoted more attention to the analysis and articulation of concepts and less to certain peripheral matters in the first Critique. The fourth requirement of completeness is one that Kant earnestly seeks to meet in the early part of the analytic of concepts, the so-called metaphysical deduction. But the question whether we may not turn up concepts necessary to experience or science that are neither among those on the basic list nor derivative from them probably cannot be answered decisively for a reason that could threaten the enterprise of the Critique itself: how can we know exhaustively what experience is and thus what is needful to it or "makes it possible" if experience is by its nature exploratory in nature? This question should make us reflect on these alternatives: We must know in advance of experience what is necessary to or what will count as experience. (1) We cannot know in advance of experience what experience is. (2) Of these Kant elects the first. In order to do so he must assume that experience is not an empirical concept. The whole Critique is built on the notion that we must in advance of experience (not of course in a temporal sense) be able to make certain generalizations about it, namely the Principles expounded in the Analytic. For example, perception cannot validate itself: it is a presupposition of natural science that perception reveals realities, and this presupposition cannot simply be confirmed by perception. Perception does not show us that we can trust perception. Yet a critic may well ask whether anything but experience could tell us whether we can trust experience. This is the kind of "dialectical problem" that the Critique inevitably stimulates. Here the clue to the categories becomes important. Perhaps there is some way to determine all of the basic concepts and principles on which experience and science rest. In any event, the clue is the only place in which Kant undertakes to show this.

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In view of Kant's further development of these problems, we need not pause over his treatment of the question of elementarity and completeness. He himself qualifies the elementarity of the categories by saying that the third category in each of the four classes "arises out of the union of the second with the first" (this is said only in B at B110). It is interesting to see what further modifications would have to be made in the table of categories if Kant had been in a position to approach the "table of judgments" from the standpoint of present day notions of the sentential and predicate calculus. We shall consider these when we take up the categories themselves.

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Transcendental Analytic Book I Analytic of Concepts A further introductory paragraph disclaims the intent or need in the present context of analyzing particular concepts. A "logical treatment of concepts" is not what is called for in a transcendental inquiry despite the description of an "analytic of concepts." Although we may reiterate our regret that an analysis of the pure concepts was omitted from the Critique, or its sequels, this is not to say that what Kant intends to do in the analytic is labor lost. The study of these concepts pursued "to their original seeds and dispositions in the human understanding" deserves every support. But it is artificial to separate from one another the explicit analysis of concepts and the study of their origin and function in the economy of knowledge.

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Analytic of Concepts Chapter I The Clue to the Discovery of all Pure Concepts of the Understanding

Still another introductory section repeats what has been said several times, that the pure concepts of the understanding are now to be collected and examined, that they have a unity or connection deriving from the understanding itself, and with the proper approach or clue we may be certain that we have considered all of them and thus accomplished the most important task of a critique of pure reason.

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The Clue of

the Discovery of

All Pure Concepts of

the

Section The Logical Employment of

Understanding

1 the

Understanding

After what appears an endless round of prelimina r i e s , we come at l a s t to grips with the main issue of the C r i t i q u e , the exposition of the contribution of the understanding to our a p r i o r i knowledge. The turning point i s reached in two pages of unbelievably compact and pregnant thought beginning at A68/B93. They seem possessed of a force scarcely p a r a l l e l e d in a l l of modern philosophy, but also of enormous d i f f i c u l t y , u n t i l a clue here and there enables everything to f a l l into p l a c e . One should refer to these pages in the further reading of the Critique again and again. Since i t i s only a matter of some dozens of l i n e s , t h i s passage must be quoted e n t i r e so t h a t we can have i t constantly before u s . The d i f f i c u l t y l i e s in the thought i t s e l f , not in the phraseology. Kemp Smith's t r a n s l a t i o n i s sound enough for the purposes. (I s h a l l refer where necessary to the l i n e s as numbered.) "The understanding has thus far been explained merely negatively, as a non-sensible faculty of knowledge. Now since without sensibility we cannot have any intuition, understanding cannot be a faculty of intuition. But besides intuition there is no other mode of knowledge except by means of concepts. The knowledge yielded by understanding, or at least by the human understanding, must therefore by means of concepts, and so is not intuitive, but discursive. Whereas all intuitions, as sensible, rest on affections, concepts rest of functions. By 'function' I mean the unity of the act of bringing various representations under one common representation. Concepts a r e based on the spontaneity of thought, sensible intuitions on the receptivity of impressions. Now the only use which the understanding can make of these concepts i s to judge by means of them. Since no representation, save when i t i s an intuition, i s in immediate relation, to an object, no concept i s ever related to an object immediately, but to some other

88

5

10

15 i: '-• • ;., 20 j j

representation of i t , be that other representation an intuition, or itself a concept. Judgment is therefore the mediate knowledge of an object, that i s , the representation of a representation of it. In every judgment there is a concept which holds of many representations, and among them of a given representation that is immediately related to an object. Thus in judgment, 'all bodies are divisible 1 , the concept of the divisible applies to various other concepts, but is here applied in particular to the concept of body, and this concept again to certain appearances that present themselves to u s . These objects, therefore, are mediately represented through the concept of divisibility. Accordingly, all judgments are functions of unity among our representations; instead of an immediate representation, a higher representation, which comprises the immediate representation and various others, is used in knowing the object, and thereby much possible knowledge is collected into one. Now we can reduce all acts of the understanding to judgments, and the understanding may therefore be represented as a faculty of judgment. For, as stated above, the understanding is a faculty of thought. Thought is knowledge by means of concepts. But concepts, as predicates of possible judgments, relate to some representation of a not yet determined object. Thus the concept of body means something, for instance, metal, which can be known by means of that concept. It is therefore a concept solely in virtue of its comprehending other representations, by means of which it can relate to objects. It is therefore the predicate of possible judgment, for instance, 'every metal is a body'. The functions of the understanding can, therefore, be discovered if we can give exhaustive statement of the functions of unity in judgments. That this can quite easily be done will be shown in the next section."

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25

30

35

40

45

50

55

60

65

70

What has been said earlier regarding Kant's "breakthrough" in directing the attention of philosophers to sentences (propositions, judgments) may now be doubly affirmed. It is the first great step away from the material to the formal mode of speech. In effect Kant is here asking what a sentence is and showing us why the answer is all-important. Perhaps we should devote a moment to the second question before considering the first. Sentences are important, all-important, because for Kant what he calls experience (we have earlier designated this phenomenal experience , E2) is through and through conceptualized and, if we may coin the terms, propositionalized or sententialized. To experience is to be able to assert propositions or to make judgments. In every waking moment as we make our way through personal or public space and time we are sotto voce, as it were, uttering an endless series of propositions, identifying, classifying, relating, predicting. There is virtually no such thing as finding ourselves in an "alien" world: it is a world of appearances "constructed" (in some sense: Kant will try to explain it to us) out of bits of intuition that owe their origin to things-themselves and of relations that are "our own" creation: space, time, and concepts, both pure and empirical. Kant takes over the structuralistic epistemology of simple and complex representations bequeathed by Locke and Hume. We are on the one hand receptive (as to the bits or materials that enter into experience) and spontaneous (as to the ordering of this material through concepts and judgments). In this section still another pair of "antonyms" is added to matter and form, receptivity and spontaneity, namely affections and functions. In empirical intuition we are affected by something, passively; but a concept is functional, that is, it is a sign of activity and functioning. ( H ) We can call a concept a functor. The role of such a functor is to relate and synthesize. Concepts are contributions of the mind: orderings, relatings, classifyings, synthesizings are our own work. Among concepts there are no such things as ready-mades. This is a fundamental article of faith in Kant. We shall recur to the term functor when we come to the categories. Kant tells us that the only use the understanding can make of these concepts is to judge by means of 90

them; thus anticipating "the meaning of a word is its use in a sentence" that has impressed itself so deeply on recent thought. (18) One might add that our contemporaries might also benefit by seeing the problems this thesis brings with it, as shown in the Critique. The next step Kant takes is to say that if we can understand what concepts and judgments are, thoroughly 'excogitating what we have manufactured these astonishingly complex instruments for, we shall have gone a long way toward explaining what experience, knowledge, and indeed nature itself are. Only when we see that the structure of sentences is what is decisive, can we throw light on all these matters. This then takes us back to our first question: what is a sentence (judgment, proposition)? This too Kant endeavors to explain in this intense pair of pages. The terms judgment and understanding are sometimes sharply distinct in Kant. When they are, understanding means the employment of the intellect (to use a neutral generic term that is here needful) to develop and state the broadest theoretical formulations of knowledge or science. All theory is thus under the care of the understanding, particularly as it approaches the generality of, let us say, the theory of gravitation or mechanics in general, or in later times than Kant's, theories about biological natural selection or electromagnetic phenomena. Judgment on the other hand is a skill that points in the opposing direction, toward the particular case rather than the general law. Here one appeals to a general law, as being already determined and confirmed by the understanding, in order to explain a particular instance as falling under the law, for the sake of practical application, arbitrament, counsel, discrimination, and the like. The distinction is made more specific at the opening of the Analytic of Principles. It is, however, more necessary at the present juncture to note that whether one is moving in the direction of theory or of specific application, both of these faculties express themselves in sentential form. (Kant's use of the term 'faculty' though liberal is from the standpoint of modern psychological criticism harmless). Kant expresses this by saying that the understanding is a faculty of judgment. ^ 50 ' The focus of the problem is now on judgment: to experience, to know, to understand is to judge. We 91

now ask what judgment is. First of all, it is the irreducible unit, the pound or penny of knowledge, or we might also say, it is the cognitive molecule. In the universe of knowledge there are no free atoms or ions; they are all parts of molecules, or judgments. Again, the only use we "can make of concepts is to judge by means of them" ( 19 )- But we can say what the atoms are, even if they do not occur alone; they are distinguishable though not separable components of judgments. These atoms are concepts. We must now close in upon concepts. What does a concept do? Its function, Kant says, is essentially that of appearing as a predicate in a judgment (38). Taken by itself it is, as Russell was later to say, merely a form of a possible proposition, a propositional function. "Concepts (are) predicates of possible judgments" (54). Thus: "...is white," or "...loves roses," etc. This tells us something formally about concepts. Their principal purpose is to appear as predicates, not but what they may also at a suitable level of abstraction appear as subjects: "Color is a quality," "Cleanliness is next to Godliness," "Time is money," etc. But these are theoretical manipulations quite distinct in Kant's scheme from judging, where a substance appears as the subject and some property is attributed to it in the predicate. (Kant's view of substance still retains an Aristotelian flavor in that it is a part of the nature of substance to appear only as subject, never as predicate. Can we not say more than this of concepts? In addition to their formal use, as predicates, we can also say that concepts are devices of synthesis (this is explained in the Deduction in A ) : a judgment is here called "a function of unity among our representations" (41) . vfe may first look at Kant's account of this and then see whether a simpler alternative to it is possible, preserving the essence of what he says. Kant's account is more complex than it needs to be. Kant supposes that in a judgment such as, all bodies are divisible, we begin with actual bodies: * * *. Then the subject term 'bodies' in some sense represents these bodies. The predicate term relates to, applies to (bezogen) the subject term, and thus, he says, the actual bodies are indirectly represented 92

i

(werden mittelbar vorgestellt) by the predicate. Perhaps thus: 'divisibles -> 'bodies' ->• * * * Asserting the proposition in question (it is a "function of unity") is in some way to bind together and give a unique cohesion to many particulars. '41; •

But this is obviously not very satisfactory and what Kant says in the last part of the paragraph suggests the following, which, thought it adds some logical notions not used by him, is, I think, compatible with his account. Seeing that precisely what a concept is and does will be worked out in the Deduction, we may for the time being content ourselves with saying that a concept (that is, a predicative term) has the function of associating an aggregate of particulars or of classes of them. Thus the concept 'divisible' is here to be thought of as a specification of a number of properties the possession of which entitles something to be called a divisible. The sentence 'All bodies are divisible1 is now taken extensionally as saying that all all of the bodies are numbered among the divisibles. Thus in an old-style Venn diagram, the class of the divisibles comprises the bodies and possibly other divisibles also, and the judgment asserting this has now brought a measure of order (or unity as Kant says) into the situation by detecting a way of connecting bodies with other divisibles in a larger group, the divisibles. (39)

Concepts thus function as synthesizers, "functors" of unity, but only in judgments, and there they operate (in the cases under consideration) as predicates. We now see that the predicate is a class that may include other possible particulars and assimilates the particulars comprised under the subject. All of this is concerned only with the extension of the terms: Kant is talking only about propositions of physics that may be so construed. To judge is to realize or perfect this unification or assimilation. To use the copula 'is', Kant says 93

later on, is to say that we are now distinguishing an objective from a mere subjective (associational) unity of representations (B142). This is an immense advance over Hume who scarcely distinguished assertion from the association of ideas. Kant now offers another example, which however is really not well chosen: ein jedes Metall ist ein Körper.- This has to be interpreted (I do not mean translated) "every piece of metal is a body," or something on this order, for surely it is neither fact nor good grammar, in English or German, to say "gold is a body," "platinum is a body/' etc. Kant would have made his point more effectively had he said, for example, "every animal is a body." (Of course, this is a minor objection.) But now we must come to the fulfillment of what this account of judgment promised. If we can see in general how judging, by means of concepts, brings order or unity into experience, the next step is to study judgment itself in its varied forms. This may reveal to us a variety of devices of unification, depending upon the type of judgment. And since, as we said at the outset, experience is judging we shall hereby be in a position to unpack all the other components of this complex notion. Kant is the first philosopher to assert that the way that philosophers can best help us to understand the world is to hold up to the light the kinds of things we say about it. He was in fact so emphatic about this, we may say that he thought it the only way we would ever understand it. The clue to the problem is language itself. Kant loses not an instant after these two momentous pages to turn to a study of the structure of language. Alas, his study of it is too sketchy and superficial to justify the conclusions he draws from it. One hastens to add that this is largely owing to the moribund state of logic and linguistics in his day. There are also momentous philosophical difficulties. )

94

The Clue to the Discovery of all Pure Concepts of the Understanding Section 2 §915 The Logical Function of the Understanding in Judgments Having shown why the proposition or judgment must be regarded as the fundamental unit of experience, Kant now proceeds to examine the form which propositions take. We shall not pause long over the actual classification despite the fact that the shape of things to come in the Critique is determined by it. No part of the Critique is in greater need of revision than this. It is, however, pointless to try to revise it. It is much more important for us to look at our present thought on the subject of the forms of sentences and to ask how matters stand on their "categorial presuppositions," having learned all we could from Kant. In a sense this is constantly being done at the present time. Kant is lost sight of because his thought has entered into the fabric of philosophical practice. We shall make a few suggestions of revision simply to put the categories into a new light. The actual derivation of the Kantian classification has been explored by various scholars. A recent one is that of one of Kant's most hostile critics, Magdalena Aebi (Kant's Begründung der Deutschen Philosophie, Basel, 1947). One may find precedents in Aristotle and in later medieval and early modern logicians, but these are of no great relevance. What Kant has in mind is in this instance perfectly clear. (As a handy way of distinguishing the table of judgments in §9 from the table of categories in §10 we shall call the first "Screed I" and the second "Screed II." Particular forms or categories may then be marked 1-1, II-1, etc.) Screed I suggests, though Kant thinks these details needn't be gone into, that propositions are, as to quantity, either universal, particular, or singular, and, as to quality, either affirmative, negative, or infinite, and as to relation, either categorical, hypothetical, or disjunctive, and, as to modality, either problematic, assertoric, or apodeictic. With some qualifications to be explained later, we may say that each proposition must have one and only one of three characters under each of the four classes. 95

Screed I

Screed

Table of Judgments

II

Table of Categories Quantity

I - 1 Universal I - 2 Particular I - 3 Singular

II - 1 Unity II - 2 Plurality II - 3 Totality Quality

I - 4 Affirmative I - 5 Negative I - 6 Infinity

II - 4 Reality II - 5 Negation II - 6 Limitation Relation

I - 7 Categorical I - 8 Hypothetical I - 9 Disjunctive

II - 7 InherenceSubsistence II - 8 CausalityDependence II - 9 Community Modality

I - 10 Problematic I - 11Assertoric I - 12Apodeictic

II - 10 PossibilityImpossibility

II - 11 ExistenceNon-existence I I T- 12 NecessityContingency

96

Turning first to Screed I we can illustrate its classifications with the following examples: 1-1

All S is P.

1-7

All S is P, or simply, S is P. If S is P, T is Q Either S is P, or T is

1-2 1-3

Some S is P. a is P.

1-8 1-9

1-4 1-5

All S is P.

1-10 S may be P. 1-11 S is P, in fact. 1-12 Necessarily, S is P.

Q.

1-6

No S is P. All S is non-P.

But it is obvious that this is little more than a sketch of some of the possibilities. 1-1, for example, specifies only that a proposition be affirmative, but if so, then it may also be Some S is P, Some S may be P, S is necessarily P, and so on. With leisure one could explore a good many other possibilities, but perhaps not very profitably. When we come to Screed II we may then expect that the categories which organize experience and which are, as it were, being invoked in particular experiences or Erkenntnisse, are, depending upon what has been asserted, similarly determined. Thus a proposition negatively but universally generalizing some causal fact but only as a possibility, will normally have been expressed by a proposition formally classifiable under 1-1, 1-5, 1-8, 1-10. ("Unity" in II-1 may loosely be read "Universality" for the moment.) No doubt there are other ways of interpreting the organization of the screeds, but this- one seems the most intelligible from the present standpoint. It is evident that Kant's program of tracking down the a priori concepts in experience by observing the forms of language makes many assumptions. Consider the following. If the forms are truly empty, they can scarcely even be read. If we read 1-8 as "If p, then q", we are already offering an application or interpretation of the form, saying at least that some assertion depends in some way upon some other assertion; but this already places a limit upon the form, so that it is not a truly uninterpreted form. On the other hand, if we cannot even read the forms we do not know what possible relevance they can have as clues to the pure concepts. The latter is a serious or even fatal issue for Kant, for he proposes to learn something about experience and scientific thought from inspecting the forms. But if he cannot even read the 97

the

forms . . . ?

•'

Kant certainly does not wish to say that every if-then proposition is about a causal event, where we may be saying that the if-event preceded the thenevent, etc. He knows that we also use this form when we want to cite a reason for something: "If A took the money, A was desperate": taking the money is not necessarily the cause of A's desperation. Or again, take, "Necessarily, P." Theologians have said, "Necessarily, God exists," or physicists, "Necessarily, no velocity exceeds c," perhaps in the same sense, perhaps not. In Screed II Kant is concerned with assertions having the unique kind of necessity ascribable to natural laws. (See his discussion of the third Postulate of Empirical Thought -the name is carefully chosen — for the interpretation of "Necessarily, P," as it appears in science, at A226/B279 ff.) But he knows also that, "Necessarily, Barbara," a law of logic, has an exemplification in 1-12 though not in 11-12. Thus he cannot wish to say that every instance of 1-12 is an instance of 11-12, inferring the nature of scientific thought from language, that is, from this form alone. Our only hope or understanding the derivations is to take the whole thing in a much looser manner than Kant desires. It may prove to be much less than the deduction he describes the derivation of Screed II from Screed I to be (that is, a "metaphysical deduction", see §26 below). How can it be a deduction, we may ask, when from mere uninterpreted forms of judgment nothing follows about empirical thought: if anything can be learned, must we not attend to more than mere forms? Rather than pursuing a deduction, the question should be, to what uses do we put the various forms of judgment, taking these to be something much less formal than what we would mean by 'uninterpreted forms.' It is too much to say that from Kant's point of view he ought to have begun with Screed II instead of trying to arrive at it through I for then he would really not have needed I at all. I think there is something valuable to be learned from Kant's approach although it needs to be modified drastically. It is really a question of resorting to a different but still altogether Kantian approach: instead of the method of atomistic synthesis, one should adopt a method of reductive or diremptive analysis, of "unpacking." 98

The approach of the Prolegomena is often dismissed as a failure. To the contrary, I believe it offers a real solution. Kant begins with a proposition or judgment of experience, as he calls it, and in full cognizance of what it says, thinks out, ex-cogitates in a very particular way, not merely what it means (this is in a familiar way obvious), but rather asks himself what sources of thought and experience must be drawn upon to interpret it and establish its cognitive value (be it truth-falsity, or some other). "In the first place we must state that, while all judgments of experience are empirical (that is, have their ground in immediate sense-perception), all empirical judgments are not judgments of experience; but, besides the empirical, and in general besides what is given to the sensuous intuition, special concepts must yet be superaddedconcepts which have their origin wholly a priori in the pure understanding, and under which every perception must be first of all subsumed and then by their means changed into experience. "Empirical judgments, so far as they have objective validity, are judgments of experience, but those which are only subjectively valid I name mere judgments of perception. The latter require no pure concept of the understanding, but only the logical connection of perception in a thinking subject. But the former always require, besides the representation of the sensuous intuition, special concepts originally begotten in the understanding, which make possible the objective validity of the judgment of experience... "As an example, we may take the following: 'When the sun shines on the stone, it grows warm.' This judgment, however often I and others may have perceived it, is a mere judgment of perception and contains no necessity; perceptions are only usually conjoined in this manner. But if I say, 'The sun warms the stone', I add to the perception a concept of the understanding; namely, that of cause, which necessarily connects with the concept of sunshine that of hear, and the synthetical judgment becomes of necessity universally valid, namely, objective, and is converted from a perception into experience." (Prolegomena,§ 18,§ 20.)

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Here we see Kant's diremptive method at work. In a proposition such as "air is elastic" (that is, it expands), the method uncovers the facts that certain judgments of perception are relevant to this (for example, in a toy balloon I observe the distention of the bag itself, its tautness, the pressure on my hand when I remove the cap, and so o n ) , that I am speaking of something occupying space and very likely a stretch of time, that a certain passing state is at hand, that that which the state qualifies may qualify several states successively, and so on. I also observe that the subject and the predicate of the sentence in question are employed in a certain manner to express all of this. This method only lays bare the components of the fact (one must beware of the mechanical metaphor here), but of course that is its sole purpose. The task which Kant undertakes in the Transcendental Deduction is yet to be done, tracing each of the "components" to its source or origin, the rules of its application, and so on. In the example "when the sun shines on the stone, it grows warm," we have two subjects (or substances) qualified by states, an implied duration, a relation between them identified as causal, and so on. We learn none of this by simply scrutinizing "S is P 1 , or "if S is P, T is Q 1 , ever more sharply but only by close study of what a fact is and what a sentence is and of the purpose that each serves. The problem with the diremptive method is that there is no way one can readily see to terminate the task, how one can be certain that all such ingredient notions as space, time, substance-state, cause-effect, possibility, and so on have been tallied up. If that is so, it only means that one cannot speak in full a priori confidence about the world -- a situation we ought accept with what grace we can command. Here the method of the Critique, the so-called Metaphysical Deduction, seeks to offer an alternative. It hopes to cut short the endless way toward identifying the contribution of the understanding to experience and to science. In the Prolegomena there is the suspicion that the trail must be blazed step by step. The Metaphysical Deduction by contrast hopes to 1 00

I

accomplish it all at once. The difficulty is that mere forms like Screed I tell us so little. Are "air is elastic" and "iron is malleable" the same kind of fact or not? Are the same categories involved in both and is it because they have the same "form of judgment?" Is "all nitrates are soluble in water" or "cinnabar is red" different from these or not? Are we not well advised to explore a range of facts before we say what enters into the act of asserting them? The forms of judgment explored, expounded, and systematized by formal logic are in Kant's opinion the best guide to the kinds of fact there are and to the kind of stance we take toward factual content. For example, we may formulate the following for him. (One would prefer Kant's having done so.) 1.

Universal propositions have the purpose of uniting many different representations under a class designated by a predicative term.

3.

Singular propositions have the purpose of relating an individual to a class designated by a predicative term.

5.

Negative propositions have the purpose of saying that a designated stretch of space and of time is occupied by nothing of a specified description.

7.

Categorical propositions have the purpose of affirming that some continuant in time has a certain property or is in a certain state at a given time.

8.

Hypothetical propositions have the purpose of affirming a relation of dependence of some continuant, or some state or property of some continuant, upon some other.

12.

Some substance, event, or process is entirely determined in terms of empirical laws.

These show us the uses to which propositions are put when they are employed to talk about events and processes in space and time. But the point must be made that we know none of this from the bare forms (truly bare), and that if we take account of the content of the propositions, then we must be open to instruction by the facts. In other words, we have not in fact learned nor can we learn thing-and -property, causation, 1 01

possibility and the rest of these notions from the forms alone. Therefore Screed I can at most hint at what we have in Screed II and then only because we have independently reflected upon facts. It should be pointed out that Kant's programmatic reliance upon formal logic as an architectonic model makes a serious error in not distinguishing between the apodeictic certainty of the formulae of logic, of analytic a priori truths, and the much less certain character of the dodecuple division of propositional types. The formulae are no less true now than they were in the previous Aristotelian framework. The dodecuple division has disappeared, but one need only reflect on the revisions that have been made in modern logic to see that many if not all of the notions Kant mentions in his division find a new place or different interpretations as a result the theory of quantification, of classes, relations, identity, descriptions, of modal logic and so on. What one can learn from Kant in this is that questions analogous to those which he raised using the classical logic as the model of language may be just as appropriate if not imperative for a logic of quite a different order. One might well call this kind of inquiry metaphysical in the same sense in which Kant's Analytic is. A single very particular example of the consequences of a revision in logical categories may be cited for the forms I - 7,8,9. Kant hangs a number of for him momentous issues on the division into categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive forms. It is not just II-7, 8, 9 that depend upon it but also, for example, the three divisions of the Transcendental Dialectic, the transcendentally pseudological arguments in the Paralogisms, the Antinomies, and the Ideal of Pure Reason. Kant recognizes properly that there is an important difference between 1-7 and 1-8, 1-9 in that the first (assuming it to be a monadic sentence) is a relation between two concepts (subject and predicate), while of the latter the first is a relation between two propositions and the second a relation among two or more propositions. Leaving aside 1-7, we may ask whether 1-8 and 1-9 have the ultimacy or irreducibility Kant attributes to them and can serve for the excogitation of II-8 and II-9. Of course, we are not taxing Kant with failure to uncover the truth-function but merely seeking to show that an alternative scheme to 1 02

h i s j u d g m e n t s of r e l a t i o n t h a t m o d e r n l o g i c h a s e s tablished necessarily puts categories I I - 8 , 9 ( c a u s a l i t y and c o m m u n i t y ) i n t o an a l t o g e t h e r d i f f e r e n t light. F o r e x a m p l e , R u s s e l l and W h i t e h e a d , u s i n g the n o t i o n s of p r o p o s i t i o n , n e g a t i o n , and d i s j u n c t i o n as b a s i c d e r i v e the e n t i r e s e n t e n t i a l c a l c u l u s from i t . If K a n t had had t h i s l o g i c a l s c h e m e at h a n d h i s c h o i c e of c a t e g o r i e s w o u l d p r e s u m a b l y h a v e r e f l e c t e d it and a v e r y d i f f e r e n t k i n d of C r i t i q u e w o u l d be the r e s u l t . W h e n o n e c o n s i d e r s n e x t the s i m p l i f i c a t i o n i n t r o d u c e d by S h e f f e r ' s s t r o k e - f u n c t i o n for the l o g i c a l n o t i o n of i n c o m p a t i b i l i t y , r e p l a c i n g n e g a t i o n and d i s j u n c t i o n , s t i l l a n o t h e r r e v i s i o n of c a t e g o r i e s w o u l d a p p e a r to be in o r d e r . M o r e o v e r , one can a l s o go in the o p p o s i t e d i r e c tion. T h e r e are s i x t e e n d i s t i n c t t r u t h - f u n c t i o n a l c o m b i n a t i o n s of two v a r i a b l e s w h i c h a K a n t i a n p h i l o s o p h e r m i g h t h a v e set up and u s e d as the b a s i s for categories. The o n e s t h a t are r e a d i l y r e n d e r e d by f a m i l i a r t e r m s in E n g l i s h are t h e s e : 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Con]unction: Implication: Strong Disjunction : Weak D i s junction : Joint Denial : Equivalence:

p and q if p , t h e n

q

e i t h e r p or q, b u t n o t

both

p and/or q neither p nor q if and o n l y if p

q

then

T h e s e and the ten o t h e r r a t h e r m o r e n a m e l e s s p o s s i b i l i t i e s a r e e a s i l y r e n d e r e d in t e r m s of R u s s e l l and W h i t e h e a d ' s p r o p o s i t i o n , n e g a t i o n , and d i s j u n c t i o n . B u t if some f i c t i o n a l p h i l o s o p h e r , P s e u d o - K a n t , had k n o w n n o t h i n g of t h e s e r e d u c t i o n s , he m i g h t h a v e r e g a r d e d all of t h e m as u l t i m a t e and b a s e d some s i x t e e n r e l a t i o n a l c a t e g o r i e s on the lot of t h e m . (One m a y r e a d i l y i d e n t i f y t h e m in W i t t g e n s t e i n ' s T r a c t a t u s , 5.101). ~ It is u n n e c e s s a r y c h o i c e of " f o r m s " h e r e for K a n t . But a l s o , a jured up for l o g i c and

to l a b o r the p o i n t t h a t the is a l l — i m p o r t a n t . It w a s so s i m i l a r p r o b l e m can be c o n l a n g u a g e in its p r e s e n t s t a t e .

1 03

Kant appends comments on each of the four classes of judgments. We may be brief with these since as already remarked drastic revisions would in any event have to be made in the table to square it with current thought. ad 1. Kant remarks on the fact that in the traditional logic the singular judgment (e.g. "Socrates is a man") functions in some essential respects like the universal proposition. Thus the subject term is treated as "distributed." On the other hand, says Kant, one must distinguish the two, since the individual is to the universal as unity to infinity. Certainly Kant's distinction is endorsed in modern logic, but the role of proper names and definite descriptions is much more complex than the old syllogistic provides for. Kant's general philosophical point concerns the derivation of a category from 1-3. Here the result is baffling because II-3 is totality, which has no apparent kinship with 1-3. Nothing further is heard in the Critique about totality or, in this sense, about singular judgment. The Schematism (A137/B176 ff.) which attempts to define in intuitional terms or at least to establish a link between the doctrine of the categories and the Aesthetic mentions all the categories except this one. The question of progressing from 1-3 to II-3 is in this instance abandoned. The Axioms of Intuition make no mention of totality although nominally they are based upon II-1, 2, 3, and thus 1-1, 2, 3. That there is more to this question than first meets the eye is readily apparent when we look at Kant's other works. Recently Michael Frede and Lorenz Kruger have reviewed the question of the coordination of the two screeds in "Über die Zuordnung der Quantitäten des Urteils und der Kategorien der Grosse bei Kant," Kant-Studien, 61-1, 1970, pp. 28-49. The fact is that two different coordinations are possible and are in fact both mentioned by Kant. B .. A 1-1 Universal II-1 Unity I -1 II-3 1-2 Particular II-2 Plurality I -2 II-2 1-3 Singular I -3 II-l II-3 Totality B is the coordination of the first and second editions of the Critique and of the text of the Prolegomena. A is the coordination of the footnote to § 20 in the 1 04

.i

Prolegomena and of several of Kant's lecture manuscripts. Prof. Frede and his colleague show why A should be regarded as corresponding to Kant's real intentions in this matter, that is, the category of unity to the singular, not the universal, judgment, and totality to the universal, not the singular judgment. This interpretation brings Kant more closely into line with modern logic. ad. 2 The assimilation of the infinite predicate (e.g. "The soul is non-mortal") to the affirmative judgment is acceptable so far as syllogistic form is concerned. But no further development appears beyond II-6 (Limitation)which is in effect explained here rather than in II. No further mention appears of the infinite judgment in the Schematism or in the Anticipations of Perception (A166/B207) which are ostensibly based upon II-4, 5, 6. ad. 3 The division of the relation of judgments into the categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive has already been gone into at some length. It is interesting to note that Kant sees disjunction as creating a logical sum or union of elements distinct in themselves. But the derivation of II-9, community, from 1-9 is not convincing. Would not the notion of conjunction, the logical product, have been more appropriate as a source for the idea of community? The world would then be the conjunction of facts, "everything that is the case." Kant seems to have grasped the notion of logical sum or union correctly but what he needs to derive community is more nearly the logical product. No hint is here given of the use of the hypothetical proposition in formulating causal facts nor of the categorical in making assertions about substances and their properties. In this instance the metaphysical "deduction" fails to point the way to the categories. ad. 4 Virtually everything Kant says must puzzle us in 4. We are now told that unlike quantity, quality, and relation, modalities contribute nothing to the content of judgments. But from the first we have been treating only the form of judgment, jJLg_tracting from all content (B96) . Either Kant has incredibly forgotten this program or 'content' must nave a somewhat different or much looser meaning at point.

L

1 05

Second, Kant fails to concentrate on the nature of these functions of judgment themselves. To explain what the three modal characters of propositions are, Kant says, nothing more than that in assertoric propositions, the affirmation or negation (as the case may be) is set forth as being true; in the problematic it is called optional (beliebig), scarcely an apt characterization since the question of truth is not left to our option but is rather put in abeyance; in the apodeictic it is said to be necessary. But instead of explicating optional . true , and necessary , and showing how these qualifiers may affect any proposition, universal, particular, singular, affirmative, negative, infinite, categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive, he limits the application to the last three in a very particular manner. Thus in the hypothetical judgment he believes the apodosis is problematically asserted, the protasis assertorically. This ignores the fact that the proposition is asserted as a whole. It should more nearly be said that the protasis is not asserted at all and that the apodosis is problematically asserted only on the condition of the protasis. We must be able to consider the proposition as a whole to be true or false and as necessarily or only problematically so. Instead, Kant assimilates the hypothetical and disjunctive judgment to the problematic, or perhaps better, problematic character pertains only to hypothetical and disjunctive judgments. But if it were simply a trait of these types there would scarcely be any need to have separate classifications for them under Relation and Modality. What might have been a better alternative than this? Kant might have simply singled out three modal operators, "Possibly (p) " , "Necessarily (p) " , "Assertedly (p)", and then gone on to ask what a priori modes of thought are presupposed when p is some judgment of experience or proposition of, let us say, physics. This would then lead him directly to the categories, if anything would, and the forms would be true clues to their discovery. Aristotle's treatment of modal operators had already provided a clear precedent, which Kant might more profitably have followed (De Interp. 21 a 35 ff). It is hard to resist the charge of mere gameplaying regarding the last dozen or more lines of 4 which try to link the three modalities with the three propositions of the hypothetical syllogism, where major, minor, and conclusion are assimilated 1 06

respectively to the problematic, assertoric and apodeictic modes. (Further development of this sort of "analogizing" is found in the introductory sections A and B to the Dialectic, A299/B355 ff.)

107

The Clue to the Discovery of all Pure Concepts of the Understanding Section 3 §10 The Pure Concepts of the Understanding or Categories

j,j; »!':

One may well prepare himself by turning back to Section 1 at A68/B93 since the present section in a : sense continues the analysis begun there. ^The purpose of the present section is to show what is involved in synthesis, both as process and and as product. In Section 1 synthesis was found to be the inherent purpose of judgement, of the capacity ot express our experience sententially. It involves first, a multiplicity or manifold of elements, of data in a basic framework of space and time; second, the elements must be "gone through, taken up, and connected" with the aid of imagination, that is, what is absent (either past or elsewhere) must be made present; ana third, a unity must be lent to these data. A multiplicity of representations must be put together and , held together in one act of knowledge. Kant believes that in some original sense or on some original level representations are separately and distinctly presented and a process of connecting simple ideas into complex ideas transpires (A 99). As a result of the synthesizing process we arrive at the ordinary objects particularly of vision., Only when we arrive at this result can we begin to speak of experience, of knowledge. The question is, through what instruments, what functors of synthesis do we arrive at the end or result? <• The process of synthesizing, Kant says here, is a "blind but indispensable function of the soul." At its most primitive level it is merely the capacity to associate and reproduce, to make present what is absent or distant in time or space.J This is precisely the mind's capacity of imagination'. But our imagination is not simply held in a lockstep with the past experience, as we may fancy is the case with our

108

animal cousins. Our imaginations are selective or productive, not merely reproductive. The device by which our selection is organized, so that we avoid a mere mechanical revival of every odd thing that has happened to attach itself to a given representation in past experience, is the unique instrument of the understanding or intellect -- the concept., A concept is inherently a scheme of selection: it is a rule uniting traits a...z and associating a name to the union. Such a selective device enables us to scan experience, discard what is irrelevant, and retain what is conforming. Unless such a functor is at work, we cannot speak of experience: the dog or horse can be conditioned in certain ways and his response approaches, at some distance, such selective devices. But he cannot carry this very far, or he could organize his thoughts, devise language, develop experience, and so learn to command his environment more effectively (as this is seen from our standpoint). We see comparable results with those who are senile or intellectually subnormal: here the imagination runs in ruts; the conceptual apparatus that guides,, develops, and selects, bringing past experience to bear upon the present, is defectivej In order to emphasize the dramatic difference that the concept makes in this situation, Kant now resorts to a phrase that is as anomalous in German as it is in English. What is needed or what transpires in this "higher synthesis" is "to bring the synthesis to concepts", die Synthese auf Begriffe zu bringen. It is only when synthesis has broken through the barrier and devised for itself this functor of selection, the concept, that one can speak of experience. Any concept is such a device. It brings order among our representations. It introduces in one word, necessity. Every concept does this. For when I recognize something as a cat, a typewriter, a planet, and so on, I have for the moment satisfied myself that some particular K has all of the traits that are necessary to its being a K. It does not mean that one part of K is necessarily connected with some other part of K (the front and hind paws of the cat), but that I have found K here and now to conform to my notion of a cat: it has all the necessary or defining traits of a cat, or at least an apparent sufficiency to satisfy me. It makes little difference that I may be hard put to state accurately the defining traits of a cat -- this is true of most of the concepts that I manage somehow to use without being able to 109

analyze them. Kant's meaning is clear. I must be able to organize, to synthesize my representations by means of concepts if there is to be any meaning to my experience. Experience is governed by rules, and the rules are of my own devising. (Again this "my own" is purely paradigmatic, as remarked before). Kant goes even further. There is really no line that can be drawn between empirical concepts and what we call laws of nature. In view of this, we must in the end regard the very laws of nature as rules. This is probably not as startling as it sounds at first. But the plausibility of it must not be judged before we come to the end of the Analytic. If this is what Kant means by 'bringing the synthesis to concepts' we must also ask how we know how to devise concepts. ( We need rules for devising rule s. This is a possible interpretation of what Kant means by categories at least the most important of them, the categories of relation, which set forth what is meant by obj ects in nature, continuous processes , and the system of nature as a whole in space and time. These are the categories that show us how necessity is exhibited in the scientific account of nature. The other categories can be explained in other ways. There may be no one way in which they can all be explained. We must draw upon the resources of both the Analytic of Concepts and of Principles for this. I will show what I mean in a single case, leaving the other categories until we come to them. There are three things to consider here: (1) the elementary fact (of the limitless number of these let us use Kant's own example, the elasticity of the air); (2) the monadic sentence (this is 1-7, the categorical sentence); (3) the category of inherence and subsistence (II-7). Kant supposes that in what he calls the Metaphysical Deduction, or identification, of a category, we proceed from (2) to (3). But (2) unadorned can tell us nothing -- if it is sufficiently unadorned it is a mere smudge on paper. The fact is to learn anything at all about language or metaphysics we must suppose that we already have a great number of elementary facts expressed in some such way as 'air is elastic' is expressed. Only through thought about (1) may we at length arrive at (3), devising the notions of thing and property (substance and accident, subsistence and inherence). Only after we have a command of these do we proceed to (2). 110

We see that the term 'air' serves one purpose, 'elastic' or 'is elastic1 another. We have learned to identify the monadic sentence (categorical proposition). I think Kant might accept the account so far. It merely sketches out the stages of our grammatical and philosophical learning. He now wishes to contrast this "genetic" account with another one that shows what must be prior here in principle and what is derived from it. What comes first is not (1) but the capacity of mind marked by (3). The mind must first of all be capable of organizing its sense-information (but not in any sort of system learned from sense) in such a way that it discriminates a relatively permanent body from the body's changes of state (qualities, properties). Given the capacity to make this discrimination it organizes its sense-information, employing for the purpose the monadic sentence (2) which in public and systematic manner clearly exhibits the inherent and the subsistent, or at least enables it to be understood. The parts of (2) and (3) are correlated with each other: subject and substance, predicate and property. All of this has transpired for all persons in principle, but most of us are aware only of (1), a limitless number of bits of information. The category (3) may now be seen to be a rule (a) for devising rules (b). In this instance we have devised (a) the distinction between inherents and subsistents which we then put into effect when we devise the generalization (b) that air has the property of elasticity. Why? I think no answer can be found except the effect of using the rule : it enables us to defeat the perpetual and total perishing of experience as time passes. But if anything outside us prompted us to devise the rule to conform to it we would not be prescribing a rule for experience but conforming ourselves to it. As it stands then the rule tells us one way of organizing experience. Once suitable language is devised particular rules can be formulated: "air is elastic", "iron is malleable", and also particular cases, "the Kaaba is black", "the Parthenon is crumbling." I think Kant has no answer to the question we have raised as to why this system of rules is adopted. The clue (2) he cites is ineffective since the form must be empty and void of any significance; it thus cannot lead us to (3) or to anything else. On the other hand, Kant has closed out any thing-itself as the 111

model to which the scheme must conform. This leaves only (1) itself. But alternatives to (2) and (3) to explain (1) are certainly conceivable: and other philosophies testify to the fact. At the same time, even allowing for alternatives, the Kantian system does offer one way to account for (1). The main contribution of this section is to underscore and to advance the point made in Section 1 j (just preceding §9), that there must be concepts of j things and processes in order for there to be experi- i ; ence. The manifold of intuitions must be held together, and for this there must not only be psychological mechanisms of association but also concepts which are rules for the selective unification of traits under class names. Thus synthesis must be brought up to the level of conceptualization. This is how necessity makes its way into experience. What Kant calls "pure concepts of experience" are higher order rules to the effect that experience must be organized by discriminating (for example) inherents and continuants in experience. Such a rule is imposed in order to keep experience from crumbling or perishing at every moment. Higher order rules are in turn put into effect by the invention of actual sentences (2). In these, specific inherents (e.g., elasticity) are expressed as predicates, and subsistents (e.g., air) as subjects. The result (1) is an asserted elementary fact (e.g., what is asserted in'air is elastic.') The order of priority according to Kant is (3), then (2) , then (1) . (3) Having the higher order rule (we organize experience in the system: InherentsSubsistents), (2) we devise a form of judgment (the monadic sentence) (1) to express a fact: the category determines the form of judgment and the judgment determines the fact through the understanding's unique function of synthesis. The order of analysis is the reverse of this: (1) take note of an elementary fact; (2) discriminate the form of the judgment expressing the fact; (3) excogitate the categorial rule being expressed by the form. My criticism of this is that we arrive at (2) from (1) only by first coming to understand (3) . Logical or grammatical distinctions presuppose the metaphysical distinctions. We would not in 'air is elastic' devise the distinction between 'air' as the subject and "elastic1 as the predicate unless we first commanded the notions of subsistents and inherents: 112

that is, we call 'air' the subject because it signifies the subsistent and 'elastic' the predicate because it signifies an inherent or a property of the subsistent. The revised order of analysis would be (1), then (3), then (2). But my criticism is stronger than that. I regard (2) and (3) as hypothetical constructs to explain (1). What is here cited by Kant as (2) and (3), that is, the logical-grammatical form and the categorical structure is one way in which to make philosophically intelligible to ourselves what kind of "entity" a fact (1) is. (For the present context only, we have endorsed Kant's version of (2) and (3) and demurred only at the order.) But there are other systems of philosophical explanation. Kant believes that in (3) he has truly laid bare the ultimate intellectual structure of all rational beings. I submit that what he has done is to base his view of this structure on the fortuitous structure of our language. But one may not deny that his view does set forth one view in stimulating fashion. The revision of the order of analysis brings with it not a revision of Kant's order of priority but calls the latter itself into question. The revised order of analysis, in my opinion, suffices. We have mentioned Descartes previously and must now recall him once more as we come to Screed II, the "pure concepts of the understanding." In speaking of his apprehension of the ball of wax and its several qualities in virtually all of the sense-modalities, Descartes had concluded in the Second Meditation that "it is now manifest to me that...bodies are not properly speaking known by the senses or by the faculty of imagination, but by the understanding only, and... they are not known from the fact that they are seen or touched, but only because they are understood." Kant does not agree that somehow, as the Leibnizians thought, we grasp the ball of wax confusedly through the senses and distinctly through the intellect. He holds that if we speak of knowledge both intellect and senses are active, the one devising concepts and the other receiving sensible intuitions. When we ask after the source of the intuitions we learn that the senses are stirred into activity by things themselves. But when we ask after the source of our concepts we must look to the understanding. 113

His approach then differs from his predecessors' in that he holds knowledge to involve both the understanding and intuition: there is no knowledge that can come solely through the understanding. Nor does he concede that there is confused knowledge arising from the senses and clear and distinct knowledge from the understanding. But what he does concede to Descartes (and to Locke who is somewhat more reluctant about substance) is that knowledge about such a thing as a ball of wax involves a notion of substance and that this notion has not been and can never be learned through the senses. The idea of a subsistent in which passing properties, states, and events inhere is a creation of the understanding. This same understanding which has devised the forms of language has also introduced a transcendental content into its representations by means of the synthetic unity of the manifold in intuition -- transcendental because they are not of empirical origin. The doctrine of the categories is therefore to be understood as a new answer or solution to an old question. We have here mentioned only substance because it may be taken as the prototypical category. With one degree or another of success we can see how all the categories must be of the same lineage. We can thus learn many things from the senses in a rather "primitive" sense of 'learn' but if we are to speak of knowing anything about a world in which there are comparatively stable entities like bodies and planets that are part of one interacting system in space and time, then we must resort to ideas (Vorstellungen) that we have not learned from the senses in any sense of the term. We must learn to create and to manipulate concepts; but before we can do so, or as a presupposition of doing so, we must possess the mental power, or more simply, the knack of devising and using concepts. This power or knack we have said is something like being able to devise rules-] for devising rules2A rule, is not very felicitously named a 'pure concept' if this suggests a class name. It is rather a functor or instrument of the understanding. Only with the aid of these functors are we able to arrest the ceaseless flow and perishing of momentary impressions. The business of the category of substance is to say if you grasp things that are changing, altering (Veränderung: "othering"), then there must be 114

A

something that does not alter, for one of these cannot be discerned without the other. Something must correspond to time itself (the railway track) and something else the momentary events in time (occurrences on the train). For this we adopt the notion of a substance, of a thing and its properties, and appropriate the traditional name for it, despite the momentous change the old notion has now undergone. Later in the Critique Kant even speaks of categories in terms of "fiction": the 'als ob' philosophy is of course derived from the Critique. The fact that we speak meaningfully in such terms as "violets are blue," and "grass is green" shows, for Kant, that we have the capacity for thinking in terms of occurrents and continuants. All that is now needed is to reflect upon the different kinds of propositions or judgments and to ask ourselves what kind of facts we are trying to express with these various forms when we employ them in speaking of the world we grasp in empirical intuition. Such reflection leads us to identify the functors that are at work bringing a synthesis and unity out of a multiplicity of sense experiences. These are the categories. One may now say that Kant must address himself to three issues: (1) whether there are categories or pure concepts or functors of the understanding, rules for devising rules that order our variegated intuitive impressions; (2) what categories there are, the identification of them among our great store of abstract representations; and (3) what reason there is to believe that these categories in particular do order experience. The first question is not kept systemmatically altogether distinct from the third which is the main purpose of the Transcendental Deduction and the Analytic of Principles to answer. As we have seen, the second question is passed over quickly: Kant was confident he could rely on the articulations of formal logic.

In the sections which follow the presentation of Screed II the reader would welcome a clear defense of the adequacy of the list and also a definition of the concepts themselves. It is precisely these aids to the advancement of the doctrine of the categories which Kant now specifically fails to offer. The table of judgments is thought of as itself an adequate clue to the identification of the categories as (1) pure 115

not empirical, (2) conceptual not intuitional, (3) basic not derivative, and (4) presented in their completeness (A64/B89). Aristotle is praised for making an effort, even if it fell short, in respect to (3) and (4). One may here call to mind his list of both the categories and the derivative concepts he identified as the postpredicaments with their customary English designations. (Categories l b 25 ff.) Categories Substance what Quantity how large Quality what sort of thing Relation related to what Place where Time when Position in what attitude State (Condition) how circumstanced Action what doing Passion how passive Post-Predicaments Opposite Prior Simultaneous Motion Having Here as in the matter of the definition of the categories one wishes Kant had taken more time to compare his categories with those of others. The list of categories did not remain in the form in which Aristotle left it. The Stoics, Plotinus, and Galen developed extensive revisions of the list to which Kant might well have adverted. He contents himself with coordinating some of Aristotle's categories and post-predicaments with his own twelve and referring others (place, time, priority, simultaneity) to pure intuition or to empirical thought (motion). Some concepts (action, passion) are declared derivative. With continued casualness Kant proceeds to offer a selection of his own derivative notions, corresponding to the post-predicaments. Force, action and passion are placed under causality, and presence (Gegenwart) and resistance under community. What is not made clear is just what derivativeness consists in. 116

'!. Are derivative notions simply logical implicates, in • which case they would be as pure as the categories, 1 or are they "minglings" with empirical content? And how are we to understand the latter? A surprising turn is given to the notions comingto-be, ceasing-to-be, and change which are placed under ' modality: but one can detect nothing that suggests possibility, necessity, or existence in them, these being the three modes of modality. One may again express regret at Kant's casualness in devising this list of topics which he allowed to determine all of the remainder of the Critique. He added two new sections in B at this point but they are devoted to other matters. 511 Little excuse can be found for the material added to the Critique in B in § 1 1 , §1 2. The present section adds some interpretations of the list of categories but they do not advance our understanding in the least, and may in fact hinder it. The first point Kant makes is to declare the first two sets of categories to be "mathematical" in nature and the remaining categories "dynamical." He had already introduced this distinction in A (at A159/B198) in application to the Principles. There is a point to the designation "mathematical" for the categories of quantity and the Axioms of Intuition, and to "dynamical" for the categories of causality and community and the corresponding Principles. But the net interpretative value is even in these cases slight, and the application to other categories and principles is far-fetched. The second point concerns the relation of the third category in each set to the first two. Hegelians may rejoice at this precedent for Hegel's dialectic but here it is scarcely more than trivial. Kant has been assuring us that the categories are all original and not derivative, yet here he declares the third category to "arise from" the union of the first two. He assures us that this does not render them derivative for the reason that the third requires a unique Actus of the understanding distinct from what is needed for the first two. Despite the effort to make this clear 117

by means of examples from the list of categories both the problem (the origin of the third category) and the solution (genesis from the first two) are thoroughly artificial. It is nothing other than eating one's cake and having it too. The third point concerns a possible want of clarity in the relation of the ninth category (community) to the disjunctive judgment. Here the problem is still confusing but far from artificial. What is doubtful, as we have remarked earlier, is that the idea of nature as a whole, even in Kant's quite relative and "unmetaphysical" sense, is not easily related to that of a logical sum (not Kant's phrase, of course) , a union of disj uncts, though possibly one might link it to that of a logical product or conjunction of all the true propositions, remembering the antinomies or paradoxes this notion may generate (die Welt ist alles was der Fall ist). Kant emphatically takes the disjuncts to be exclusive in nature: if one disjunct is true, all the others are false. It is not easy to see how a system of exclusive disjuncts could constitute the whole of nature. But the point Kant raises, one may readily concede, is speculatively stimulating.

§12 The final section in the Clue, also added in B, adds even less than §11 to the forward momentum of the Critique. As if he thought he had to remain on cordial terms with the very scholasticism he was so effectively and irrevocably destroying, Kant casts a glance over his shoulder at a distinction of the Schools and tries to relate it to the present problem. "Whatever is in being is one, true, and good," reads an old maxim. Kant argues that these notions, which are of course not empirical, are to be assimilated respectively to the three categories of quantity: unity, plurality and totality. No ideas can exceed truth and goodness in importance. Certainly the first deserves ample treatment in an inquiry such as the Critique. It receives little and the present section adds nothing to our knowledge of it. The reason for introducing it at this point derives partly from a lingering obligation Kant felt toward old scholastic classifications, but also from the belief that he was obliged 118

to treat all the basic transcendental terms. We recall that transcendental notions have the three essential characteristics of not being derived from experience, but being applicable to experience, and making experience possible. In edition B Kant seems to have decided the omission of particularly so important a non-empirical idea as truth in A might appear to be an oversight; it seemed apparent to him that this notion was certainly transcendental, and that one would have great difficulty in carrying on the business of science without it. Always overinclined to be attentive to architectonic details, he manages to interpret the trio of notions as really instances of the three categories of quantity. Thus he can present them not as omissions from Screed A, but as instances of categories already provided for. In all genuine knowledge, he says, there is unity of concept, truth of all that may be deduced from it, and perfection or completeness of all that is deducible from it. The third category again involves a recursion to the first: it rests upon plurality regarded as unity (looking to the previous categories of quantity). Kant offers no analysis of any of the three notions but then we must remember that he has not committed himself in the Critique to analyze concepts but to show the place of a priori concepts in experience and in science. The result of Kant's inquiry is nevertheless one of artificiality. One may ask whether Kant would have hit upon this way of assimilating the trio of terms to the stock in Screed I if good had not readily had a near synonym in perfection (Vollkommenheit) in the ethical doctrines of the Leibniz-Wolff school (see Kant's Critique of Judgment §15), and the word Volkommenheit in turn, when re-literalized, did not lend itself to the notion of that which has some ideal fullness or totality of traits. (Reference should also be made to the recurrence of the idea of a most perfect being in Kant's consideration of the proofs for God's existence later in the Critique. A583/B611 ff.) There is of course no denying that even in this somewhat superfluous section Kant's thoughts are stimulating.

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Analytic of Concepts^ Chapter II The Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding We now approach a climax in the Critique. We are to be shown the indispensability of the categories identified in §10 for our knowledge of nature, of a world of objects and natural processes. What thus unfolds is the famous transcendental deduction of the categories. It is evident that it cost Kant an enormous amount of intellectual labor. The result is scarcely satisfying to most of Kant's readers and critics of the past two centuries. It is often regarded as being a morass of confusion and a failure. It is indeed a tangled account and it rests on some assumptions which are now likely to be thought unacceptable. It also, however, presents one of the most important analyses of human knowledge, of what enters into it and of its scope and limits. Modern thought on the subject is scarcely to be imagined without the Critique: it is deeply woven into its fabric.

Section 1 §13 The Principles of any Transcendental Deduction The two unequal sections of this chapter are designated by Kant "Principles of a Transcendental Deduction in General" and, in A, "A Priori Grounds of the Possibility of Experience." The latter is the transcendental deduction itself in several subsections, and the title is an accurate brief description of it. The transcendental deductions of A and B (we shall hereafter speak simply of "deductions" without the qualifier) are ostensibly concerned only with the categories, but as we shall show, one must not lose sight of the principles, which are to follow. The categories themselves are curiously not prominently in evidence in the deductions: it is categories in general that are being deduced. We shall first follow fairly closely Kant's exposition of the nature and need of the deduction and then offer interpretation and criticism. 120

I

The question Kant is asking concerns the source and validity of a priori concepts which are not derived from experience, but which have application to experience and in fact govern experience or make it possible. Concepts derived from experience raise no problems about how they can apply to experience, and concepts which are neither derived from nor apply to experience (e.g., immortality) likewise present no immediate problem. But the ideas enumerated in Screed II are all such as to demand some special legitimation if they are to be applicable to experience. Hume had shown with irrefutable evidence that we could never detect any impression of sensation that corresponded to or supported our common sense convictions that one kind of event might be the cause of another. We also speak confidently of things or substances as perduring through time and undergoing various states, but no impression ever abides in such a manner as to afford us direct evidence of a continuant. Similarly we speak of some states as possible , necessary, or actual. None of these notions could even be suggested to a being whose cognitive apparatus comprised only the senses. Kant holds that we simply cannot speak of experience or knowledge unless we command this array of concepts. We must not forget that Kant is leaning heavily on the fact that we speak as we do, that all the Western languages readily lend themselves to being dissected into subjects, modifiers, transitive verbs, and so on. On the other hand the fact that they do so _i_s obviously significant: what Kant did not know was what significance it had. There is considerable truth in Hume's explanation or rather description of how the non-empirical concepts (e.g., cause) that are so indispensable to knowledge are in point of fact acquired, how we come to apply what we have learned from past processes to the future, or to believe that the physical world has an independent and continuant existence, or to suppose ourselves to be continuously in being. Hume's cognitive psychology aims to give a plausible explanation of these matters. The question, however, is not only how we come to make all of these extensions and extrapolations, how we are induced to believe or why we are inclined to expect their occurrence, but what will justify an 121

inference of the future from the past or present or show that we can make no such inference. The question is whether Kant in accepting Hume's descriptive account offers more adequate reasons for our trusting to causal inference, or to other functors similar to causality. In the end, I think he has a clearer notion of the indispensability of non-empirical concepts than Hume and he tackles main issues more persistently. The discussion in § 13 leads us directly from the place Hume had arrived at into the area in which Kant now proposed to achieve a decisive solution. Kant's view of the empirical deduction or, we might say, the empiriogenesis of the categories is no doubt the most important contribution of this subsection. In § 14 we learn that it is only because of the categories that we can speak of objects. In this section it is said that "objects can appear without any relation to the functions of the understanding," that is, to the categories. But I think there is no contradiction between what Kant is saying here and his general position. I believe he is at this point saying only that the categories are not conditions for the apprehension of intuitions. He can still maintain that intuitions may in some sense be apprehended independent of the categories. He is not saying that objects of experience may appear without "any relation to the functions of the understanding," the categories. Apprehension of intuitions is one thing, cognitive experience of objects is another. Here as elsewhere Kant is maintaining his position that both concepts and intuitions are necessary for knowledge.

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It is no doubt a rare kind of experience (in the narrow sense) to apprehend mere empirical intuitions by themselves but it is not impossible, nor inconsistent with Kant's basic standpoint, that knowledge involves a full complement of components: pure and empirical intuitions, pure and empirical concepts. Empirical intuition alone, if such an experience could transpire, might well be in such confusion as to suggest no such regularity as is requisite for knowledge . If this interpretation is correct, Kant's point is simply to insist again on the absolute difference between intuitions and concepts. Others might perhaps insist that they are not separable. Kant however maintains that it is only in knowledge that they are inseparable. It is quite possible to think without 122

intuiting: we are told this both of things themselves (in the Preface, Bxxvii) and of the transcendental unity of apperception (Deduction, B 157 ff.) Must it not also be possible in principle to intuit without concepts, empirical or pure? This is what the difficulty in the present section comes down to. If we now attend to the apprehension of mere intuition in the no doubt rare cases in which it may appear, we shall see that nothing such as a pure concept of the understanding is to be found in it. But if it is not to be found in this quarter, there can be no empirical deduction of the categories, nothing that will, for example, reveal to us how or why any A is followed by B "necessarily and in accord with an absolutely universal rule" (A91/B124). In the end, I believe Kant is not inconsistent in this subsection with the position he is at such pains to develop, both before and after. Saying that the categories cannot be derived from experience (E-|, intuition) clears the way for the Deduction, and this has been the purpose of §13 from the start. In all of this we must remember that Kant is not disagreeing with Hume's diagnosis of the causal situation: both of them agree that there is no empirical (intuitional) evidence for necessary connection. Nor do they disagree when it comes to seeking a solution to the question how causal inferences can nevertheless be made. They differ over the kind of solution to offer. Hume's is psychological, Kant's is transcendental. For Hume, Kant's solution might seem question-begging. For Kant, Hume's solution is irrelevant. The clash of issues is obscured only by Kant's style. §14 Transition to the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories The present section is one of great consequence and also comparatively clear. Kant draws attention to it in the first preface (A xvii), because, he says, it presents the essentials of what he calls the obj ective deduction of the categories. The transcendental deduction itself has "two sides": the objective deduction seeks to expound the objective validity of the pure concepts of the understanding, 123

while the subj ective deduction gives an account of the pure understanding itself, its possibility and the cognitive powers on which it rests. Of these two, the objective deduction is declared the more important sinceii lies closer to the main issue of the Critique itself which is "to determine what understanding and reason can know independent of all experience" (that is, of all empirical intuition). If what is said in the sequel on the subjective deduction is not altogether convincing, Kant advises us to rely upon the objective deduction. Since,he says, §14 states this ;| in a nutshell, it is, of course, advisable to attend M closely to it. • At the outset we are told that objects and re: presentations, the poles of all cognitive apprehensionj: can be related to each other in either of two ways: the object may determine the representation, or the representation determine the object. Schematically this would seem to distinguish empirical from a priori knowledge. But the matter is more complex than that. The result of the first (object determining representation, o •> R) does not really add up to empirical knowledge, but only to sensation. Merely having sensations does not, at least for Kant, amount to knowledge; it merely yields one of the ingredients of knowledge. It should be noted that the formula 0 •> R is a bit pat and premature, since Kant's whole message in the Deduction is that an object is a rather elaborate construction, and i~E Ts not at all this construction which somehow produces the sensation. What he needs to say, to be consistent with other parts of the Critique, is simply that sensations do occur or that their origin may possibly be ascribed to things themselves. Hume's cautious observation about this matter is judicious and apt, superior in sagacity to those of both Locke and Kant. Impressions of sensations, he says, arise "in the soul originally from unknown causes" (Treatise I, I, II). I think this would not, howeveT] be difficult for Kant to accept. In any event, the other side of the opening alternatives is of more consequence for Kant's problem. To repeat, the distinction Kant is making is not between empirical and a priori knowledge: it is more nearly between sensation on the one hand and knowledge gained through experience or science on the other. His point.now is that the latter is itself complex and involves both intuition and concept. 124

(There is an ambiguity here as to whether Kant is now saying, as he often does quite generally, that there must be both concepts and intuitions for there to be knowledge, or whether he is saying that there must be both formal or a priori intuitions as well as a priori concepts of the understanding. Of these two conditions for knowledge, the first is intuition: it is referred to not just as a condition but as an a priori condition. This may suggest that he is at the moment thinking of space and time: "the first condition, under which alone all objects can be intuited, must in fact precede objects a priori in respect of form." Fortunately, however, nothing hangs on this ambiguity since it is the other condition, the conceptual, which is decisive here. So without resolving this minor problem we turn back to the second condition.) The principle point of the section is now made: certain a priori concepts must precede, as a priori conditions ( a priori vorausgehen, als Bedingungen), the thought of anything as an object. It is not enough to allow only for the empirical intuitions that we acquire by way of sensation if we are to explain the nature of experience and the knowledge of the world embodied in experience. Sub-rational beings may be bombarded at every moment by just such intuitions but, even looking aside from their other obvious limitations, they never develop the idea of their world as a system of objects and processes: the idea of an object is a coinage and manufacture of our own (the rational paradigmatic self of course) and we could never in all the reaches of time develop it with the aid only of intuitions. This now is not the concept of particular substances or processes (e.g. tiger, horse, walking, burning) but the concept of an object itself (or a process) or in general the concept of objectivity. It is not yet the category of substance that is being expounded, but what in more recent terms we express by 'intersubjectivity' or 'communicability'. We must be able to account for this because shareable objects, a shareable world are what we experience (E2) and do not merely intuit (E-j ) . Such a world we believe is a world that, at least as appearance, enjoys an independent existence. The danger of question-begging (Lewis's charge again) is particularly evident at the end of the first paragraph of §14 and it will remain throughout the Deduction. Categories "relate necessarily and 125

a priori to objects of experience because only by means of them may any sort of object of experience be thought." The only remedy for this, I have suggested, is to interpret the Deduction as diremptive in nature. At the end of the section, Kant returns to the theme with which he opened this section, empirical and transcendental deduction. Locke and Hume also are now cited as having failed to see what they had encountered in their studies, namely a priori concepts of the understanding. One cannot, says Kant, be content with the mere illustration (Kant's own term) of such notions: a proof, a deduction must be provided. Kant presents in a few lines a shrewdly critical account of both the great empiricists. Locke, he says, attempted to derive the very concepts which Kant is about to expound from experience, but he failed, or as Kant says, proceeded "inconsequently." Such notions simply involve what lies beyond experience: it is idle to seek their grounds there. Hume, Kant thinks, saw or was on the verge of seeing that these a priori notions, notably causality, "had to have an a priori origin," that is, that they obviously were of a different stripe from empirical ideas. He found that event and cause had no necessary or logical connection but nevertheless had a prima facie "necessary connection" with one another in experience, in the object (_im Gegenstände) . It did not occur to him to seek the source of this very experience in the understanding itself, to make the understanding itself, the "author" of experience. Instead he turned toward a psychological description of the experience and, Kant concedes, not only carried this task successfully to its conclusion but saw more clearly than any one else that the necessity of the connection in question could never be learned from experience, that one could never, as a matter of custom, extend what one had learned from past experience into the future. Both Locke and Hume, Kant says, failed to see that in fact we do have a priori knowledge in mathematics and in the general science of nature and their empirical derivation of the concepts in question wholly fails to account for this fact, a point also made clear by Leibniz. Hume is of course occasionally of a mind to circumvent this result by simply denying that there is any such knowledge; he was not altogether abhorrent of scepticism regarding man's vaunted scientific knowledge. 126

Kant on the other hand seems to have considered such a way out as little short of folly. we must remember that Kant unlike Hume, was essentially a scientist before he was anything else, even before he was a philosopher. His contributions to science were significant and he thought of it always in enthusiastic, optimistic terms. The purpose of the Critique is to" explain how knowledge is possible: its reality is not brought into question. Kant in the last paragraph but one of this section (as amended in B) is scarcely unfair to Hume in saying that he fell into scepticism. But his characterization of the consequences of Locke's views as Schwärmerei• emotional extravagance, might well have grieved both Locke and Hume. They thought of themselves as anything but romantic philosophic adventurers, but far more intemperate things have been said of the British Empiricists since Kant sought to pinpoint the source of their philosophic failures. In the last paragraph Kant has in effect given a general definition of the categories: they are concepts of an object in general (Begriffe eines Gegenstandes überhaupt) of objectivity as such. This clarification is repeated in the Deduction: the pure concept of the transcendental object provides that which alone gives our concepts relation "to an obi ect. that is• objective reality." The purpose of the Analytic as a whole is to show us what concepts and principles must enter into or be in some manner involved in experience if this is to be not only a play of sensations but an account (such as culminates in natural science) of a world objected to its observers, shared by them in common, and intelligible to them through concepts of particular things and processes. Kant alludes briefly to the way in which the concept of substance, as one of the categories, works to contribute one aspect of objectivity. It is regrettable that Kant did not devote more time to the analysis and definition of the particular categories, even though one may respect the reasons he specifically gave for not doing so in the Critique.

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Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding (Edition A) Section 2 On the A Priori Grounds of the Possibility of Experience We have now reached what is generally acknowledged to be a climactic portion of the Critique. Its structure and interpretation have been a source of ceaseless controversy. Kemp Smith's Commentary was completed in 1918 and carried on the study of the text under considerable influence from others. The result was termed the "patchwork theory" of the Critique by Professor H.J. Paton. (I believe it was he that coined this characterization in an address to the Aristotelian Society in 1930, "Is the Transcendental Deduction a Patchwork?") Paton of course rejected the patchwork theory. On the whole, I am going to follow his example, but a brief discussion of the matter is in order. Only a very lengthy discussion could hope to deal with all of the issues raised by these authors. For our purposes we need to refer only to the main outlines of the approaches of Kemp Smith and Adickes.20 Each of them believes that an alternative division is preferable to Kant's, or at least that their researches dictate a division that reflects better the order and manner of composition and thus its content. A division such as that of Kemp Smith, based upon Vaihinger's, may have the virtue of putting like with like, as indeed it does, but the question with this and any other such division is whether it is in any sense to be preferred to Kant's, whether it is to be substituted for it, whether it makes the Gedankengang any more convincing than the order in which Kant left it. It is certainly possible, in principle, by some such method as that of these able scholars and philosophers to hope to clear up the course of an author's thought by working over notes, manuscripts, and letters. In this case, however, there is very little of this sort to rely upon and the main direction of the proposed revisions is derived from "internal evidence." But what does this mean? It means that the author's argument is being 129

understood in a certain way and is being revised in certain ways. We are no longer learning that, for example, something may have been written earlier and forgotten later. We are being offered really quite a new argument, that of the scholars and not of Kant, when we are told that logically it proceeds from (let us say) C to D to A to B, when Kant has proceeded from A to B to C to D. I think this is defensible only if one is clearly saying, in order for anyone in general to deduce the categories he must proceed in the order C D A B; Kant has not done so and his effort fails. This is straightforward, and may be correct. It is relevant to what is after all the great issue of how we can explain to ourselves the concepts here designated as categories. All this is true. But it is irrelevant to the Critique. The question here is, what is Kant's procedure in the argument and does it succeed or fail? Kant's argument, I am saying, must be allowed to stand or fall as it is and in the order in which it J is written. He presented it so and staked what was, "j in 1781, already a considerable philosophical repu.j tation upon it. We are free to call it a failure, a mess, or a botch, but we are not free to construct , some other argument and attribute it to him. We may ' construct an argument and say, if Kant had argued so he would have succeeded in deducing the categories. j; This is all we may do, in fairness to him and in i loyalty to the philosophical ideal of the truth. It ! is in this spirit that we must approach the difficult . questions of the Critique• We must hold an author j responsible for what he said and how he said it. Kant expected to be judged in this manner. Had he • expected he would be judged as his modern critics have judged him, he would have made available not ; only a few lose Blätter but every Zettel too. ;

We now begin the exposition of that part of the Deduction which is omitted in B. I am strongly inclined, in this as in other comparable places in the Critique, to prefer the formulation in A to that in B. The want of order in the exposition in A is really not remedied in B and new topics are there introduced which are not altogether necessary to what Kant prescribes as needed in a deduction. The present introductory paragraphs continue on directly from the preliminary exposition in §14 of the need of the 130

deduction. It is quite possible that the critics are right in thinking that the last paragraph of §14 may relate to the opening of Section 3 below, judging from the content. Yet, it may be placed here quite properly because Kant wishes to sound an early note regarding the role that each of the faculties plays in the development of experience. The topic he has been considering in §14 and which he continues to discuss in the present section is that of possible experience and the a priori conditions of the possibility of experience. Even if the Critique were a mosaic it is yet possible, making allowances for hasty formulations, inadequate transitions, and lapsus memoriae to find the central reason in each element why it is placed where it is. It is true that the exact division of synopsis through sense, synthesis in imagination and unity through apperception is not followed in the exposition of the ensuing subsections, but it is not seriously in conflict with them. Besides, in the paragraph next preceding "Preliminary Reminder" he takes a moment to indicate roughly the connection between the earlier and the later form of threefold synthesis. Moreover, while the earlier division is reaffirmed, as the critics note, at the beginning of Section 3, this need not at all mean that it is somehow a displaced part of 3. It means merely that Kant, by strategic repetition is concerned to tie together a complex subject matter. Kant is here saying that pure concepts of the understanding must be presupposed if there is to be experience not only in the narrow sense of intuitions coming (and going) before our attention (E-j ) but experience in the broad sense as continuant entities that enter into processes and systems of connection with one another (E2) -- a basic formula that appears and reappears many times here and elsewhere in the Critique. But how can a priori concepts (and the emphasis is upon a priori) relate to objects? Are they not removed from them altogether by their very nature? The answer is, these particular concepts, the categories, relate to them by virtue of the fact that they spell out for us what it is for anything to be an experience. There might be other concepts, logical concepts, for example, which had no such office. And we can, of course, spin out many other concepts without reference to experience. We must now confine our attention to just these categorial concepts 131

and see how they do make experience possible. This is to ask just what the structure of experience is, what enters into it. We are invited to proceed to unpack experience. As Kant has pointed out in the Preface (to A ) , the decisive thing is to see that the categories make experience possible. Experience, to put it into the form of a mild paradox, is not made possible by mere experience. The solution to the paradox is immediately apparent: what we mean by experience in the sense of learning from it, applying, projecting, predicting it, and so forth, is not the mere blips, flashes, and pricks of sensation: it involves elements fetched from some other source altogether. What Kant now proposes to do is not only to spell out the significance of the proposition that experience presupposes certain pure concepts and principles I but also to explore the workings of all the faculties of mind (and body in a sense) that enter into the construction of experience. The first of these is essentially the so-called objective deduction, the second the subjective deduction of the categories. The first is all-important. The second he hopes will increase our understanding. unfortunately, the two are mingled, if not confused, with almost, one may say, untold philosophical suffering. An effort must, therefore, be made to keep them distinct. They are not, of course, unrelated: in fact, the most important aspect of the whole analytic of concepts is the point at which the weld between the two is made. We shall draw particular attention to this. Kant turns first to the subjective deduction, the exposition of the role of the cognitive faculties in the construction of experience. preliminary Reminder We shall now proceed to examine the Deduction in the order in which Kant presents it and deliberately avoid the use of hypotheses about order and manner of composition so far as possible. We will be taking Kant's word that this, the deduction as presented, is the deduction. In the present paragraph he gives us to understand that the principal statement of the deduction is to be given in Section 3 following. The subsections immediately preceding 3 are meant only to "prepare the reader." 132

In another context, it would be an interesting question to ask exactly what deduction is. We shall confine ourselves to saying that a necessary condition for a deduction "to occur" is that someone clearly .understands certain logical and other connections •I among certain facts or propositions, just as a certain Jauditory discrimination of such things as melodic I lines, harmonic contexts, and cadences is a necessary !condition for a "performance" of a symphony. What will "count toward (if not, count as) failure in the deduction will be want of intelligibility in what is being said (where we can truly regard this as Kant's fault), factual error, incompatibility with what is, or was even in his day, known to be a truth of fact or of theory, logical error, and so on. Many such errors will, of course, more effectively dispose of the deduction than will avoidance of them prove it to have succeeded. Although Kant proudly claims that no one has previously even undertaken such an enterprise as the deduction of the categories, let alone succeeded in it, we seriously misunderstand what he is doing if we do not make an effort to see how he is trying to succeed at precisely that task at which others have worked, notably Locke and Hume. As we have seen in §13, he is taking these two men to task for failure. But this charge would be irrelevant unless they had been engaged at the same task. If Locke, let us say, is undertaking a "physiology (i.e. psychology) of the understanding" (A ix), or if Hume succeeds in producing an accurate description of the psychology of our acts of causal inferring, then failure can scarcely be ascribed to them by Kant unless they think themselves to be at the same time undertaking to deduce the pure concepts of the understanding, though under a different name, of course. But it is obvious that Locke is endeavoring to trace the workings of those very ideas that Kant considers in the Transcendental Logic, and even if we confine ourselves to Hume's seven types of relations we are dealing with exactly the same ideas that Kant is concerned with. From Kant's standpoint they are not raising the right questions about such ideas, with the result that at most they merely contribute something to the "empirical deduction" of such ideas (which we have discussed earlier). He thinks they have misconceived the problem and offered the wrong solution, because they did not account for the necessity, strict universality, and indispensability of certain ideas and principles. 133

The aim of the Deduction is to show the ground of this necessity, not simply as in Hume's main account, why a feeling of necessity attaches to certain beliefs. Kant thinks that if we make inferences about matters of fact, if we claim to have knowledge about the past and the future, about the remote as well as the accessible, if we claim to be able to learn from experience, then speaking generally, there is a certain necessity in knowledge. No empiriogenetic account will tell us what it is. A new way must be found. This is what the Deduction is about, and this it is what Kant can claim some originality in conceiving and devising. The next question, then, is where and how this necessity actually manifests itself. It is astonishing how little understanding there is of this matter. One critic after another professes not to understand what Kant meant by the necessity he thought he found, for example, in synthetic a priori propositions. Profound puzzlement is expressed because some sort of necessity other than analytic is being projected,and all his claims to finding any element of necessity in experience are rather summarily dismissed. We must first see in general what the source of necessity is. (A much more specific source of it will come to light in the third subsection below.) In the first place we must try to recapture a feeling for the view of science and of knowledge that prevailed from early times down to the end of the eighteenth century. When Hume said something "amounts to knowledge," he had in mind that which was certain and demonstrable. Since he formulated no precise view of the analytic-synthetic distinction, nor perhaps even a clear equivalent of it, we cannot say that he thought propositions that were known and demonstrable were analytic. Of course, he offers many examples of what w£ recognize as analytic propositions. It is very likely that Hume would have arisen from his dogmatic slumbers exactly like Kant if someone had convinced him of the notion that in what he regarded as known or demonstrable propositions the predicate was simply contained in the subject. For it would certainly have occurred to him that on this interpretation they might all be truistic, trivial, or even absurd, as he often characterizes analytic sentences, and that surely knowledge must be something more or other than this. The neat divisions of thought would certainly hereby be at least upset even if not in as great an upheaval as in the case of Kant after his 134

J

discovery of the synthetic a priori. Hume makes his views on such matters explicit in his tripartite distinction between knowledge, proof, and probability (Treatise, I-III-XI). One should observe the accord for certain practical purposes between this and Kant's division: 1. 2. 3.

Knowledge Proof Probability

4. 5. 6.

Analytic A Priori Synthetic A Priori Synthetic A Posteriori

As we have seen, 1 is evidently covered by 4, even if Hume was not clearly aware of this. Similarly 3 is covered by 6. 2 and 3 are distinguished by Hume by the fact that a matter may be said to be proved if no contrary instances are known. Propositions are probable depending upon the ratio of the favorable to the total or possible cases. 2 therefore accords approximately at least with Kant's empirical universality, though probably not with his strict universality (see Introduction, B4). The synthetic a priori proposition unlike 2 is said to be strictly universal. But classifications 2 and 5 might have the same extension . It should be noted, also, that no one prior to the nineteenth century would be inclined to use the term knowledge in such a weak sense as it now is, where any bit and scrap of information is deemed to be knowledge. Earlier ages were much more circumspect and rigorous in this regard, and by comparison with former conventions the term 'knowledge' (perhaps equivalents in other languages too) is now considerably corrupted. It is therefore not in the least surprising or anomalous or contrary to usage that Kant should have regarded knowledge in terms of strict universality. We must remember that he was a Wolffian philosopher and scientist for years before he was the author of the "Criticistic" philosophy. We may therefore take a glance at an example of scientific explanation as expounded in Christian Wolff's Cosmologia. Suppose we inquire into the phenomenon of the seasons. Virtually all races and peoples can describe for us the differences of the seasons: the changes of temperature, of the elevation of the sun, of the growth and demise of vegetation, and so on. Peoples had ascribed these phenomena to the birth and death of gods 135

and to other such causes. But with the grasp of the motion of individual bodies in the solar system, particularly sun, moon, and earth, and the dawn of understanding on many other subjects the explanation that satisfied all the relevant criteria could at last be given. The revolution of the earth on its axis, its orbit about the sun, the inclination of the axis exposing now one, now another hemisphere to the more direct radiation of the sun, and other factors proved to be the invariable determinants of seasonal change. As the young student learns one after another of these facts and begins to put them together he will be able to tell himself why the seasons are not only so, but under these conditions, why they must be so: cannot be otherwise. With this in order he can now proceed to the explanation of many other cyclic phenomena.

This, says Wolff, is a true explanation. It is true "philosophical knowledge" as distinct from the two other genera of it, mathematical and historical '. \ knowledge. It is a simple model of a scientific or | philosophical explanation such as Kant himself helped '••'( devise in his theory of the origin of the earth. ;' He dealt with such theories day in and out as a teachej: ofscience. : Kant is a man who respects both common sense and ••;; the hard-won insights of scientists and mathematicians, but not the noisome doubts of "philosophical" sceptics. His most deeply held tenet is this: science and mathematics are the paradigm of knowledge; they are. as a whole the explicandum to which philosophy must devote the largest part of its effort; philosophical thought which has the sceptical consequence that science and knowledge may ever elude us is inherently in error. After the first Critique Kant never veered from this faith. What is surprising is that it is not Kant the transcendental idealist but Hume the empiricist who doubts that we shall ever arrive at what truly "amounts to knowledge" in science. Hume in the end has the academic mind, not Kant. The issue is now formulated so: Is it conceivable that one can devise the whole texture of scientific explanation beginning and ending with sensation, with propositions based wholly upon Anschauung? No. In the Prolegomena the issue is put flatly so: what science asserts about the universe is not typified in 136

intuitive or sensate "stenographs" such as, "Here now warm; there now bright," but in full causal assertions such as, "The sun warms the stone," and ever more j complex formulations of fact and theory. Philosophy now steps in to ask what precisely is the difference between these two? and, how do we get from the first to the second? We do not, like the"epistemological atomists" Locke and Hume proceed in the futile hope that we can build up directly from the first toward the second. Kant's considered procedure proceeds more nearly from the second to the first. We "take apart" a paradigm of scientific fact or theory like a watch: we try to see what must be so if it is so. A belated effect of this can be seen in the views of later positivists who thought Hume's program could succeed only if it was dismantled and reorganized with specific attention to language and its analysis. It is the use of the idea of necessity in the context of science that now comes to light and that Kant now undertakes to investigate. Once we see what he thought this explicandum to be we shall be well on our way to making sense of the arduous Deduction ahead. We may now turn to this matter briefly. Some of the most important things have already been said about necessity in the Introduction. Others will appear as we proceed through the Analytic. We must first draw attention to what Kant says about strict universality at B4. Although at this point he has not yet introduced the synthetic a priori judgment he is already expounding a notion which will enter as a definiens into his exposition of this judgment, that is, a rule, Regel. It is this that we must understand in the very notion of synthetic a priori propositions such as any of the Principles. But what is a rule? It is that which permits no exception to itself: dass gar keine Ausnahme als möglich verstattet. We may now ask whether a rule is anything more than a kind of imperative? It remains to be seen how different "imperatives" like this are from "shut the door." What Kant means to say about the causal principle, for example, is that come what may, regardless of any number of adverse cases of apparent acausality or contracausality, we will never under any circumstances give it up. An utterance (to use as 137

neutral a term as possible) which is held to in this manner is evidently of a singular character. Let us quickly review some of the possible views of its structure. First, we may ask whether it is in fact an imperative. Imperatives are to be accepted or not. fc Before we can accept or reject a "causal imperative" !: we must first formulate it as one. I suggest the .I following as consistent with Kant: Never accept as final a failure in seeking a conditioning cause of any event. (I will not concern myself with the latter day view that 'cause' is a relevant form of speech only in reference to untoward or anomalous events.) Can we turn aside such an imperative? If Kant had offered this formulation his answer would be, not if you hope to advance knowledge or to explain how we have achieved the knowledge we have. It is true that unlike an analytic a priori proposition such an imperative manifests no "cognitive authority" on the face of it. But Kant does not expect that it will. He does not offer the causal principle, as self-evident: a "deduction" of it is necessary and is formulated. We can see that although the interpretation of the principle as an imperative is not following a very adequate model, it does bring out something of what is singular in it. What we expect to gain from this interpretation must, of course, rest on the leverage implicit in "if you expect to advance knowledge or science." The question would be, can we do without the principle to advance it? Of course, this is a reasonable question. Again, we may decide upon a milder form of the imperative, couched not in terms of "thou shalt" but "let us:" a resolution or some other "grammatical constant" like this. The result would resemble the foregoing: we must be prepared to assess the rewards and penalties of following the resolution, or not. Third, we may think of the principle in more formal terms, yet still similar to the foregoing, as a postulate. In Schlick's well-known essay on causality in Naturwissenschaften,^1 this possibility is surveyed, among others. The question of why the principle, or the rule, as Kant says, is to be followed is said to come down to appropriateness and inappropriateness. Kant could not have foreseen that quantum physics would one day teach us "that the principle is bad, useless, impracticable within the limits precisely laid down by the principle of 138

indeterminacy." The question whether, in fact, the causal principle has suffered as grievously as Schlick supposes is one that we cannot undertake to answer here. The point is only that this is still another way of interpreting it and of coming to terms with its singularity and indispensability. The possible pragmatistic implications of this (third) interpretation which Schlick goes on to raise need be no surprise to us. The interpretation of the principle which Kant gives as he comes towards the end of the Critique show that he was fairly explicitly moving toward pragmatism, if not toward a kind of fictionalist interpretation. Following the principle, Kant is saying, is justified because if you do you will succeed in arriving at true or verifiable laws or generalizations. All of this we must reserve for later consideration. But it is of the utmost necessity that we keep it in mind in the meantime so as to forestall objections to the idea of the synthetic a priori on rather formal or formalistic grounds. Kant's views on this subject are not confined to the Introduction or even to the Transcendental Analytic, but extend throughout the Critique. The issue is ostensibly the synthetic a priori but the struggle is over the nature of the causal principle (and other such principles). We must now confine our interpretation of its structure to the indicative or assertoric mood: it is instructive to see how far Kant goes towards imperative, resolutive, postulative, or fictive interpretation. The point, then, is to keep firmly in mind Kant's conviction of the singular nature of the principles in question, their presumptive certainty, their indispensability to the advance of science , and their need for a proof, defense, or "deduction." With this we are at last prepared to consider this deduction itself. 1.

Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition

In order to articulate the system of human knowledge, Kant undertakes to begin at the foundations. Although the "structuralistic" standpoint of Locke and Hume (especially the latter) is not so emphatically evident, the very term 'synthesis' with which Kant begins involves the notion of structuring 139

complexes from simpler, or even simplest, elements. These elements like the more complex structures, are called representations.22 At least at some hypothetical "micro-level" we must suppose that there are simple elements. "Each representation insofar as it is contained in a single moment can be nothing but absolute unity." Of course we< dö not normally, if ever, encounter such atomic representations in experience, but Kant firmly holds to the maxim that an aggregate must consist of (what may be treated as) simple parts, that a process of structuring (whether overt or implicit) must intervene, and that analysis can only follow previous synthesis. We must first pause over the materials and mechanism of synthesis or structuring. It is the same process as Locke and Hume envisaged as taking us from simple ideas or impressions to complex ideas or impressions. The plain-spoken Locke sometimes refers to it as "bundling." The bundles are modes (simple and complex), substances, and relations. Kant is working over the same territory. But what is largely overlooked by all three is first the relative nonoccurrence, the want of availability, of the individual elements which enter into the structure, and second, the unob- I served if not indeed unobservable character of the I process of structuring. Thus, we do not consciously | witness the constructing of such complex representa; tions as concepts, or witness their coming into being, ;. except perhaps on the rarest occasions at higher reaches of science; nor do we apprehend the bits that are being processed into wholes. Yet Kant firmly believes this must be allowed for. How else can we obtain aggregates unless the components are "first run through and held together"? We must raise these disturbing questions both here and in the further parts of the theory of the categories. These functors of synthesis are pictured as doing a certain work, but in fact we can never be aware of the functioning process. It is all done behind the scenes. We can only regard it as implicit so long as we adhere to the maxim that concepts are complexes and complexes are aggregates consisting of simples. It should be said at once that there is an alternative to what Locke, Hume, and Kant are doing in the Gestaltist analysis of experience. Although the atomist analysis seemed so self-evident to them, it is really indefensible. Either the act or process of structuring is overt or it is implicit. If it is 140

implicit, it rests on certain shaky assumptions, and it is by definition inconfirmable or unobservable. If it is presented as overt, it is plainly false that we witness any such things in process of construction. Like many other philosophical theses, the doctrine therefore runs the danger of being either inconfirmable or false. To make this system work in any manner, we need to make even more assumptions. We must now add an agent to the process of structuring. Locke overlooked this, Hume denied it. Only Kant clearly provides for it. Having the agent we need also the locale in which all this transpires, a subconscious, subterranean area in which some Vulcan's hammer and anvil are busy. The idea of an agent is a truly serious problem, and we will accord it every respect and in the end virtually concede it; the rest is more problematic. For the moment we shall merely say that the structuring process Kant describes calls for a paradigmatic self as agent, something, someone, that is not to be identified as the familiar you or I and yet in some way a psychically and intellectually active person. This self (we shall call it the Self until we come to its more proper identification) is what is "doing" all the things in the described acts of synthesis. We should also note another assumption. If we ask how the Self can move and lay about itself in such a free or spontaneous fashion we must remember that Kant holds we are dealing only with representations, ultimately with appearances, not with things themselves which might, of course, have ways of their own and go their own ways. Kant is presenting a kind of "logischer Aufbau der Welt." It is a world he thinks we can structure as we wish (if the paradigmatic self were not in principle devoid of wishes and every other affect). These then are the presumptions that enter into Kantian synthesis. We may now recount the unfolding of synthesis at its first level. To do so we must begin with a certain "aboriginal" example of synthesis. As we have seen, Kant says that when we have a complex before us, its parts must have been run through in time (by the Self) and held together. Such a complex he calls das Mannigfaltige which is simply the manyfold, a complex, a multiplicity. The most basic or aboriginal synthesis of a complex or manifold is one in which we simply keep the parts together in one 141

context: we rescue each perishing "atomic" representation and maintain its life alongside that of another, and another. Kant later ascribes much of the work of synthesis to imagination, as did Hume in an even more extensive way before him, and what we have here already shows the imagination at work. For what is imagining but presenting (present-ing, where "present" has more than a bit of temporal sense) us with something not present? Thus every complex in every sense-modality (for this is presumed) is a structured mosaic of parts the maintenance of each one of which must be specifically provided for, because of Kant's dogma that the Self can attend to but one thing at a time — but the speed with which it works is, of course, sheerly miraculous. It should be noted that Kant describes the synthesis ? : as going on in time, and in inner sense. Thus, he ; seeks to keep the process from sinking into a timeless abstraction. While this is praiseworthy, certain aspects of it, such as the speed at which it must be accomplished, strain credulity. (His analysis suggests an analogy with modern electronics, such as the scanning mechanism working at incredible speed in the television tube. We develop this further below.) This aboriginal synthesis is the synthesis of apprehension, and every act and object of ordinary Anschauung involves such a synthesis, a complex series of operations behind the scenes. Kant adds at the end of this subsection that the same kind of synthesis must be exercised in reference to a priori representations. This is a puzzling addendum (a similar remark is added at the end of subsection 2, regarding another order of synthesis). Kant does not make perfectly clear at this point whether he means that space and time themselves or merely figures in space, for example, triangles, circles and the many other more complex forms we encounter involve this aboriginal synthesis. Possibly, he may be thinking of the "empirical deduction," the psychological explanation of how we come to possess these forms. The propriety of such an inquiry has just been acknowledged in §13 so long as it is not presented _in. place of a transcendental deduction. It is interesting to recall that while in the Aesthetic space is said to be an infinite given (gegeben) magnitude, infinites are regarded in the solution to the antinomies as rather prescribed-as-a-task or to-begiven (aufgegeben). If the latter is what is intended 142

here we see that space and time are syntheses dandae (or construendae) rather than datae. "The synthesis of the manifold parts of space through which we apprehend it is successive and thus takes place in time and constitutes (enthält) a series", A412/B439. There is a missing guest at this banquet, and we must call him to mind before his absence (or presence) is even more insistently felt in the next synthesis: his name is 'Memory'. As soon as we bring memory to mind we see more plainly that Kant is undertaking a review of all the faculties that enter into knowledge. In such a review, how can we neglect memory? The point is that Kant is in effect giving us the explicans of memory, or at least a bit of it, while never mentioning the explicandum by name. It is apparent that the first step in this, shall we say, logischer (sometimes psychologischer) Aufbau must be the rescue of perishing impressions, the very thing Hume so sorely needed and never provided for. Thus Kant is providing that every least manifold or complex must involve a rescue, for in synthesis the Self can scan but one bit at a time, though apparently with incredible agility and speed. Theory is, of course, far stranger than fact.

2.

Synthesis of Reproduction in Imagination

Analogy and imagery may enable us to get a clearer idea of the point and purpose of Kant's "analysis of synthesis." I shall apply it to what we have just considered and then extend it to the synthesis in the present section. Suppose that a directed beam of light sweeps through 180° of a scene in front of us that is otherwise dark. A Series of about a halfdozen snapshots of the scene from #1 at the left to #6 at the right would serve the same purpose. As we sweep the scene, lighted patches replace one another. The torch or source of light remembers nothing. When #2 comes, #1 has perished irrevocably, and so on through the series. If this were our plight in the cognitive survey of the world, we would never have risen to our present level of intelligence. Perhaps, in some degree, subhuman species "think" like this. In order to see the tree we must, in Kant's atomistic system, "sweep" it from end to end and side to side and preserve its "parts" as we go. A tree is an aggregate. But for it to be an aggregate it must have been aggregated. This is the first step, the 143

aboriginal synthesis. We have already adverted to the television picture tube in which an image is synthesized by a rapid scanning of individual points on a surface. Since it works at great speed, a meaningful image results, although if we could hover long enough along the way none would result, just as in the motion picture film a single frame shows nothing of motion. In the situation Kant is trying to describe it is obviously difficult to develop explanations and hypotheses about hidden processes of connecting and synthesizing which we cannot remember carrying on or being involved in. We do not directly witness any of them nor can we even identify ourselves with the Self that is involved in the synthesizing activities. Kant is, however, deeply convinced that only this piecemeal, atomistic account is faithful to the facts. Let us help this account along as much as we can instead of rejecting it as meaningless and impossible. It is at worst really only rather incredible, but not otherwise absurd. Suppose we are attending a play in the theater. From where we sit everything is highly organized. The curtain goes up or down at fixed moments, and the I actors are already beginning their scenes as the cur- | tain goes up. An interesting scene opens up before ;, us, an interior, a city street, a park. The scene F runs on in an apparently foreordained manner, unless f something very novel is being attempted. All the work, I in any event, has already been done for us, for our I { pleasure or edification. We are enjoying the end j product without a glance at the process of production. But a moment's reflection reminds us that every last : detail has had to be put into place by someone, the director, the prop mistress, the stage hands, and so on. Costumes have been sewed and pinned, cheeks and lips rouged, tables laid, and so on. This is exactly where we are with the Kantian synthesis. What we see from where we sit is what Kant calls experience (E 2 ). We can only have theories about what has gone on behind the scenes, we can never go backstage to see for ourselves. But as Kant thinks, it stands to reason that every bit of our complex experience has been "put" there in some manner a piece at a time, and put there by "someone." The job of explaining all this, the deduction, is one of 144

analysis: we take the presented drama of experience apart piece by piece. In this way we discover "how experience is possible." The play we see is the explicandum; the play which we tell ourselves the company is producing, or has produced, piece by piece, word by word, is the explicans. With this image in mind, we can now observe the scene even more closely to refine our observations and to develop more reliable philosophical hypotheses of how and why the tale of experience unfolds as it does. The next ingredient of the explicans is largely already implicit in the first synthesis. We saw that even the least complex of representations, if at all complex, necessitates the maintenance of being of the components. We must now take the further step, Kant thinks, to revive impressions if they have perished. But how can this be done? What mechanism will restore them, and what can assure us that later representations are identical with earlier? In this subsection, the first of these questions is answered; the other question is taken up in the next. The second synthesis is concerned with the reappearance of representations. The question is fortunately not how reappearance is possible (even now this has not been explained) but rather what determines what reappears and what is left behind. Kant, like his contemporaries, attributes this to association. He does not go into the details of the particular mechanisms of association but he could have adopted at least some of Hume's views of the matter: ideas tend to call up one another if they are associated by resemblance, contiguity in time or space, and perhaps cause and effect. (There might also be other such bonds: Hume's contrariety, for example, might be a bond of association.) Regularities or concomitances are readily enough found to occur in experience. Examples abound since anything we have attached a name to is generally a system of fairly invariant associated properties. Remoter associations are often the most interesting. The mining prospector who turns up a bit of ore of a certain shade of red and who knows his trade thoroughly instantly thinks of cinnabar and its heaviness and potential yield of mercury and sulfur, and other properties. He has developed a synthesis, an association of certain properties which another person, 145

unschooled in geology, has no notion of, and since he knows what he is looking for or what kind of thing he is likely to find and not to find,he makes fine discriminations. So also, all of us have at our command systems of syntheses that enable us to recognize things. But before they can be recognized patterns of synthesis must be developed, based reproductively on the past and now brought to mind by the imagination. We must try to confine this synthesis to the psychological level, rather than extend it to the understanding of concepts, for this is taken up in 3. (Kant has himself introduced the matter of regularity.) We are to deal here with the reproductive imagination, where representations recur because they are associated by one or more of the bonds of association. It is a powerful and yet a very primitive mental mechanism. Although efforts have been made to "reduce" thought to this, it must in the end be distinguished from thought, as Kant himself suggests. Thought is more than mere conditioning. We are not in lockstep with past experience, our every exploration in thought channeled along the grooves of association. This we may suppose is the character of the "thought" of simpler animal beings than ourselves. Far from being determined in such a reproductive lockstep we can exercise a choice and patterning of thought by means of artfully produced concepts: these depend on what Kant calls the productive imagination -- but this is to get ahead of the story. Kant also points out that although nature seems to repeat itself in endless regularities we are here concerned with what we make of all the raw material of experience: it is we, at least we as paradigmatic selves, that make our own selections, and build up the world of appearances around us. No doubt we have to be content with a good many orderings of the world because of the language we talk with its limitless mass of concepts that represent syntheses the race and tribe and not we ourselves have worked out. Language reflects, in any event, a world of appearances not of things themselves: we (often the tribal "we") have hammered and bent our concepts in a way that often makes one tribe misunderstand another altogether. But we can take or leave them just as we can the concomitances nature offers. Association is, of course, a sort of force of nature, but it is of little significance unless we go on to make use of it by conceptual means of our own devising. 146

There are some puzzles in the subsection that may be clarified as we proceed. What Kant seems to wish to show us in this section is how association contributes to the Aufbau of the world of Erscheinungen, appearances. In the first synthesis, we learn that perishing impressions or representations must be saved, in the second we learn something of how representations may turn up from the past, and particularly how their cohesion originates. But this still would not explain experience fully. There is more that must be built into our explicans to enable it to reflect the full explicandum of experience. We are far from having accounted for all the remarkable events on the "stage." If we are to be able to make sense of them, we must not only tie the data of experience together by association — and we must remember that under suitable circumstances anything can be rather "glutinously" associated with anything else -- but we must also see what unites the associated data into persons, places, processes, things. This takes us immediately to the next topic.

3.

Synthesis of Recognition in the Concept

With the present section, we reach the most important stage of the deduction. Since it is also an exposition of great difficulty, much ink has been spilled over its meaning locally in the Critique and also in the history of thought. This behooves us to treat our opinions about it in a restrained and tentative fashion. I shall continue with the plan of according Kant's stated organization priority so far as possible, on the simple ground that whatever forgetfulness may have attacked him now and then,he could scarcely have conceived the Critique without giving some thought to whether the presented form of it expressed his argument adequately. At the same time some suggestions about the order and connection of materials in this and following sections will be accorded attention. I do not believe they alter the fundamental argument, and they may help us to follow it. In the present section, we must make the idea of concept central, even as Kant does in the title. In order to rise above the problems of reference we shall refer to the eleven paragraphs of the section by 147

number. (The paragraph break beginning, "Now also, we are, etc." in Kemp Smith's translation, page 137, is not present in the original.) In subsection 2 we arrived at the result that entities reappear, are reproduced. But mere intuition cannot tell us this. When I return to light patch #1 after going on to #2 and #3, I must recognize it as #1 if it is to have been reproduced. Thus reproduction necessarily involves recognition. What now enters into this act of recognition? I must seek to understand this if I am to understand how my world is structured. Its many-fold character is, as I see everywhere, tied together — I encounter the same things and the same kinds of things; parts fit into wholes. How is this possible? "It must have a unity which only my consciousness can supply." When I count a dozen eggs, even in the dark, I can and must in imagination remember what I am doing, must "rescue" #1 when I come to #2, exactly as with the patches of light, and so on up to #12. What is the number of these eggs so far as counting is concerned? "It is nothing but the consciousness of the unity of this synthe sis." The upshot of paragraph 1 is thus to bring out the constructed nature of the world before me, and its creator -- myself, or the paradigmatic self. Adapting a term no longer used for other purposes, we may say that the world is factured , constructed, a near synonym to Nietzsche's term fingiren, which he used for practically the same purpose in Will to Power, though not in a favorable sense.

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The first thing we must allow for in this facturing of the world is the concept. As we learned at the outset of the Metaphysical Deduction experience is conceptualized and propositionalized from top to bottom. As the very terms show, concepts imply an act of consciousness to grasp or hold together (zusammennehmen) the representations that come before us (begreifen and concipere). Of course, we are aware only of the outcome of assembling the bundles or parcels rather than the actus of assembling. Kant now digresses for some paragraphs in order to explore what is meant by 'object'. This digression runs from paragraph 3 through 6. He then resumes discussing the role of consciousness in the facture of the object. We shall follow the digression with 148

this in mind. Part of what the digression in the end accomplishes is to ask and to answer the question whether indeed this process of facturing must be posited in order to account for the organized thing, Gegenstand, that lies before us. Why, the question may run, why make such a mystery of what is there before our eyes? The object is organized by itself and is it anything more than obscurantism to try to make something complex out of such an obvious fact? Such an approach, Kant would say, is that of philosophically lazy "empiricists" who are content with an "empirical deduction." Nothing is that easy, Kant thinks. Nor can we be content to look to the notion of object of "common sense," for this we find to be virtually nothing at all. What does common sense understand by the object that corresponds to, what is the "accusative" of, awareness? "A mere something, a cipher, an X." Even things in themselves are powerless to produce the ensuing result. We cannot be content with the naive explanation of how the object is* factured or organized for the reason that there is an element of necessity in it. It is a basic Kantian tenet that no such element can be accounted for by attributing it to the receptive (as against spontaneous) powers of the mind. Kant now delivers a master stroke that combines the rather diverse set of notions object-conceptnecessity. But how is this done? The answer is elusive, but once we hit upon it we see that it does the job and answers the question. In fact, we have already had a hint of it in the all-important opening pages of the metaphysical deduction. (A67/B92 ff.) How can one impute necessity to a mere object and what would be the purpose of it anyway? Kant's point now develops out of what he has been saying all along, that experience is judgment: having experience of an object is not just having one's sensibility rubbed or pricked a bit in a certain way -- even a snail has that much awareness. Experience is seeing and hearing things as such and such. In effect Kant is saying that we never cease judging, that words never fail us. It is our ceaseless application of concepts in judgments to our awarenesses that introduces necessity. We have explained this earlier and may now repeat the essentials. 149

Our development of concepts is a proceeding that Kant characterizes as one of literally laying hold of, "gripping" together (begreifen, so also con-cipere) the more elementary representations of our experience. Since the species of organic beings are stable, the development of concepts of such species and of names for them awaits only our becoming aware of the steady recurrence of their distinct assortments of traits. Outside the organic realm, the assembling of traits may range from stability as great as that found in the organic realm to comparatively total arbitrariness. In neither case however, would Kant be tempted to any sort of logical "realism", Platonic or other. Concepts are instruments artfully devised to suit our purposes, not to conform to transcendent models. Even concepts that are based on no natural recurrences or altogether contrary to them may have their uses. Having devised the concept, we (that is, our paradigmatic selves) have in effect stipulated what traits must be present if a representation is to be designated by the concept. This is the element of necessity in the situation. Once I recognize (and we must recall that recognition is the topic of the third synthesis) a representation as a so and so I have by the same token decided that the representation has the requisite, the necessary defining traits. The foregoing sets forth two of the three principle pillars of the "objective deduction": concept and necessity. The third, object, is now completely intelligible from the first two. Knowledge, Kant holds, is possible only if there are objective and communicable representations — not mere intuitions local to this or that center of consciousness. There is moreover something necessary in knowledge. Concepts and the use of concepts have now been shown to have such an element of necessity. Accordingly, when I express myself employing conceptual language, I am in a position to convey to all who understand, a knowledge of facts, a knowledge about objects. Only when this level is reached is there experience of a world whose reality is shareable and shared. Only through a rational being's command of concepts with which he can order his more elementary representations is there knowledge. We may now see how these theses are developed. Considering necessity somewhat further, we must not suppose that Kant thinks the parts of objects are 150

necessarily related to one another. Kant never even hints at saying that there is some spook of "necessary connexion" that pervades the world, uniting its bits and parts in time and space. He hews without fail to Hume's line that bare matters of fact may not be inferred from one another unless this is done with a clear appeal to something like the causal principle as proved in the Second Analogy. Hume, of course, just as emphatically asserts that such inferences are made and that they are "not only a true species of reasoning, but the strongest of all others" (Treatise, I-III-VII note). Kant's point is that to experience is to name, to name is to judge, and to judge is to infer. Experience is a tissue of inferences. This is what Kant means by necessity in experience. When it is put so, we see "empiricism" and "not going beyond experience," that is, beyond sense impressions or empirical intuitions, are but empty shibboleths. The result, then, is that if we are speaking of objects in a philosophically circumspect manner we must think of them in terms of the concepts by which we organize and facture them. A concept, however, is nothing but a rule setting forth the properties a thing must have to be named by a given name. Concepts are entirely of our own devising. To be sure, languages tend to preserve only those that have proved their usefulness and applicability, but we might have preserved much more useless linguistic detritus in language than in fact we have. (Mathematics is not obliged to consider whether its constructions are useful or interpretable.) In paragraph 4 the key notions are united, but one thing more is necessary. The object spoken of is the product of the facture, the concept is the device that organizes it and confers on it the kind of necessity that a concept is capable of. But there must still be something, some agent, that in some sense does this, effects the facture. Concepts, we know, do not grow on trees, but neither do they merely grow on or in animals — if they did we should long since have established true communication with them. The one thing that is needed is just that which Hume hoped to do without in his account of both personal identity and the continuance of the "external world." Kant believes there must be a consciouness that is aware of what it is doing. Otherwise there may be reproduction which is not aware that anything is reproduced, nothing that imagination has carried over from past to present -151

and this is all the same as saying there is no reproduction, nothing in fact at all. There must be a "unity of consciousness that precedes all data of intuition and in relation to which alone there can be representation of objects; this pure, original, invariant consciousness we shall now call transcendental apperception" (9). In the previous paragraph Kant has spoken with emphasis of empirical apperception• which is the structuring that underlies the object on the merely psychological level, essentially the first two syntheses -- a structuring, we repeat still another time, we share with other animal beings. But now we are no longer speaking only of conditioned responses, laws of association, and propensities to behave but of objects of experience which are articulated under rules and concepts that have been shown to be necessary. There must be a transcendental ground for all necessity (7): transcendental because anything less than this would simply be another item that entered into association. What unites or synthesizes must transcend what it unites or synthesizes. The rule maker stands behind the rules or concepts, the effect of which is to facture the object, the world of objects. Only by presupposing the numerical identity of a paradigmatic apperceiving self have we a ground on which the necessity expressed in empirical concepts rests. It is in fact one and the same as we read in one of the key sentences in the Deduction. Since we cannot attribute the unity and necessity of objects to things themselves, to some x unknown to us, "the unity which the object makes necessary (compels us to recognize) can be nothing other than the formal unity of consciousness in the synthesis of the multiplicity of representations" (5). The unity of objects is the unity of consciousness! It should be noted in passing that this is a sword that cuts both ways, or also an equation that reads both ways: for Kant, the unity and continuity of our world and the unity and continuity of apperception are one and the same, and one may be inferred from the other. Along with the present appeal to the transcendental unity one must take also Kant's proof of the existence of the external world in the Refutation of Idealism (B275 ff.): "The mere, but empirically determined consciousness of my own being 152

proves the existence of objects in space outside me." The thing-itself is mentioned several times in this exposition, but it is always, I think, spoken of consistently with what Kant has said elsewhere. In popular terms we think vaguely that ideas are veridical when they "correspond" to an object "out there." But when we examine the range of cognitive faculties and functions we see that this amounts to little more than a vague something (an X ) . The whole examination, Kant wishes to show, reveals that our true objects, the objects we speak of and have concepts for, that we have knowledge about which we can share with others, is a highly factured affair to whose fabrication or facture not only the senses and the imagination but also transcendental sources contribute. Once this entire account is completed, Kant will have shown that no significant claim of the common sense view has been denied. Kant is_ the philosopher of common sense and its stoutest defender against the twin dangers of dogmatism and scepticism. One more factor, no doubt the most important of all for Kant, remains to be introduced. We have surveyed the agent, the device, the product of synthesis. In pursuing the mechanical metaphor of construction or facture Kant needs to take account of one more thing: something one might describe as the plan or plans upon which the devices, concepts, are devised. We may think of these plans as rules for devising rules, or as Kant says pure concepts of the understanding, the categories. It is soon apparent that they are called concepts only because any abstraction may be referred to by this term. They are certainly not class or relation concepts (house, tiger, color, singing, next to). What, in fact, are they? Concepts such as those just mentioned are not simply devised out of the blue but depend upon a certain ultimate and no further analyzable way of looking at the world. That is why they are categories, "highest kinds." As we have seen, Kant has told us where, in effect, he believes he has found them, in the forms of language. But this does not really answer the question whence we have them, because forms of language are ultimately the categories themselves or else are truly empty and void forms. We may therefore pursue the categories by searching the forms, but we have yet to discover why these forms are employed and not 153

others. In a certain sense the concepts gas, temperature, pressure, volume, or zebra, striped, hoofed, or sun, moon, earth, gravitation, or matter, variant temperature, degree of incandescence and so on are possible only because we are capable of the higher abstractions thing and property, physical system, quantity, functional determinant and determinables. We have of course employed the first set of concepts long before we thought of the latter. But Kant wants to show that every intelligence, even the most pedestrian, is capable of employing the first only because the latter sets of functors are inherently characteristic of all rational beings, and that the functors are not learned or acquired as empirical intuitions may be nor in any other way. Man is the concept-maker but on what this power rests is, if not a mystery, then perhaps explainable only in such terms as Kant has resorted to in this so-called deduction of the categories. This, in any event, is what he proposes. In order to assert "roses are red, violets blue" you must command the categories thing-property or thing-state and others too. He has then in this section brought us in the last paragraph to the threshold of these concepts of how to devise concepts or rules for devising rules: thing and property, determinant and determinable, system, possibility, existence, quantity, and others. The point of the deduction is that without a command of these we could not speak in such terms as we use to convey information to one another about very humble or very complex affairs or to devise explanations of them. I think it is now apparent why one might wish that Kant had devoted more time to the particular categories without diminishing his efforts to show us why we would be other than rational beings if we had no implicit powers such as those he named in the categories and principles, for nothing might better fortify the argument for the latter than a consequent exposition of the former. 4.

Preliminary Explanation of the Possibility of the Categories as A Priori Knowledge

The present section reiterates some of the points of the preceding though in sketchier fashion. It 154

introduces the categories, though mentioning only causality specifically. Beholding the drama of our experience, we are aware of the continuity that makes it one experience, our own. 'Experiences' in the plural can denote only the discriminable perceptions in it which gain a common unity in the whole through the concepts that apply to their content, presumably as this has been worked out in subsection 3. In the second paragraph we are, however, informed that if this unity were only that of empirical concepts, we would still have something much less than experience . Without something more than this, our mass of perceptions would not amount to true objects related by general and necessary laws. It is now said that what is needed to attain this end is the categories, for these are the indispensable a priori conditions for experience from the side of thought, just as space and time are from that of intuition. Categories are given the somewhat curious general characterization, "basic concepts to think objects to appearances," Grundbegriffe, Obi ekte überhaupt zu den Erscheinungen zu denken." As he explains presently, categories transform the undetermined object of empirical intuition into the experience of an object. There is an anomaly in this. The way empirical concepts have had to be understood until now is as representations that are themselves made possible by the categories. In our phrase for characterizing the categories, "rules for making rules," the second 'rules' is the empirical judgments. Hence, on this interpretation, if experience contains empirical concepts it is <* fortiori informed by the categories. In the second paragraph of 4, however, Kant speaks as if experience could conceivably be organized by empirical concepts without the categories, as if experience came in various degrees of being "processed." In §13, we saw that he seemed to envisage the possibility that empirical intuitions might occur quite alone in experience. Here he allows empirical concepts to appear in independence of categories. But in doing so he departs from his program of presenting experience as a tissue of both concepts and intuitions, both pure and empirical. It should be apparent that the empirical concept of a cat is that of a being existing in time, that can undergo constant causal 155

alteration from within and without; thus causality and substance and other categories have already served as, shall we say, templets for it. For there to be such a representation as "the black cat" there must first be the notion of substance and attribute. Adickes suggests that the first three paragraphs constitute a distinct "deduction," the second. But in fact the following material actually completes the argument of this deduction, rather than beginning all over again as his designation "third deduction" for it implies.

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There follows the by now familiar argument that '! without the apperception by a unitary Self, there •• i would be no experience such as any rational being has but "something less even than a dream, a mere blind play of representations." Such a Self resorts to certain functors of synthesis -- causality is specifically mentioned here. It devises the notion of causality and employs it as a rule by which to unite representations in time. Once again, Kant particularly emphasizes the converse of this, that without the unity conferred by such functors of synthesis no unity of consciousness would be met with in the multiplicity of perceptions. The remainder of the subsection offers few difficulties. Kant reiterates that it is utterly futile to try to derive notions such as causality from experience. A statement to the effect that one kind of event is the cause of another introduces an element of necessity which experience, as intuition (E-|),will never manifest. When we ask for a cause for a given event we ask what must have occurred to produce this event, such that it might even have been predicted in advance if a suitable system of theories had been at command. Experience might enable us to observe a sequence of events, but this would only lead us to inquire whether there was anything more involved in the situation, whether indeed a kind of affinity was involved in the sequence. This term is, of course, simply another way of saying that there is a law. Eventually Kant will seek to show why we simply will not "give up" the guiding principle that "everything that happens, that is, begins to be, presupposes something upon which it follows by a rule" (Second Analogy, A189).

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It should be remembered that necessity as it eventually gets to be defined in the Schematism and in the Third Postulate of Empirical Thought is thought of in terms such as those employed by the Stoic logicians of antiquity: "The schema of necessity is existence of an object at all times" (A145/B184). As we have remarked before, Kant's view of necessity is free of all abstruseness. What he is seeking in causal laws is what is in the most unrestricted sense invariant. The category of necessity in turn means nothing more than that the universe, as appearance, is pervasively determined. This,then, is what is meant by the necessity of causal laws. But we must also ask the very Kantian question, how they are possible. "On my principles," says Kant, "this is readily understood. All possible appearances being representations belong to the totality of a possible self-consciousness." Such a Self must be thought to maintain a numerical identity and is apperceptive. The conditions, by nature a priori, which it prescribes are the categories. A prescription of any kind is a rule, and thus experience must be regarded as rule-governed. Since we often think of rules as by nature arbitrary, made at the pleasure of the lawgiver, we of course ask whether the principles the Critique is inquiring into are of this sort. Kant emphatically says (A113) that the laws do not rest on an empirical affinity in representations, but vice versa: "a law is a rule that must be posited." I do not think that this means more than what we will learn as a result of subsequent definitions and proofs. The possibility of laws as rules rests for Kant on the fact that we are dealing wholly with representations, with factured appearance. He finds no conceivable alternative to this, because the object of experience (E2) contains an element of necessity which can never be attributed to experience as empirical intuition (E-j). There is an inexorableness (a Zwang) to the situation. Kant might say like Luther: hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders• The problem must be solved with the materials of experience and what it presupposes: no others will be invoked. Kant is well aware of the paradoxical nature of his view of laws as rules. He presents an excellent defense of it both here and at the end of the following section, beginning with what Adickes calls the sixth deduction (middle of A125 ff.). 157

Section 3 The Relation of the Understanding to Objects in General, and the Possibility of Knowing These A Priori At the end of the "Transition to the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories" Kant ascribed the possibility of experience to three faculties: sense, imagination, and apperception (A94). In similar terms he now begins what is ostensibly the deduction of the of the categories. (All that has preceded has been presented as merely the clue to the categories, or as a preparation for the reader, A98.) In both instances Kant wishes to distinguish the empirical from the a priori employment of these faculties. We may think of these first as they may function at a level below that of rational beings: in a plausible sense representations are sensed, reproduced, and organized even at the animal level. But we cannot attribute experience to any being unless it is in command of concepts that enable it to identify and to relate representations, and to organize them into objects and processes. For this we must have not only an animate being behaving in a certain manner, but a self that recognizes, that seeks out and selects details in experience relevant to its purposes, that learns from its experiences and knows how to use the result to infer and predict the future. If we sometimes think that certain sutkhuman beings, dogs and primates, manifest extraordinary cleverness we simply affirm that in such cases there appears to be behavior that needs a little more than the laws of conditioning to explain. Or again, if human beings sometimes disappoint us with their want of intelligence it is because they have responded to cues in a mechanical or animal fashion without making selections and discriminations or applying them carefully and without anticipating outcomes and using the anticipations to determine their actions, and so on. The overriding condition for behavior that is basically informed by intelligence, as against mere [ conditioned response, is that there be an ongoing ;. Self. It is an a priori, a transcendental condition of there being any knowledge that there be identical, continuant selves to which all representations that constitute knowledge may be referred. There are no ready-mades we find like shells on the seashore:

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everything must first be fabricated, factured, or in Kant's own term, synthesized by such beings, by Selves. There are some obscurities in this deduction in which the Kantian jargon sometimes threatens to overwhelm us. We should, however, accord extra attention to Kant's brief remarks on the productive synthesis of the imagination. He emphasizes its special role in the development of knowledge and experience. We have observed (in subsection 2 of the previous section) the role of the reproductive imagination. If our imaginative powers (of present-ing what is past or absent) extended only to this we would be, as said before, in lockstep with previous representations, or with whatever after-effects they may have left behind them. No rational being, such as the subject here, confines itself to this. A rat in a maze can be conditioned to follow very complex cues. But its intelligence is still based upon the reproductive imagination, no matter how complex its discriminations are. But a person who is trying to solve a problem, even let us say, a comparatively simple problem of carpentry, plumbing, or electricity will certainly fail unless the productive imagination can develop or exhibit an array of similarities, differences, cross-connections substitutions, outside possibilities, good and poor options, assured failures, and so on, none of which the person may ever have encountered before. The pragmatic bent in Kant's theory of knowledge represented by this view of imagination, however obscured by the jargon, is quite modern and very greatly to his credit. The exposition in section 3 has so far gone over in rather condensed fashion (though without repeating) the material of subsections 1, 2, and 3 in section 2, that is to say, it has expounded again what Kant has called the Subjective Deduction. This is devoted to assessing the contributions of the faculties to our knowledge, rather than to the transcendental account of what can render our experience or knowledge objective. The categories proceed from the latter. The present version of the deduction introduces these in only a few words at A119. Whatever unity or connection there is in experience is made possible only by the Self's command of these functors of synthesis, particularly subsistents and inherents, and causes and effects.

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At about A120 the Deduction seems once more to recommence with the words, "We shall now, beginning from below with the empirical exhibit the necessary interrelation of the understanding with appearances, through the categories." The following paragraphs, to the middle of A125, if read in full recollection of the "first deduction" offer a fairly clear summary of the argument. This version of the deduction does not always conform to the letter of the preceding, but its procedure and direction are in general the same with them. Appearances, the objects of our knowledge, are the product of the structuring and synthesis of a multiplicity of elements. The principal agent of the synthesis is the imagination,which can rescue passing impressions and reinstate them to form an order or series. The reproduction of these impressions or representations must derive from something more than a mere chance association of anything with anything else. Their affinity, the ground of their association,J is given by their necessary relation to one conscious- I ness, or original apperception. They are always ;; present to some such Self, or system of apperception, : which intuitively owns them as "mine." This is ] possible only because of the unity, the one-ness of ;V this consciousness. Mein , we may say, entails ein. . j. This relation to a centre is fundamental to all per- : ception.^4 As in other deductions the imagination is presented as mediating between the other two faculties that are indispensable to experience or empirical knowledge, namely sense and understanding. Fundamental to the work of the understanding is the devising of concepts, systems of rules (concepts) developed a priori but significant only through relation to sensible intuition. The imagination can perform this mediating rule because its representations are concrete like those of intuition, and yet since it is not immediately limited to sensation it is capable of presenting even that which is past or absent. It is not limited to dredging up mere replicas of past intuition, but aids the understanding in summoning up the presently inaccessible, creatively and productively. Kant points out in an important footnote the decisive role that imagination plays even in 160

perception. He insists on this point because there is really much more in perception than what meets the eye, so to speak. The imagination is constantly aiding the understanding which is ceaselessly supplying conceptual interpretation, going beyond what is sensed. Moreover, the senses by themselves, Kant says here as elsewhere, are incapable by themselves of synthesizing and thus generating complex representations. Only the imagination with its capacity to roam selectively over what is not present is capable of this, but only under the guidance of the understanding because it alone is capable of developing plans: classifications, rules, and systems. This rule making faculty is capable of devising concepts of particular substances, properties, relations, but even more significantly it supplies the generic notions of substance, causality and other functors of synthesis that make experience an intelligible whole. These notions can never be learned from mere intuitions. Without them mental life would be a mere phantasmagoria of disjointed sense impressions and of chaotic imaginings scarcely distinguishable from them. Knowledge is thus something far different from a scroll of blotting paper that is affected by every passing encounter. It depends rather upon a complex interaction of several faculties, each with distinctive powers and products. The object of knowledge is as complex as a drama we watch in a theater. It is not merely there, but every detail has a certain origin and purpose and has been put into place by the functioning of our faculties, which are like players, directors, stage hands, wardrobe mistresses, impresarios and so on. The categories are like the drama itself which, with the help of the cast, holds the evening together and is the ultimate reason for our attending. It should be added that "we", at least the paradigmatic we, have a hand in writing the play! Thus we are led to the final version of the deduction which begins: "We ourselves introduce order and regularity into the world of phenomena which we call nature, nor could we discover them if we, or the mind by its very nature, had not originally installed them there." We are "ourselves" the authors of the order and regularity: this the deduction has asserted from the beginning. For the unity of nature which is the subject matter of all experience and all science 161

is a necessary one (in the sense explained several times over). Such a unity can only be established a priori, that is, it must already be present in the original cognitive sources of the mind {in den ursprünglichen Erkenntnisquellen unseres Gemüts). The "Copernican Revolution" which appeared some years later in the Preface to B is of course already being proclaimed in Kant's proposal to reinterpret the laws of nature as rules. Particular laws, such as those of mechanics, are regarded as only particular determinations of higher ones (nur besondere Bestimmungen noch höherer Gesetze). Neither here nor later, however, does Kant ever come to grips with the problem of the limit at which in proceeding from higher to lower determinations, we pass from synthetic a priori to synthetic a posteriori propositions. It is quite clear that when Kant says, as he does here, that the understanding is the lawgiver of nature he is referring only to the causal principle, not to one or another causal law. Of course, he says, what are only "empirical laws cannot trace their origin to the pure understanding." But if they are only "special determinations of the pure laws of the understanding" are we to take him to intend the absurdity that synthetic a posteriori propositions are only special cases of synthetic a priori propositions? I believe we can explain this only by saying that Kant must not have had the three-fold analysis of propositions in mind when he composed the close of the Deduction. The Introduction to the Critique, in which the analysis most prominently appears, is no doubt of late composition (as Ädickes and others maintain). But if Kant is not thinking of subsuming a priori under a posteriori synthetic propositions how does he wish the phrase 'particular determination' besondere Bestimmung, to be understood? In the Analytic of Principles he frequently speaks vaguely : of how the Principles "lie at the foundations" of knowledge (zum Grunde liegen). Are they premises that must appear somewhere in every scientific venture? Surely, being a consequence of a premise is not the same as being a "particular determination." I raise these questions because we must, as early as possible, begin to ask what use precisely we are to make of the pure concepts of the understanding, assuming that these have been deduced. So far we have really only had very general assertions about this 162

matter: that they are "indispensable" to knowledge, that they must "precede" it, that we would have little more than an association of ideas rather than knowledge without them. But such generalities are so far of little help in trying to arrive at a view of the logical architecture of science which Kant was so greatly concerned about. We shall return to these questions again in exploring the Deduction in B and in the Analytic of Principles. Summary Representation of the Correctness of this Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the understanding and of its being the Only Possible Deduction The purpose of the addendum is given in the title. The categories are necessary for us to have anything we call experience or knowledge. Without them mental life would simply be that of Shakespeare's cat which "can look at a king" but which has no categories such as might enable it to know that it has seen one. Whence, then, are the categories derived? They cannot be learned from things themselves or they would be merely empirical. Are they then, generated somehow out of ourselves (aus uns selbst)? Not this either, says Kant, although this is what we may have expected him to say. We do not manufacture the world around us (as in some caricatures of idealism we are said to do), but rather the organization of our representations into something objective and systematic is the Self's handiwork. To return to Locke's plain image, it is the bundle, not the sticks, that is the Self's creation. 'Object' is a formal concept for Kant, and such form or organization can derive only from the self as "the unity of consciousness." The categories are the Self's devices for supplying this form. "Pure concepts of the understanding are possible a priori and indeed indispensable in relation to experience because our knowledge is oriented toward nothing but appearances whose very possibility is rooted in ourselves, whose relatedness and unity (in the representation of an object) are to be encountered only in ourselves. Such concepts, moreover, are prior to all experience and, in respect of form, make it possible" (A130). This sums up the deduction and its purpose.

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Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding (Edition B) Section 2 The Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding §15

On the Possibility of Combining in General

We come now to one of the two portions of the Critique which were altogether redrafted in the second edition. (The other is the sections on the Paralogisms of Pure Reason.) Section 2 has been rewritten and receives a new title. One may easily acquaint himself with some of Kant's reasons for thinking he ought to improve the exposition of the deduction in the second edition by consulting his correspondence, now rendered into English by Professor Zweig. I am not certain that the rewritten deduction is an improvement on the first version. It is perhaps less labored, but it also takes certain things for granted that were more fully elaborated in the earlier edition. The second deduction is much briefer than the first if we accept the view that it extends only from §15 to §20, with a recapitulation in §21. It has been suggested that in § 22 to §25 the dialectic makes a premature appearance and that these subsections were inserted at a later date. I think this is less applicable to the latter portion of §24 (after the second paragraph) and §25, which should be considered in connection with §16. The purpose of §26 ff. is, he says, to show that the categories are laws of nature. Certainly the main thrust of the deduction is now confined to §15-§2O (or §21). One should notice the effect of the formulation of the deduction in the Prolegomena (which appeared in the interim between the two editions) in section §19. This trend of thought did not appear in A at all. §20 is a succinct statement of the deduction in one paragraph. Besides this, if any one notion is given more extended or emphatic treatment in the deduction in B than in A,it is perhaps the notion of the I, the self considered as an epistemological presupposition. (Explained on p.72)

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Kant begins with the familiar thought that the matter of our representations derives from sense receptivity, but its form, that is the order, the relatedness, the manner of apprehending them must stem from an altogether different source, being the work of a spontaneous act. All combining, or synthesis, is here presented as owing to the understanding, whether it is exercised upon a multiplicity of concepts or of intuitions. (The latter may be, he says, "sensuous or non-sensuous", but since a non-sensuous intuition may very well fall to the side of "intellectual intuition" which human minds do not command, one editor has suggested that Kant really means by the phrase, empirical or non-empirical.) We learn immediately that an obi ect is not anything given, or "prestructured", but is the product of such synthesis. Parts, as the product of analysis, are possible only jj as divisions of a previously synthesized whole. }.\ This raises the question we have considered \• earlier: when, where, how, and indeed whether such a j: \ process of "facturing" objects has taken place. Kant ( says this combining is an indispensable act, "whether we are conscious of it or not." But of course we are not conscious of it and should not, I think, identify any known mental or intellectual operation with this act. And if we are not conscious of it, the confidence with which Kant speaks of its occurring certainly needs to be fortified. Somehow, it simply "stands to reason" for Kant. Or should one simply regard it as one of the axioms on which the Critical philosophy rests and agree to exempt it from proof? In any case, we do well to reflect constantly on the source and consequence of this decisive principle. Continuing with the characterization or the metaphor of synthesis as a kind of mechanical process of putting pieces together, Kant points out that the process involves not only the parts , the multiplicity or manifold of intuitions, and the act of combining them, but also a purpose or end that guides the act, that is, the resulting unity. The prime example of such a finished result or product is, we recall, a judgment, the characteristic work of the understanding. Kant is saying that the process of combining is not a mere process of growth as a mechanistic biologist may conceive the assimilation of substances in organisms: it is the work of some agent who sets out to accomplish a certain end. It must therefore not be thought of as a kind of byproduct of the act of 166

synthesis: synthesis presupposes unity and makes no sense unless we suppose that unity in the multiplicity is what it sets out to achieve. The nature of the unity is not disclosed until the next subsection, although the footnote makes it clear that the power of consciousness to synthesize is what is meant. i Kant adds that the unity spoken of is not the •I category of unity (the first category). It is clear 'that it is not, since first, all the categories are 5 the product of the instruments of synthesis, and •second, because the unity spoken of is nothing other I than the transcendental unity of apperception itself. iIf we ask precisely what the category of unity is or does, granting that it is not what is the subject of discussion here, we must look elsewhere. And in fact Jwe have more than a little difficulty in finding an answer to this question.

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§16 Of the Original Synthetic Unity of Apperception We are thus led directly to the source of the unity that has just been identified in the total process of synthesis. Kant now sets out to identify this source and to show the indispensable role it plays in the total economy of scientific knowledge. As in the deduction in A there is far less said about categories in what is ostensibly a deduction of them than we would expect. Only in §19 does the necessity of a priori functors appear, and only in §20 are we given a succinct statement of their indispensability. Kant here concentrates upon the need to recognize the agent of apperception in knowledge. Taken as a whole, §16 offers an answer to Hume's view of the self and of its place in our knowing even the commonest things, such as recognizing one's hat or shoes from one day to the next. It does not so much controvert the first of these (Hume's self) as in effect grant the whole structure of personal identity that Hume sees the imagination as constructing (this Kant calls empirical apperception, here and elsewhere) while showing that the self so constructed is useless to account for common knowledge unless the self is seen also in a much more responsible role as a transcendental unity. I think what Kant is saying comes down to three main points: (1) that an identical self must be present if there is to be knowledge; (2) that although what we are empirically acquainted with as ourselves or my. experiences may be the deed or work of such a self, the merely empirically determined self cannot serve to account for knowledge; (3) the self that can account for knowledge must be set forth in a transcendental manner. When we add to this that the categories are the instruments or functors by which this "transcendental self" works, we have the rudiments of the deduction. It should be said first that Kant has some three distinct notions of the self. 27 These are probably not numerically different. Perhaps they differ in the way in which three monotheists may disagree about God, in fact, may even zealously make war upon one another. If you and I agree there is only one God 168

must not yours and mine be numerically identical? I think this depends on whether there is some solid core to the notion Hod on which we both agree. Otherwise I may regard him as a Great Rabbit and you as a Great Antelope, let us say. But I think most religious Jehads in the past have arisen over differing conceptions of God, although the existence of God in some core sense is agreed upon. If I am not mistaken, Kant's views of the self are like this. The three notions of the self are these: (1) the empirical self, the object of introspection, largely a creation of associative mechanisms, and the subject matter of empirical psychology: (2) the epistemoloqical presupposition , the transcendental unity of apperception, to be explained in detail later; (3) the immortal soul, the object of religious concern and a fixture of classical theology. Kant's view of the empirical self is not essentially different from the view Hume has of the self as a product of the imagination (Treatise, I-IVVI). It is the object of study of introspective psychology and indeed any psychology, introspective or not, ought to be able to answer the question what our notion of the self is, even if the self is thought an illusion. It is compatible with what Kant says to regard Hume's account as not particularly mistaken but that this is only one side of the self, the side it presents to our view, so to speak, and that this side would not at all exist if there were not more to the self than this. When we now follow up this image of foreside and rearside of the self we may come to the conclusion (a) that in fact we are directly acquainted with the two sides, the inmost self being an object of intuitive certainty, or that such a self is inferrible with equal certainty, and (b) that quite a number of properties are readily observable in it. This view is that of the self as the soul , a cornerstone of much religious belief. In the Paralogisms, Kant sets forth what properties are generally attributed to such a self, or soul: simplicity, substantiality, immortality, identity, and so on. Whatever other reasons there may be for believing in the existence of such an entity, he regards it as neither empirically confirmable, nor logically inferrible from experience, nor a probable hypothesis of psychology or other science, nor a notion indispensable for carrying on 169

such science, as a category is. it is, being an Idea, at most a notion that has a regulative, but never a constitutive use. Of these three notions of the self, Kant essentially agrees with what the first affirms so to speak, but he rejects what, in Hume's hands, it denies; and he regards the third as lost in a tangle of unconfirmable statements. But he does not deny that empirical operations are attributable to the self or that the self may be, for all we know, simple, immortal, substantial, and so forth. What he wants to affirm is the three statements presented above which state that a continuant self, not empirically determinable, must be presupposed if we are to account for the indubitable fact that we have knowledge. In other words he supports the second as well as the first view of the self. Let us return to our analogy of the beam of light moving in the dark. Unless an observer somehow preserves the image at A as he moves to B, C, and D he will not have seen, let us say, a house, a train, a street. We might say that he had seen only what was at A, let us say, a locomotive, and then have lost this altogether. (On strict Kantian grounds he could not even have seen a locomotive under those restricted conditions since seeing something so would involve a considerable "synthesis".) This we might briefly think of simply as consciousness of something, as against apperception, but this is only a rough approximation. Kant's point is that a street, a house, a train, if it is large enough, or a continent, if it is seen from a spacecraft has a certain unity and this is possible only if glimpses of it are remembered, preserved, and reviewed by one reviewer. This "reviewer" Kant calls the "I think" — he might have said, the cogito. (We must remember that his interests are epistemological, not ontological, like those of Descartes.) The anomalous name serves to warn us that we can say virtually nothing about this reviewer. Kant is aware that what is said of it must be absolutely minimal without however being nothing — not an easy requirement. We must take the present section in conjunction with §24 and §25 to try to make clear to ourselves what Kant means by the "I think." (In those sections 170

he also renews his thoughts about inner sense; this goes back to the Aesthetic.) We learn that we must distinguish between the subject as appearance and j the subject as it is in itself. He then, in § 25, i speaks of our knowledge of the self in exactly the ;! same manner as in the Preface to B (at B xxvi) he ; spoke of things themselves: we can think them, but we cannot know them, because knowing requires both concepts and intuitions. Hence this self is so far only a logical possibility. What makes it more than merely that is that it proves to be indispensable to knowledge. (Many logical possibilities remain in their characteristic limbo since they- are of no use to us, and are merely logically innocuous.) What we do not have is any intuition of the self. Kant could endorse Hume's honest confession: "When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception" (Treatise, I-IV-VI). So far so good, Kant would say. The rub comes when one notices one's equally unshakeable convictions that what is being perceived and recognized with heat, cold, light, and shade is the continuant objects of everyday life. If these convictions are not mere illusions — and Kant does not allow that any sceptic has ever given us good reason to think so -- then we must be prepared to assert the reality of the conditions necessary for this, and the first of these is a unity of apperception. Of this unity I can claim no knowledge, I merely think it. I cannot attribute any material properties to it. The most I can say of it is that it exists "as an intelligence which is aware of itself solely as a capacity for combining" what comes before it (B 158). The problem is to say as little as possible about this new version of the coaito and yet to say enough. I think Kant proceeds with the utmost caution in this matter, carefully discriminating between what we know directly or immediately and where we go beyond this. We know directly, have a simple unshakeable intuitive conviction ('intuitive' not in Kant's technical sense but as meaning immediate) that these and these and these are all my_ experiences. I say so not because I recognize some little apple called 'I' that reappears here, for I may be mistaken about any such identity. I must stick to what I'm sure of. 171

I'm sure I'm suffering a severe headache, that this looks like the pen I lost two weeks ago, that I'm hearing my son's voice, and so on. I am sure -- the mere conviction of certainty is enough — of what is mine, mein. Now, says Kant, there is only one way to account for this, and it cannot be by means of something which merely (in Hume's words) "induces me to believe" that these are my representations -- for then I have one feeling of certainty to account for by means of another induced feeling of certainty, and so on. The only way to account for mein is through ein, one or unity. "The multiplicity of representations in a given intuition would not all of them be my representations, if they did not all belong to one selfconsciousness" (B 132). If not ein, then not mein: ein is the necessary condition for mein, the only way to account for it. Moreover the two must be absolutely distinct: the explicans cannot be simply one experience among other experiences, for it is that which is needed in order to explain experience. Since we are not merely devising an empirically inaccessible entity as an hypothesis to explain a fact, the explanation earns the characterization transcendental, and thus we have a transcendental unity of apperception to designate the traits and powers of the self considered as an epistemological presupposition. I think we may still have questions to raise about this way of accounting for the unity of exper- >' ience, for that is what it is, but one must remember '\ what Kant is trying to do. His main purpose is not :| to give a comprehensive account of the self. Nor is what he is saying a rejection or correction of Hume's ; account of how in principle the idea of the (empirical) self is constructed. Kant can in principle accept Hume's account of the development of the empirical self. What he cannot accept is Hume's failure to allow for the second view of the self, his failure to explain how there can be knowledge if the continuity of the physical world is only one of association, but an association that is not done or witnessed by any one agent. As we have seen in the previous deduction and also in the Aesthetic, Kant is careful to provide both for the empirical facts of the matter in hand and what we may call the cognitive requirements. Under the empirical facts, he allows fully for our inner experience, introspection, the development of empirical self-awareness and continuity, 172

association, and so on. The concept of the self, as much as space, time, or the regularity of events, deserves what he called an explanation of possession, how we come by such a concept (A85/B117). But it is equally necessary to answer questions about all of these notions that go far beyond the empirical explanation of their presence, to allow, in other words, for the cognitive requirements or the claims that they make. And in order to provide for them we must resort to another mode of confirmation because the claims are not empirically confirmable, nor are they analytically true, nor highly probable generalizations. But since they are absolutely indispensable for knowledge, and since it is absurd to suppose that we never have knowledge, we are entitled to affirm or confirm these claims. This is what he means by a transcendental procedure. The continuant self is thus what may be called a transcendental entity. It is, as already explained, one, or a unity, and its characteristic function is the review or apperception of what we are at particular passing moments conscious of. It is not derived or derivative from experience, nor dependent upon it: precisely the reverse is true. Hence it is original, and in a similar vein, Kant speaks of it as a priori. When we sum up all these properties we see the different functions performed by such a self: original, synthesizing, unifying, apperceiving, transcendental, a priori. The name for this self is as accurate as it is awkward: the transcendental unity of apperception. It also appears under slightly varying titles, emphasizing other functions. Tnere remains a troublesome question which may be raised but scarcely answered, and it touches not only this but all the other key parts of the Critique. The question is how we are to construe the key terms in the characterization of the transcendental unity. 'Transcendental' is no problem, of course, since it refers only to the mode of deriving the notion. But how shall we understand 'unity', or 'continuity', and 'apperception'? This is like asking about the use of 'cause' in connection with things themselves. If we think of the terms as analogical or metaphorical we will have difficulty in assimilating the construction and the decoding of the analogy or metaphor to more familiar cases of these. We must at all costs avoid giving the appearance of solving a problem merely by offering a new name for it. The problem is not only Kant's, but is already vigorously evident in Neo-Platonism and medieval "negative theology" with 173

their effort to characterize a being that is in principle beyond observation. Moreover, Kant must heed his self-imposed restriction that nothing more than 'I think' can be attributed to the self. In the Paralogisms he remarks that in Rational Psychology we have an alleged "science built solely on one proposition, 'I think1." Of course his point is phrased as a warning to theologians, but he emphatically does regard this as all we can attribute to the self. The question is of course, whether even this is too much to attribute to it and whether the other predicates 'unity', 'continuity' and so on are not in fact much too much as well. I shall not undertake to answer this question so long as we keep it in mind as we go. We must ponder carefully Kant's own way of dealing with the matter -I do not at all wish to suggest that he was unaware of the problem or that he avoided it. We must consider j; such remarks as that the proposition ('I think1) "is I of course not an experience but only the form of i apperception" (A 354) ; "it is only the formal condition,! the logical unity of every thought" (A 398); the 'I' in "I think' is not "an empirical representation ... it is purely intellectual" (B 423 n . ) . Adickes thinks there is no way of avoiding the charge that there is simply an irremediable contradiction at hand in this situation: Kant is "attributing existence to the self, and thus applying the category of existence to it, whereas his whole system, consistently carried through,forbids it" (Adickes1 edition, p. 332 n . ) . This problem has turned up before: the use (or misuse) of categorial terms in application to transcendental entities. I think we will not falsify Kant's meaning if we present the relationship between the empirical (Em) and the epistemological self (Ep) in the following terms. The order of acquaintance (or discovery) is from Em to Ep, that is, what I am first acquainted with is a "bundle of perceptions" (to be brief about it) which I find to be resembling, connected, and regard as all mine. (This is the order Kant recognizes in what he spoke of earlier as the "empirical deduction" or "explanation of possession" (A85/B117 ff.). I cannot of course infer Ep_ from Em, although that is what the theological approach to the matter seems to sanction, but I am undoubtedly "induced to believe" (again Hume's phraseology is apt) in E£. because of the way I find E_m. Kant's point is that 174

proceeding in this direction is invalid if it is brought forward as explanation. We must, he argues, proceed contrariwise. Only on condition of E_p_ can I explain how all my experiences are intuitively my own. The order of explanation is what is decisive. In it we proceed from Ej3 to Ein and this is what the Critique means to offer us here. We are not of course directly aware of Eja as we are of .Em. I am, Kant says, "aware of an identical self in view of (in reference to, by virtue of, jji ansehung des) the multiplicity of representations given in an intuition, because I call them all nry_ representations that collectively make up one intuition." He then adds the explanation that this is to say that I am conscious a priori of a necessary synthesis, dass ich mir einer notwendigen Synthesis a. priori bewusst bin. I take this to say that the ground of the unification of elements is an a priori condition: nothing of this sort is ever to be found in empirical consciousness. "Being conscious a priori of" is perhaps easy to misinterpret: there is not another consciousness that lurks in the background while the empirical occupies the foreground; rather, there is and must be a ground of the latter. To proceed to establish the reality of anything in this way is what Kant means by the "transcendental" method.

§17 The Fundamental Principle of the Synthetic Unity of Apperception is the Supreme Principle of all Employment of the Understanding The cogito which has been established by reference to subjective intuitive continuity of experience is now to be shown as the condition not only of inner experience but of objects. What is an object? "An object is that in whose concept the multiplicity of a given intuition is united." An object or an objective process is discrete and continuous. Moreover, it is "a something", which is to say that it falls under some concept or concepts. To say that it is something, K, for example, is to say that it has all the traits anything must have to be named by 'K'. To find a K in experience then means we have found something which affords us all the intuitions covered by the defining traits of K. But concepts do not lie about like pebbles on the beach; the selection of traits they represent is an artfully constructed mosaic. The 175

world and what is in it are not pre-structured, according to Kant, but factured. Since being an object, having the continuity and stability of an object (no matter how momentary), is not just "being there", being a thing itself, and since its order or structure is acquired from some source other than itself, we must now ask after this source. An object is an assemblage (Vereinigung) of representations and such a synthesis can only be produced by a unitary conscious-, ness. This consciousness, which is Ep, the synthetic | unity of apperception, is the source of all synthesis. \ This brings us to one of the cornerstones of the I deduction, the principle that the unity of objects and ; thus the possibility of objectivity in knowledge, is • one and the same as the unity of consciousness. Since what we mean by knowledge is by its very nature objective, this consciousness proves to be responsible : for objective knowledge. Kant adds that the foregoing act of synthesis must be presupposed only for beings like ourselves, or in particular, for beings whose intuitions are ordered in space and time. In such beings two sources are active in the generation of knowledge, intuition and understanding, and one of these cannot do the work or produce the result of the other. The concepts of the understanding, we recall, are empty without reference to intuitions, and intuitions are blind without concepts. But in beings in whom knowledge did not depend upon sense organs, divine beings no doubt, beings whose very understandings or intellects were intuitive, the work that is distinct in us would be accomplished without distinct tasks being carried on by understanding and by intuition. Kant frequently touches on this theme because he wishes his theory to be of completely general scope, so that once intellect and intuition are treated of in a truly generic manner specific applications may then be made to beings of certain particular sorts. Man's intellect is thus not treated of as that of man as such but of a being of a certain general description. § 18 What Objective Unity of Self-Consciousness Is The present sub-section introduces nothing new but repeats and emphasizes succinctly the points that have been made in the two previous sections. Kant again 176

contrasts what he has variously referred to as subjective unity or empirical unity of consciousness or empirical apperception with the transcendental or objective unity, or transcendental apperception. The latter, the 'I think1, is what is fundamental, accomplishing essentially the same result in every person. The former differs from person to person. Whereas all those who speak the same language will for that reason use the same criteria in the application of concepts, they will nevertheless have differing, perhaps idiosyncratic mental associations and imagery in turning them over in their minds. Kant repeats that subjective unity depends upon objective unity, that it is the ground of it and even derived from it (abgeleitet). This holds also of the framework of objective time: subjective time may lag for me but not for you, whereas we all have a conception of objective time with a steady and equal flow. In this as in former presentations of the same matter Kant offers nothing that helps us to understand better the crucial terms and turnings of the argument. Among these one must certainly be concerned about the meaning to be given to the way in which the objective unity can serve as the ground of the subjective or permit it to be derived, or what one is to conceive the nature of the former to be when all we can say of it is that it is the 'I think', and even this may be saying too much. Taken strictly the present subsection does not answer the question it addresses itself to, what is the objective unity of self-consciousness? but only declares it to be the ground of the subjective, the source from which the latter derives. §19 The Logical Form of all Judgments Consists in the Objective Unity of the Apperception of the Concepts Contained Therein I take this somewhat baffling title to mean that judging, being a process of synthesis, as Kant has said earlier, is possible only because it is the effort of an apperceiving being. What then is the nature of the relating in judgment? Kant begins by a kind of warning that we must not suppose this is a merely logical matter for in fact logicians have either neglected to ask what precisely 177

the relation is that is being expressed in judgment or confined it to the relation of a subject to a predicate which obtains in the categorical but not in hypothetical or disjunctive judgments. As he reminds us in a footnote, these are quite distinct; the latter two cannot be reduced to the first. (One may well review what he has said in §9, to which he refers us, but also to the all-important brief subsection on judgment which immediately precedes §9.) The section shows the development of Kant's views on the nature of judgment and of the nature and need of a deduction of the categories as he saw these matters when he wrote the Prolegomena (published in 1783, two years after A ) . The essential point Kant makes there is to point out the distinction between judgments of perception (JJL) and judgments of experience (Jj2) , a distinction that is essentially the same as that of twentieth century philosophy of perception between sense-datum or basic propositions (Protokollsätze ) and physical object propositions. Kant is aware that jJP's are not truly judgments like the JE's. The same fact is re-discovered in the later investigation since the JP_ or protocol must simply inform us of conjunction of sense data, without any real !••? attribution. In Kant, the JP uses the form of judg- .'';, ment ("when I lift a body, I feel the pressure of its | weight") , though at most one seems almost forced to !( utter jerky phrases such as, "here, now a body-feel; * there, now a heavy-feel," or something on this order unless one believes one can venture something closer to a standard sentence, perhaps beginning, "I feel ..." or "It appears to me that ..." In some such manner Kant wants to inform us that there is a difference between the full, objective synthesis that is evidenced in jJ_E and the mere subjective association of impressions that we may try to record in Jj?. In the Prolegomena we learn that the difference between a JJ3 such as, "The body is heavy" or "The sun warms the stone," and the corresponding JP_ is precisely that the JE involves the additional functors of the categories. When I say that the stone is warm or the sun is hot I am not merely associating two impressions, but saying there is a continuant, perduring substance that for a time, or even a moment, has some property or is in some state or condition. And when I say the sun warms the stone I am also saying that there is a causal relation between one substance, or an event in one substance, and another.

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The present exposition, as compared with that of the Prologomena. does not yet mention categories either in general or in particular: it merely affirms that there is a difference between the synthesis recorded, or asserted, in full judgment and in mere subjective association. Kant's point then is that what the logicians neglected to mention is precisely the subject matter of the deduction. They failed to explain what a judgment really was, offering only, according to Kant, the suggestion that it was "the representation of a relation between concepts." It is the categories that must be recognized as making true judgment, JE. something more than a verbal sign for an association of impressions, or however we choose to understand JT. Accordingly, Kant is now ready to present the categories, and this is done in the following sub-section and the remaining discussion of Section 2. The actual theoretical content of §19 is by now familiar. We distinguish between the reproductive and the productive imagination, between the understanding itself, the subjective unity of representations and the objective, between empirical and original (a priori) apperception, between connection through association and objectively valid relations. The examples discussed are meant to help us understand that there must be differences between these pairs. We now ask what they are. §20 All Sensate Intuitions are Subject to the Categories as Conditions under which alone they in their Multiplicity can enter into a Single Consciousness This section presents in five sentences an extraordinarily condensed version of the Transcendental Deduction itself. As such, every phrase is significant. Actually everything that appears here has appeared before except that the place of the categories in the general scheme of the deduction in B has not yet been made clear up to this point. Kant is, I think, much more certain of himself in this third deduction of the- categories (counting the Prolegomena) and he is accordingly briefer and less repetitious, and he knows better where each part of the argument fits. I shall attempt merely a paraphrase of §20: but of course nothing is really better than simply 179

concentrating on the original especially brief.

since it is

Unity of apperception is the necessary condition for the connectedness of the multiplicity among our representations. That mechanism that the mind, or in particular, the understanding, employs to effect connection under such apperception is judgment. Whatever is judged is expressed by one or another of the forms of judgment and subject to one or another of the logical functions of the understanding. The categories are nothing but these functions which present the content of the judgment under thing or substance and property or state, cause and effect, determining and determined members of a systematic whole, and so on. Hence everything in experience is subject to the categories. Presented in slightly amplified form we may put the present version of the deduction as follows: (1)

(2)

(3)

Only when we presuppose a unitary apperception have we a ground supporting the apparent connectedness of the subject's experience. I This apperceptive capacity effects its opera- I tions through the synthesizing device of ?. concepts whose only use is to appear as predicates of judgments. Since the whole of experience is subject to judging, it is necessarily subject to the logical functions of judgments.

;

(4)

These functions are the categories, which confer a determining order on our intuitions.

(5)

accordingly, since all experience is subject to original apperception, it is subject to the categories.

The whole purpose of the deduction is to justify the claim to the objectivity (necessity, in Kant's terms) of the results arrived at in science, or in experience generally, to justify the claim to knowledge, in other words. If there is knowledge (and Kant believes there" i s ) , we must in advance grant certain propositions which are neither analytically true, nor empirically confirmable, nor capable of being established in any other manner. But to put the matter thus as one of 180

granting propositions, rather than acknowledging that certain concepts or functors (the categories) are in effect or in operation in knowledge, is to get ahead of the story, going beyong the analytic of concepts (categories) to the analytic of principles. One of the difficult, and perhaps unresolvable problems of the Critique that lies ahead of us is to try to see why both these regimens must be gone through. §21 Supplementary Remark The content of this section is somewhat puzzling in both form and substance. It surprises us by saying that what has gone before has now made a beginning of the deduction of the categories, while in fact all the essentials of it are now before us. The first paragraph is difficult in phraseology. It draws a comparison between the synthesis in empirical intuition as a whole and the synthesis within a given intuition that has just been explained. Categories are the instruments of synthesis of the understanding by means of which the multiplicity in a given intuition has been shown to belong to one self-consciousness. The point is now generalized to show that categories perform in the same manner in respect to all objects. In this way, says Kant, the fully general intent of the deduction will be revealed. The application of the categories is restricted to empirical intuition. What is excluded is of course intellectual intuition which minds such as ours do not command. Kant adds that the ultimate reason why this restriction should hold admits of no further explanation. Whether it does or not is perhaps not as interesting as the comparison he makes between this situation and the parallel inexplicability why there are just so many functions of judgment, from which we derive the categories, or just so many forms of intuition, namely, space and time, and no others. With this Kant underscores his particular choice of categories as set forth in the Metaphysical Deduction. But it also permits what one might in our times call a "Kantian revisionist" position: namely if, as is apparent, the list of functions of judgment must be drastically revised in accordance with modern logic, the list of categories must itself be revised. We have, of course, reviewed aspects of this at length 181

earlier in presenting the metaphysical deduction.

§2 2 The Only Use of the Category as Contributing to Knowledge of Things is its Application to Objects of Experience Sections §22- §24 (first part) reiterate the familiar stipulation that intuitions are an indispensable component in knowledge and that categories unsupported by corresponding intuitions (the term is Kant's own, korrespondieren) cannot yield knowledge. If we emphasize the negative aspect of this, the consequences of the absence of intuitions, the Dialectic is in some measure anticipated. Of course, displaying the limits of the proper use of the categories is actually a proper part of the exposition of the categories themselves. The first section ( §22) develops the familiar theme that there must be empirical intuitions if there is to be empirical knowledge; categories without intuitional reference cannot afford knowledge. The second says that non-sensible intuitions will not meet the demand for intuitional reference. The third opens a discussion, further developed in the Schematism, of the manner in which the imagination serves to relate the understanding and sensibility. First, concepts and intuitions are necessary for ., knowledge (Erkenntnis). Failing the intuitions, we || may often find it needful to think out the logical f( ! possibility of something, but this can furnish no S knowledge of it or about it. Knowledge involves pure ;, and empirical intuitions and pure and empirical con' cepts, and none of the four components may be missing. The familiar demand for empirical intuitions is now extended also to mathematics. Relying on pure intuition one may have a species of mathematical knowledge of the mere form of objects. But this is not knowledge in the full sense of the term unless also empirical representations are at hand. Of course mathematical knowledge in this sense is severely restricted to applied mathematics or it is being equated with a kind of mathematical physics. This is only momentarily surprising. Pure mathematics is provided for but the main point of the argument is to drive home the point that there can be "knowledge of things (Kant's italics) 182

:

only insofar as these can be taken to be objects of possible experience." Here experience is emphatically intuitional experience, E-| .

§2 3 This section has no formal title but is a continuation of the preceding line of thought. The categories have reference only to objects of intuition. This excludes reference to things themselves but it also raises the question as to the scope of the term 1 intuition. ' The requisite intuition, says Kant with emphasis, must be "our sensate and empirical intuition," for this alone can lend the concepts of the understanding sense and significance (Sinn und B e d e u t u n g ) . The notion of non-sensible intuition now reappears as on several previous occasions. The difficulty with this, says Kant, is that one cannot affirm anything positive of it: one can only define or characterize it by staying that it is not extended in space and that its duration is not temporal, that rio. change is to be encountered in it> and so on. And even if one could identify such a species of intuition how could any category apply to it? For as we shall see in the Schematism and later, the categories are not to be defined or analyzed without reference to our way of experiencing time. One query should be raised as something to be kept in mind in the study of the present sections and of the Schematism. In each of the sections ( §22-§24) Kant uses the term 'corresponding' (korrespondieren) in speaking of the relation between intuition and concept. What precisely does he intend with this term? Hume would say that impressions and ideas can resemble one another closely, but this way is obviously not open to Kant, considering the distance he has placed between intuitions and concepts. We must ask whether Kant has adequately explained himself when he takes up the question of the link between them in the Schematism. In the immediately following section he considers the role of imagination as an intermediary in this situation.

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§2 4 The Application of the Categories to Objects of Sense in General The title of this subsection refers principally to the first three paragraphs after which a pause is indicated in the text and Kant takes up a discussion of inner sense. No doubt from the very beginning Kant has had in mind the question of the interrelation of the aesthetic and logical elements of knowledge, intuitions and concepts, since he regards both of them as absolutely necessary to knowledge. How can categories, which are in and of themselves mere abstract and intellectual forms of thought, relate to intuitions and thus objects of appearance, objects of experience? In one sense, the question is as old as Plato's thoughts on participation ( vie9e£ia ) , although Kant does not concern himself with that view of the problem. The problem is of course a characteristically Platonic, and Neo-Platonic, problem and recurs in the Incarnation question in Christian theology: how can the Logos "become flesh and dwell among us?" Something must "humanize" it. So also something must enable us to see the category as relating itself to or organizing a manifold of sensible intuition. Kant's terms for the "third thing," the 'schema', that effects this is not employed in the present sub- ~ section; the schema is the product of the imagination, and this is presented as mediating between intellect and sense: imagination represents its object in an intuitive, auschauend, fashion, but what it represents is not itself present. One may well say that a very large part of intelligence is nothing but imagination and capacity to imagine. How then in thinking with and through abstract categories do we reach the ground of sense? What is needed is a capacity for schematic, figurative thought, a synthesis speciosa, as Kant says, that is, thought in "well-appearing", "presentable" form. The Aesthetic has in fact already expounded what is essential here. "The understanding, being spontaneous, can determine inner sense because there is in us a certain form of sensate intuition a priori" (B150). The a priori forms of intuition of course are space and time: it is time that is decisive here, the more pervasive of the forms, for as we saw in the 184

Aesthetic, "time is simply the form of inner sense" and "the formal condition a priori of all appearance whatsoever" (A33/B49 ff.) Thus the pure understanding, or the transcendental unity of apperception, does not organize mere "raw" intuitions, which are in themselves, as we know, blind and, we might add, intractable: it is the fact that they can appear in the framework of time and its modi that enables them to be related to the categories, which are the instruments of the understanding. This is gone into in detail later (A138/B177 ff.). As we have implied earlier, Kant here attributes the synthesis speciosa, or figurative synthesis, to I the imagination. In fact, he has here allowed the 1 lines among his "faculties" to fade. For the figura••> tive synthesis is also associated with a priori 5 intuition, and being synthesis, with understanding. ; The latter association is underlined by the reappearance of the notion of productive imagination, ] which was discussed twice in the first deduction. ; The present section cannot I think, be regarded as an effective exposition of its topic. The Schematism, difficult as it is, will improve upon it.

Appended to the foregoing section is a discussion of inner sense which was taken up for the first time in B in §6 and in the General Remarks appended to the Aesthetic. The discussion is relevant to the distinction which we find Kant to have followed throughout the Deduction between the self as a presupposition of knowledge, the transcendental unity of apperception, and the self as the object of study of introspective psychology. The former is the active source of unity but is in no way an object of awareness: there are no intuitions of it and of course, without intuitions there can be no object of knowledge. The consequences of the error of presuming that we know the self as if we had intuitions of it are expounded in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. The "self itself" is a kind of thing in itself of which we know nothing. What we know of ourselves is confined to inner sense in which intuitions are ordered only in time but not as objects or substances. Being subject to inner sense means only that a manifold is subject to inner awareness. The connection of the parts of the manifold is altogether owing to the understanding and the 185

imagination . Kant now draws a parallel between the ontological character of things we think of as organized and ordered in space and those which as mental are not located in space but in consciousness. First, as the former have been shown to be appearances, that is, multiple elements synthesized under the form of space, so also is mental content known but not as evidence of anything in itself. The object of introspection is what we think of as "ourselves" or perhaps as "our selves." It is not a thing in itself but may bear the same relation to this as a ground ,as physical substances and processes do to things in themselves. Kant formulates this as a distinction between the I that thinks and the I that intuits itself, or also the I as an intelligence and thinking subject and I as an object thought. The very form of words here is difficult. Kant speaks of "the I that thinks", das Ich, der ich denke, which if it is his actual intent may be seeking to say something such as in English might be put as "that I which is he that thinks." I believe this is actually more plausible than Vaihinger's emendation das Ich, das denkt, which is our first phrase above, "the I that thinks." Kant was well aware that conventional language was an obstacle to what he was trying to say: it must be respected but not reverenced. What he appears to be saying here is that if we admit that we know objects only insofar as we are externally affected, we must also admit of inner sense that through it we intuit ourselves only insofar as we are inwardly affected by ourselves: that is, so far as concerns inner intuition, we know our own subject only as appearance but not as what it is in itself. The ultimate subject is as plausible . ,: or as problematic an existent as objects in themselves <| whose being we in some sense concede, but which we ;I cannot speak of in the language of experience and science, in terms of the categories and forms of intuition, as substances or processes, existing in time and space, in causal relation to one another in a physical system of nature, etc. As Kant later shows, both the notion of such a subject and of such an object can be cured of the misuse they have suffered at the hands of theologians and metaphysicians and can be made to serve a necessary regulative purpose only if we carefully distinguish their "mood" of speaking from the language which is constitutive of science. The arguments in defense of this procedure are called 186

"transcendental"; extending the use of transcendentally determined notions beyond all reference to experience is characterized, if not quite condemned, as "transcendent." Kant adds an interesting footnote to this section about the influence of the understanding, ultimately of our original selves, upon inner sense. This self is of course a spontaneous power. It thinks what it sees fit to think whereas the self as inner sense is by its nature simply whatever results from this and whatever my history, as experienced, has been. It is apparent, says Kant, that among the determinants of what turns up in inner sense (though not the only determinant, since it is also subject to the contingencies of intuitions themselves) none is more powerful than the self itself. His example is attention, Aufmerksamkeit . What transpires in inner sense is affected by what the self chooses to think, to attend to. It has the power to draw attention to this or that and to exclude other things. Of course what then passes consciously before me is all in inner sense since everything that is mentally before me is of course in inner sense and can be nowhere else. But inner sense is essentially passive; it is not some kind of autonomous power.

§25 The present section continues the account of selfawareness and the nature and status of inner sense. What Kant is saying, as he said in the earlier deduction, is that there is an original, fundamental, and continuant self. The basis on which this is affirmed is not empirical, for this self is not the object of awareness, but awareness itself. Nor is the affirmation analytically true; it can only be established through the transcendental method. The very fact that I call experiences my own entitles me to affirm an a priori consciousness, an "I think." But I must not suppose that I can affirm more than this. I am not entitled to say that there is aji I, if this means there is a mental substance here, a ghost in the machine. Nor can I affirm the many things metaphysicians, particularly Kant's own predecessors both British and Continental, say of what is referred to here as 'I' or 'I think'. all I am aware of is that I am, Kant maintains.

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The original self, if we may venture to speak of it so, does not itself "put in an appearance", to borrow this convenient vernacular phrase. For what appears is here as everywhere else a phenomenon, and it is just this which requires an original self. This is not merely to invent a hypothesis of a sort to explain phenomena and then declare arbitrarily that there is no alternative to it. Kant's point is that any alternative either negates the phenomenal facts or merely reaffirms the same necessity of an original self; and this is what he means by a transcendental necessity. Hume's account, as we have shown, does not rid us of this necessity. It offers an account such as Kant calls an empirical deduction or an explanation of possession of the self, showing the genesis of my notion of the self. But once I truly have this notion and see that in fact it has been operative all along, I see that there can be no knowledge without it. Hume's candid confession that he could never catch himself or his self in introspection merely underscores a peculiarity of it, but this is no evidence against its reality. Kant's point in this section is that I have at best a conception of the self, but I have no intuition of it. A mere conception would, however, be of no more use to me than a concept of a civilization of rational centipedes if there were no need for thinking it. Transcendental notions such as this together with [' the instruments by which it accomplishes its work, f the categories, are conceptions which, we recall, are s not derived from experience, but apply to experience in order to make it possible. Empirical representations on the other hand are derived from experience, and metaphysical notions are not prerequisites of experience. This exhausts the possibilities. The original self is thus limited in its function. We witness its work every moment but we can say nothing of its character. Its work is synthesis, Verbindung, and is carried on subject to the special condition that the elements synthesized are subject to the condition of inner sense, to the relations of time in which they stand. These conditions are entirely distinct from those of the understanding. What I therefore know of myself, as against what I think , is subject to a basic condition of all appearing, time, and if I therefore say that I know myself, I must add, as I appear, not as I am in myself.

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§2 6 The Transcendental Deduction of the Universally Possible Use in Experience of Pure Concepts of Understanding In Kant's repetitious manner, and as what may seem an anticlimax, we encounter still another deduction of the categories. In B this has succinctly been put in § 20. In A it appeared several times over. The present formulation is fairly concise, and the content is the same. (Even here there are two distinct formulations, the first beginning at the head of §26 and the second in the latter part of §26 at B164.) I do not suggest that the several formulations are otiose. On the contrary, they lend the Critique reality. A great builder has been engaged on a task of monumental proportions: brushes, chisels and crumpled sketches are still lying about, and the scaffolding is still in place. •j Once again, we can interpret the work of the I Critique in an analytical or in Kant's more explicitly ] transcendental manner. What are the ingredients of ; experience? First, empirical intuitions which con, stitute the matter of it; second, the form, the powers and functors that cannot be supplied by intuition, namely the forms of outer and inner sensate intuition, space and time, and the synthetic unity of the multiplicity of intuitions in one original consciousness by means of the categories. Or, to speak in transcendental terms, certain a priori representations univer' sally apply to experience and make it possible.

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One could consider in both ways the two concrete examples Kant presents here. The multiplicity of parts that make up a co-existent spatial, physical complex, such as a house, can be an object of experience only because the parts are apperceived or synthesized under the several categories. In the representation of a house, as an object of experience, I think far more than a congeries of sights or feels, though perhaps that is how a house may appear to a passing deer or sparrow. When I analyze my experience I find a good deal that I simply cannot account for as empirical intuition. Similarly I may observe the freezing of water, noting the behavior of the thermometer, the order of states of the fluid, and vary systematically all 189

attendant conditions. In analyzing the physical account or theory of this process I find myself compelled to resort to notions, such as causality, which are under no conceivable circumstances visible to the eye or hand or ear. Moreover, I go on from any one such "event" of freezing water and assume that I have "learned something" from it and extend it to other events. Categories, says Kant, are concepts through which we prescribe laws to nature. How? Here Kant makes a distinction between laws of nature of the most general sort, which alone are meant, and special laws of nature. (This may perhaps be equated with the difference between synthetic laws, known a priori, and those known a posteriori.) By categories we must here think not of mere concepts as named by distinct terms such as 'substance' and 'causality', but principles such as those formulated under the Analogies of Experience in the next large division of the Critique. Kant here leaves important matters indeterminate. Special laws are said to be derived (abgeleitet) from general laws; they are said to stand under, to be subject to them (stehen unter). They are also said to need empirical determination: they cannot be fully determined only by reference to the categories. There may be an inconsistency here that is fate- I ful in its consequences. For if Kant cannot specify i how causal laws are related to the causal principle, • the Critique may be in danger of terminating in contradiction. The whole momentum of the argument dictates the conclusion that all laws are a priori, which, however, Kant's fundamental good sense and his skill as a natural scientist prevent him from drawing. Before endorsing this conclusion one should await further results of the length to which in our time or in the future the formalization of physics may be carried for this must affect our view of the possible a priori character or the a priori aspects of science. It is not likely, however, to issue in support of the view of the propositions of science as both synthetic and a priori. While the actual articulation of Kant's philosophy of science is left unclear he is definitely of the opinion that basic general laws, such as Newton's three laws of motion, are not to be learned from experience, that they are indispensable to the economy of 190

experience and science, and that they are to be derived, proved, or as he says, shown to be possible, only by the transcendental method. This program can be carried out only because the objects to which these laws or categories apply are appearances rather than things themselves. These, being only representations are subject to the synthesizing faculty. This subjects nature, as comprehensive of all appearances (der Tnhsgriff aller Frsnhai mingen) , to the categories.

§2 7 Outcome of this Deduction of the Concepts of understanding The approach of the last section (that is, the first two paragraphs) is like that of §14 which appears almost at the very beginning of the Transcendental Deduction. There Kant had said that there are just two ways in which synthetic representations and their objects may be related to one another: either the object will make the representation p o s s i b l e , or the reverse. In the present section he states that "there are only two ways in which we can conceive of a necessary agreement of experience with concepts of its objects", and then repeats the alternatives. By the phrase "necessary agreement" Kant means of course that it is already known that the a priori concepts are necessary to experience. The question then is as to their origin, whether it be from experience or from another source. Here as there, the first alternative is ruled out. Only the second is possible: a priori concepts are the products or original fixtures of our cognitive faculties. The whole point escapes being question-begging only if we emphasize the phrase 'synthetic representations'. If representations were analytic, this would itself explain their necessity. Kant's point is of course that although they are synthetic, they are not derived from experience: hence we can explain their necessity and their indispensability only if they are conditions for any experience whatsoever. This of course is the basic issue of the whole deduction: How are synthetic judgments possible a priori? Because they are the necessary conditions for any and all experience,and there is no alternative manner of explanation that accounts for and can do justice to experience. 191

This applies more stictly to the principles which are to be considered next in the Analytic rather than to the transcendental concepts, the categories. The question, which Kant has told us is the basic one which the Critique addresses itself to, is formulated mainly with the principles in mind. It is never altogether clear why both concepts and principles are expounded, rather than just the principles. Kant himself told us at the outset of the deduction that "the only use the understanding can make of these concepts is to judge by means of them" (A68/B93), though perhaps he was at the moment thinking more specifically of material or empirical concepts. I think we must regard the Analytic of of Principles as even more decisive than the Transcendental Deduction in assessing the Critique, particularly since specific reference to the categories is so sparse in what is ostensibly the deduction of the categories. Thus, precisely what it is that we need, under causality for example, as an a priori condition for experience is only made clear to us when we come to the proof of the principle of causality in the Second Analogy. In this light the Analytic of Concepts has of course thoroughly prepared the ground for the real work of the Critique, which is considered next. In fact, the greatest part of this extraordinary labor is now done. The proof of the principles is not nearly as arduous Before leaving the deduction Kant wishes to I dissociate his view from one which he regards as quite f retrograde. It is often said that Kant was in effect ; only rehabilitating rationalism in the face of the murderous criticism of Hume. That such an interpretation was conceivable to Kant is shown by his defense of the present approach. The counter-proposal that Kant here rejects is that there may be a middle ground between the alternatives discussed above: either experience makes concepts possible, or vice versa. Although this appears almost as an after-thought, it is really a question of so serious a nature that it touches on the very foundations of the Critical philosophy. We can give it only an inadequate glance in this exposition. The problem is that Kant has given all too brief and inadequate an answer to why his own standpoint should not be identified precisely with the one he is here rejecting. It may first be said that Kant may have been overzealous in distancing his standpoint from that of 192

certain of his predecessors, just as he may have been with regard to Berkeley whose views are in so many ways identical with his own but from whom he took great care to dissociate himself (v. B214 ff.)- If this is so, one might merely say that he need not have repudiated his kinships with the innatism, as we may call it, of the rationalist "school." On this view, Kant's views are innatistic thoughout unless of course the argumentsin the present paragraph persuade us that they are not to be so understood. But I do not think Kant here offers any reason to revise the impression he has given us from the start. At the end of the deduction in A he was emphatic about the categories being "in us", "original cognitive powers of mind;" "we ourselves introduce order and regularity" into nature. Elsewhere he even says these forms are "in our brain"! In the present section, however, he argues that the categories are not "selfthought first principles" (the phrase is left unexplained) , not "subjective disposition of thought implanted in our very existence by the Creator in precise accordance with the laws of nature." They are not a "preformation system of pure reason," by which he is undoubtedly suggesting Leibniz's pre-established harmony. But it is difficult to see much difference between these and his own formulations of the way in which the categories belong "to us." What other way 1 is there to express his thought, than to say that they 'are native to us, implanted in us? He argues that if 'we think of the categories, for example, causality, 1 in this manner they will lose their necessity, for they will have only an "arbitrary subjective inborn necessity." The categories will then only signify that we are so consitituted that we cannot think in any other manner. I think there is only one defense of Kant that is possible. No doubt he wanted to guard his view against the interpretation that the categories are some sort of psychological mechanisms like instincts, but he ought to have been at greater pains to show exactly why they may not be so regarded. The burden was on him. This could no doubt have been done. But if this was his intent he went too far in repudiating the rationalist interpretation of the categories. It was, moreover, unnecessary. What Leibniz had said was that all cognitive functioning, both what passes as empirical and as conceptual, was innate and expressed the inner nature of the monads. Kant's point should be that the :

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categories are innate, but empirical intuitions are not. There was no need to repudiate "innatism" at this point and thus throw the whole point of the habitat of the categories into doubt. The only interpretation that would seem to explain Kant's train of throught is that he intends to say that the categories are not psychological mechanisms. But scarcely any reasons are offered for this that do not at the same time call into question the power of the categories in shaping our conception of nature. Brief Formulation of this Deduction The deduction issues finally in one difficult sentence that seems to hope to say at once all that has gone before. We may compare Kant's formulation with the paraphrase "The task of the deduction is to show how the determination of appearances in space and time can succeed only by means of the categories and how this determination proceeds on the basis of the principle of the original synthetic unity of apperception; this principle is oriented toward space and time, that i: is, applied to space and time." (Adickes1 edition, p. \ 165 n.) It is, however, doubtful whether this para' phrase or most direct translations are of much help to us. But if one has understood Kant reasonably well up to this point one may also see through the jargon well enough to what is intended. In any event the critical questions are not decided by such concise formulae: a summary interpretation of the significance of the deduction can be undertaken only upon detailed consideration of the Analytic of Concepts.

The final note concerns the numbering (§§) which has been in effect in B since the beginning of the Aesthetic and the Analytic of Concepts. Together they expound the basic concepts of the system (space, time, the categories) in accordance with the general framework of a logic, which it was thought, had to cover the three topics of concepts, judgments (now to be expounded in the Analytic of Principles), and inferences (to be expounded in the Dialectic). The use (Gebrauch) of these concepts will now be made evident in the Principles.

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Transcendental Logic Book II Analytic of Principles

What Kant has to say in the two brief sections at the outset of Book II has little bearing upon the problems he undertakes to solve in it. The distinction between judgment and understanding would be sound enough in a general philosophy of mind but it throws no light on what ought really to be Kant's concern: how and why we must proceed from transcendental, concepts to transcendental judgments. It should be recalled that in the all-important section at the outset of the Analytic (just prior to§9) Kant gave a rather different account of judgment and understanding: they are not, as here, sharply distinct faculties. "All operations of the understanding can be reduced to (the term is zurückfuhren) judgments, so that the understanding can be represented as a faculty of judging" (A69/B94). In the present sections he is concerned to show the differences between three faculties, understanding, judgment, and reason. Taking these in reverse order, the Transcendental Dialectic considers the inferences of pure reason. In it we learn the consequence of the intellect circumventing the necessity to support concepts (Ideas) with intuitions, namely, pseudo-science in the fields of psychology, cosmology, and theology. Second, the forthcoming division, the Analytic of Principles, would seem to belong to judgment and the previous Analytic, that of Concepts, and perhaps the Aesthetic, to understanding. But this is not Kant's intent at all. The Principles are of course propositions and thus judgments, but not at all in the sense expounded in the present Introduction, where the meaning attached to "judgment" is that of accurately applying general rules and theory to specific instances, a capacity many learned persons woefully lack. The Principles discussed in the forthcoming Analytic are something else. They are of maximum generality and anything but applications to specific instances. The only 195

application in this sense in the sections ahead is the Schematism, but it is not concerned with propositions: it is presented as the problem of classifying and subsuming particulars or intermediate classes under higher classes. In the old logic this was not a problem of judgment at all. Third, in the present division of things, we can assign the previous Analytic of Concepts to understanding only in the sense that the concern of the analytic is with concepts of understanding. It began as we saw with judgment. But the understanding is only incidentally and certainly not exclusively a faculty for concepts. Rather it is above all a faculty of principles, from general principles which are most responsible for science as a whole, like the principle of causality, to the most specific laws, theories, and hypotheses. The understanding is therefore more relevant to the forthcoming Analytic of Principles. Thus the triple ;• distinction Kant introduces is interesting but has • little relevance, or is even counter-relevant, to I divisions already made and yet to be made. Kant is more nearly right when he says in the fourth paragraph: that the understanding and judgment have their canon of objectivity valid use in the transcendental logic, but since this includes the Dialectic (which involves a functional misuse of the two faculties) the application is only to the Transcendental Analytic.

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Introduction Concerning Transcendental Judgment in General At the very end of the preceding Deduction, Kant said that the ensuing section would proceed from the deduction of the elementary concepts (the categories) to their actual employment. This might suggest the use that, let us say a physicist, an engineer, a seamstress, or any other practical person might make of them. In fact, however, it comes down to proceeding from the categories, such as substance, or causality, to the principles of substance and causality, as set forth in the analogies. Yet for these we do not need a doctrine of how to proceed when subsuming particular under general, or applying a general law of science to a particular problem of technology and these are what Kant seems to be preparing us for in the present subsection . ••i The only sense in which a general rule is made | specific here is that there can be no particular laws | of nature as the content of theoretical physics unless ! certain very general concepts and principles are pre: supposed: the Analytic then purports to convince us of jthis fact in general and also of the particular concepts and principles it names and formulates. Apart from the Schematism the problem of "specification" is not gone into in the Analytic of Principles, contrary to what Kant says in the concluding paragraphs of this Introduction. No principle applies itself, but if it is .properly formulated it does specify what it applies to, and nothing more can be asked of it. In this sense, the ensuing Principles are sufficiently specified and -•j spe cif ic .

We might conclude with the study of the first two chapters of the Analytic of Principles. The third chapter, on Phenomena and Noumena, is already a part of the Dialectic and would properly serve as a kind of introduction to it. It is interesting to note that in the last paragraph of the present introduction Kant speaks of the Transcendental Doctrine of Judgment (for which 'Analytic of Principles' is an alternative designation) as having two chapters, though in fact it has three. This brings us to the end of the Postulates of Empirical Thought and thus tacitly acknowledges that Chapter III ' (on Phenomena and Noumena) is on a different topic. I include the appendix to the chapter, on the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection at the end. 197

Chapter I The Schematism of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding The title, which introduces this all important division of the Critique, is of course dictated mainly by architectonic considerations: judgments as against concepts are to be considered; the proposition "every event has a cause" as against the concept of causality, whatever that difference may be said to be. The division is more appropriately designated by its content and this is given in the subtitle. Analytic of Principles. But as soon as we make our way through the first chapter we find that its subject matter is essentially concepts rather than judgments. The latter, the transcendental principles, are taken up only in Chapter II, one of the largest in the Critique and the culmination of the whole category problem. The Schematism has always fascinated Kantians, both professional and amateur. What meaning is to be given to its brief, deceptively lucid content? If it had been omitted would the critical philosophy have been any different? How does its presence affect our view of the rest of the Critique? Many more questions about it have been discussed. Once again, although Kant's reason for introducing the topic may seem to us obscure and inadequate, it is, like all topics in the Critique, of first importance and worth discussing. When we gain an understanding of it we see that it does and must throw light on the rest of it. There are in fact two or three pages in the Schematism that are absolutely indispensable for the understanding of it. Much has been written on the subject but I shall proceed to ignore all of it and offer an interpretation that should at least stimulate the re-reading of the Schematism even if it is not accepted. To the extent that the Schematism is not a unitary discussion of a single problem the chapter may be interpreted as addressing itself to three loosely related problems: (1) the subsumption problem; (2) the problem of the definition of the categories; (3) the deduction problem. We shall take these up in turn. (1) The subsumption problem is both general and

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specific. In the first sense, it is of course a matter of interest as to how we are to understand the notions of set-membership and set-inclusion, but this should be of no immediate concern in the Critique since it has other issues before it. Kant, I think, is never inclined to be a Platonist any more than he is a sceptic. He has simply too much common sense, gesunder Menschenverstand (a Platonist would say, indeed too much). The problem of "forms" or "ideas" is of no interest to him. He is as far from Plato as Hume is: one can go no farther. It would therefore be curious if Kant had decided to go into these questions for their own sake. He has not. He takes up the subsumption problem because he is interested in how the pure concepts of the understanding apply to appearances or intuitions. This of course relates also in turn to the other two problems of the Schematism. But the relevance of this may also be contested. The reason is that since the pure concepts or categories are not class-concepts at all, they do not raise any questions about subsumption. Kant's discussion of the categories has been sketchy so far but sufficiently clear to show us that they are concepts only by courtesy, for want of a better name. No thing, no class of things, no relation, no class of relations in any familiar sense (as up-down, brother of, rotation, etc., are relations) is named by 'causality1, 'reality', 'possibility'. They may be provisionally called 'functors of synthesis' but it is best to await the exposition of the Analytic of Principles to say conclusively what they are. For these reasons then subsumption seems irrelevant both in a general and in a specific interpretation of the so-called "pure concepts . " But another approach offers itself. It is that Kant used the subsumption problem only as a way of leading into an analogous problem about the categories. When we explore this I think we see that the issue about relating the concept of the circle and a material disc-shaped object such as a dinner plate is a figurative way of raising this problem. This leads quite readily to both the second and the third problem which we loosely distinguished above. The point is the subsumption problem leads to that of the application of the categories and this in turn to the idea of deduction such as has just been carried out in the Analytic.

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If we read the second paragraph even casually we see that what Kant is interested in the the application (Anwendung) or the exemplification of the categories in Appearance. It occurs to him that what is needed here is a "doctrine of judgment" because, as shown in the preceding Introduction, judgment is the faculty for making applications. It is of course obvious, though not to Kant, that the Principles in the ensuing Chapter II are not applications in that sense at all. It is also apparent that what in this chapter makes application possible, namely time, is not a judgment. So once again Kant has come across an important matter for what seems to be a faulty reason. Let us take up the application question. The general problem arises from the absolute generality of the products of intellect and the absolute particularity of phenomena. Science brings these together. The paradigm of this is to be found in the j first great "breakthrough" beyond the traditional ' I" Platonist version of the problem: Descartes' inventions or discovery of analytic geometry. The issue had been i that of ue6e5ia, the participation of the particular ; in the universal. Aristotle had dealt successfully with any and all versions of the "third man" solution. The "relation" of universal and particular, which was unlike any other relation man was able to conceive of remained a mystery. It could be solved, some said, only by Plato's metaphysics. Others held it to be not really elusive, but illusory. The Christian metaphysic early found Platonism a perfect vehicle for its thought. What was the relation of the second (and the third, too) person in the Trinity to the first and how should we think of his Incarnation? How could God, the summit of reality and perfection, appear as man? Without seeking or pretending to offer an answer to these sublime questions, Descartes asked how one could relate the abstract idea of a circle, straight line, cylinder, sphere, and indeed any and every conceivable figure to a particular instance? The result he found in the algebraic presentation of these figures. Thus: Straight Line

ax + by = 0

Circle

(x-h) 2 + (y-k) 2 = 1 2

Ellipse a 200

Hyperbola

= 1

a Parabola y = etc. By giving x and y spatial interpretations on a system of coordinates one could present them visually in just that concreteness that was possessed by a table edge, a plate or wheel, and so on. Thus, the concrete form of a parabola appears to illustrate, embody, or "incarnate" the intellectual algebraic notion, v = x2 . that is, where x V= f(x), plus or assumes values and minus function y is a It was thereof. in time that apparent every shape any and X even the whatever, _ scribble , worst either had a corresponding algebraic function or one could be approximated more and more closely, if one took sufficient trouble to do so. Similarly, with the invention of the calculus one could produce an expression for any volume. One may now observe how one has proceeded not only from the perfect "Platonic circle" fixed in intellectual imagination to a particular disc or wheel, but also in the reverse direction because the algebraic formular has served as a rule to enable us to construct a circle. In this way a concept becomes not merely a vague fixture of thought but in the term which Kant taught us to use about concepts, a rule. Kant's language is perhaps a bit awkward since he talks about "some third thing" that must intervene between the concept and the object; even as early as Aristotle we were warned of danger if this was taken literally. The motion is not particularly improved by Kant's requirement that this third thing be both intellectual and sensible, still less by Kant's attributing both of these properties to what he accepts as the third thing, namely time. What now is the outcome of Kant's presentation of the subsumption problem as a kind of three-cornered figure with the abstract, the concrete and a mediant at the apex between them? It is, I believe, that it enables Kant first, to identify a key aspect of the 201

categories, namely time, second, to establish a connection between the Aesthtic and the Analytic and beyond this, third, to develop the main portion of his philosophy of science, in which we see how and why physical science is something other than mathematics, because in fact the physical world is for us not only a system of concepts but also of empirical intuitions. Thus mathematics may present us with what is true eternally and in all possible worlds, but physical science, appropriating what it needs of the language and technique of mathematics, is directed toward a world in space, but even more significantly, in time. It is man's picture of the world in time that Kant has undertaken to explore to its foundations. With this we can now discard the literal implications of the subsumptions metaphor with its third man difficulties. The point is Kant has implemented the view of concepts and causal laws as rules that has been presented in the Deductions and given us some notion how in practice this is to be understood. A concept, we may paraphrase him as saying, is a rule according to which the imagination can delineate a figure without being confined to the reproduction of a particular figure which experience has previously afforded me. We may observe that still another aspect of what \ Kant has under review in the Schematism is precisely , the question of "abstract ideas," which Berkeley first raised in the Introduction to his Principles; Hume endorsed Berkeley's solution in his Treatise • Kant's whole presentation in the Aesthetic, as we have already seen, is a virtual rejection of their narrow "imagistic" view of this matter. What Kant means by pure or formal intuition is a defense of what they are trying to repudiate. He is saying to them that it is not true that we are somehow limited in our mental powers to having visual, auditory and other impressions or ideas in present or previous experience and the various impressions and images involved in words. We can conjure up and operate intellectually (and successfully) with infinite space and time, which they were unwilling to allow; with breadthless lines, depthless planes, and so on. The mind, in its capacity as productive imagination is able to do all those things which they may have been quite right in saying ordinary intuition cannot do, and such imagination is absolutely essential to carry on the intellectual operations of science. His point is that we are not, as the British philosophers seem to maintain, in lockstep with experience, confined 202

only to reproductive imagination in what transcends the impressions of the moment. In all of this, Kant breathes the air of the nineteenth and even the twentieth century: more knowledgeable in both science and mathematics and not so suspicious of them as Berkeley and Hume often are. At the same time there is no trace of the immobile universe of eternal forms and paradigms of the Platonists. What we have as objects of intellect are concepts and these are meaningful to us only in so far as we are capable of giving interpretations and applications to them. For this capacity to deal with abstractions in a meaningful way Kant appropriates the term schema. His answer to the British standpoint is that of course no image could be adequate to the "pure concept" of a triangle. But it is schemata, not images of objects with which we think. And a schema is the concept treated as a rule by which it is possible to synthesize or delineate a determinate particular. What is needed then, Kant is saying is not so much a repudiation of pure Platonic forms, nor restriction of thought to imagistic particulars, as a new understanding of what a concept is in relation to particulars. Not a high heaven far removed from lowly earth, as if we had to choose between them,but a new interpretation of the means by which the soaring eye, so to speak, comprehends the earth. We have comprehended a subject when we are intellectually able to construct it; to do so we need a rule; what we call a concept is such a rule. One wishes that Kant had not thought it a "dry and longwinded dissection" to explain schemata to us in detail and to show how they are developed and used (A142/B181). (2) The problem of the definition of the categories now has a background against which we may reasonably hope for an elucidation, if not a solution. It is evident that the categories are not simple class notions, such as dog and triangle or even the number five, which Kant uses as examples of such notions. But if one is to explain what is meant by 'causality1, 'substance', 'reality1, 'necessity' and other such notions, we must present them as related in some manner to intuition and imagination. This Kant undertakes to do for nearly every categorical term, but in greater brevity than one might wish. If we ask for definitions 203

of the categories there are just three places to look in the Critique: in the Metaphysical Deduction (or Clue), in the Schematism, and in the Analytic of Principles. We must, however, remember that Kant has told us several times that he does not intend to offer an analysis of each of them in the Critique : he is obliging himself only to offer a critique of pure reason, not a system of pure reason. The latter will perhaps come later. (Only the Metaphysical Foundations appeared.) We must therefore be content in the Schematism and elsewhere. If we collect what Kant has said regarding the four general classes of categories and the particular categories under each we can gain a fairly clear view of Kant's definitions somewhat more systematically:

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Schematism:

Definitions of Categories

Quantity: Generation or synthesis of time itself in the successive apprehension of the object (TimeSeries ) . Unity: \ Plurality: Totality:

[The pure schema of magnitude is number, i.e., the successive addition of homogeneous units (p.183) . Extensive magnitude involve successive synthesis (in time) by the productive imagination (A163/B204 . ]

Quality: Synthesis of sensation or perception with the representation of time or the filling of time (Time-Content) . Reality:

Correspondence to sensation in general. A being in time. Filled time .

Negation:

Not being in time. a limit).

Limitation:

(Not Defined)

Relation:

Empty time (as

Connection of representations with one another at all times according to a rule of time-determination (Time-order).

Substance (Inherence-Subsistence): Permanence of the real in time. Causality:

The real upon which, whenever posited, something else follows by rule. Succession in time.

Community:

Reciprocal causality of substance: simultaneity of reals.

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i

Modality: Time itself as the correlate of the determination whether and how an object belongs to time (Scope of time). Possibility:

Existence at any time. Agreement of a synthesis with the conditions of time in general.

Existence (Actuality): Existence in some determinate time. Necessity:

Existence at all times. (This echoes views first stated by the Stoic logicians,- see Mates, Stoic Logic, University of California Press, 1973).

(Space:

The pure image of all magnitudes for outer sense.)

(Time:

The pure image of all objects of the senses in general.)

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I have perhaps taken some liberty in speaking of these formulae as definitions of the categories. It will no doubt be granted that if not definitions in every sense of the term (the term 'definition' itself is not readily defined), they do certainly specify some very necessary and central traits of the categories . It must of course be noted that time plays the central role in this presentation of the categories, and thus time is clearly seen to occupy the place it has had from the very beginning in the Critique. The place of time in the scientific world-view that Kant promulgates makes him appear to be a good bit of a Heraclitean. He saw clearer than any of his predecessors, even Leibniz, what must be treated as fixed and true in all possible worlds, and what is regular only in conforming to or illustrating laws. He did not see these fixities and regularities as being somehow ontological or objective principles JLII things and processes, but as rules by which we assessed the transformations of things. Kant accepts change in all direction. The world is open-ended, infinite,problematic. It is useless to yearn for fixed points and lines of reference. The foundations that religions had stood firmly upon are regarded as useful, regulative ideas and ideals, if we know how to treat them sagaciously, otherwise they are meaningless. Despite the apparent rigidity of his moral system, he is an existentialist and nothing marks this better than his acceptance of time as the framework of the phenomenal world, more fundamental even than space. As we can see from the condensed formulae of the Schematism presented here, time is inherently involved in the definition of each of the categories. The four classes of these are presented as based respectively on the series, the content, the order, and the scope of time. The intent of this classification must now be explained. Experience, we recall, inherently involves more than momentary intuitions. The categories are the instruments by which the self manages to transcend what is momentary and perishing. The first aspect of the synthesis is mere perdurance in time as a set of distinguishable moments in a series. The moments must be thought of not only as discrete and passing but a_s a series, a multiplicity, das Mannigfaltige. 207

(We recall to mind the first Synthesis in the transcendental deduction.) This involves the notion quantity, the first of the four classes of categories. Second, we must observe that these instants or moments are not empty. Each moment is filled, qualitied, has content, and we know how to distinguish one from the other. This also involves a transcendence or synthesis because if each occurrent perished irrevocably we could say nothing of it, for to say something of it is to distinguish it from another occurrent alongside which, as it were, it can be laid and with which it can be compared. This involves the notion of quality, the second group of categories. Third, the connection of occurrents, or appearances involves the order in which they may stand. Four possibilities are to be distinguished. For example, one and the same appearance may turn up at two or more moments. This requires notions beyond mere perishing intuitions to establish. Identity, or the permanent, which is what is involved, goes beyond the momentary. We can readily see that if we think of this example as that of the same occurrent at different moments, there will be altogether four possibilities.28 ye can have: | ! (1)

Same occurrent at different moments.

(2)

Different occurrents at different moments,

(3)

Different occurrents at same moment,

!

(4) Same occurrent at same moment. Our capacity to think these signifies our command of yet other notions that go beyond empirical intuition. These are the categories of order in time. We may diagram them as follows. (1)

A

A

A A

A

208

(2)

A ._.

B

._.

C

__.

(3)

D

>

(4)

The fourth possibility is inherent in each of the others, so that the notion of the self-identical occurrent has no distinct category. The others present for us the notions of permanence or duration (Beharrlichkeit) , succession and simultaneity. In each case we see a power of synthesis at work moving in three different directions. When we ask what these three syntheses are or what "makes them possible", we find that they are the notion of thing-property (or -state), causal connection, and causally interrelated system. These are the categories of relation: substance, causality, and community. Fourth, the question of the extent of the synthesis is taken up under the scope of time. Here we command the notions of an occurrent at any time in the series, but not further specified; of occurrence at some definite time or times or stretch of time in the series; and of occurrence at any, all, and every time in the series. These define the categories of modality: possibility, actuality, and necessity. None of them can be derived from mere intuition. Kant sums them up as follows: If the occurrent occurs at some time or other, it is possible. If the occurrent occurs at some definite time, it is actual• If the occurrent never fails to occur, its existence is necessary• It must be conceded that Kant's derivation of the categories is ingenious. I suggest that it also amounts effectively to a definition of the categories, or as much of a definition as they receive. The further specification of them, or at least some of them is to 209

ä

be found in the forthcoming Analytic. The present derivation may therefore be kept in mind as we explore the Principles, particularly the Analogies of ExperiFinally, it should be remarked that just as the question of definition as it touches the categories must be left elastic, so also must that of deduction. That is to say, any such derivation as Kant provides in the Schematism may also be regarded as a kind of deduction, and in this instance, a deduction of particular categories. All that is needed is an exposition of the notion of experience itself: once we have this, we can see that the categories as defined or analyzed are absolutely necessary to experience and therefore make it possible. This brings us to the third approach to the interpretation of the Schematism. (3) The deduction problem as it arises in the Schematism makes itself felt mainly at the end of the section. The categories, Kant repeats, apply to sensate intuition and to nothing else. They are phenomenal in their very definition. He makes still another foray into definition of them, but breaks off after working out a few phrases in Latin: Phenomenal quantity is number

;'f

Phenomenal reality is sensation.

i.

Phenomenal substance is constancy and durability. Phenomenal necessity is everlastingness. (These are approximations to his terms.) Thus a further ray of light is shed on the first class of categories (of quantity), and on the fourth (or perhaps better the eleventh), the seventh, and the twelfth categories. "Schematizing" the categories means giving them the kind of definition hinted at in these phrases or in the more explicit phrasings of our previous exposition. If we now ask what a category may be apart from its schema, we find of course that it is, so far as experience is concerned, nothing at all, or if this is too drastic, it is a mere expression of a unity which can only be significant in actual experience. As happens so often in the Critique, a causal ex210

planatory remark opens up still another avenue of problems and interpretations, for Kant now introduces the phrase 'unschematized category' without explaining its relation to what has gone before. What he actually says leads one to think that he means by the phrase merely any one of the twelve logical "functions of judgment" which we have collectively referred to as Screed I. They are, he says now, "mere functions of the understanding for concepts without representing any objects." He also says, a moment before, that they have "only the logical significance of a mere unity of representations which have neither a reference to any object nor apart from this any significance" (A147/B186). Substance, in unschematizedform is thus simply the notion of a subject which is in no sense also a possible predicate. This suggests two questions: (1) What one can mean by a mere form or function in this connection and (2) what significance it can have to speak of this as an unschematized category. We have already gone into the first question when Screed I appeared in the Metaphysical Deduction. Kant hopes to arrive at the a priori fixtures of mind by an analysis of language. But what does 'language' mean? If it is stripped bare altogether of all semantic function, there remain only inscriptive or audible marks--these can scarcely be analyzed for anything except their physical or aesthetic properties. If on the other hand some semantic function is left to them we do not know where to draw the line between this and their categorical content or function. The upshot is not that Kant's approach is wrong, but that a mere elaborate analytical apparatus than Kant devised would have to be brought to bear in order to excogitate such a content or function. The second question may come down to asking whether it is a contradictio in adj ecto for Kant to speak of a category as unschematized. If what he has presented us with in the "time table" is the categories as schematized it is hard to see how they can be significant apart from this. This question then is perhaps much the same as the first. If so, one must, I think, identify the unschematized categories with the forms in Screed I. This is probably what Kant did intend, although opinions are often at variance with this interpretation. It is possibly therefore only a mild inconsistency to speak of a category as being unschematized.

211

I would now venture the opinion that although the process is still fragmentary and incomplete, the only deduction of the categories, as against the principles, that appears in the Critique appears in the Schematism. Only here has attention been given to specific categories, showing why and how they help constitute experience and make it possible. The importance of the Schematism is that it represents the completion of the task of the deduction, as Kant leaves it. This offers something of a revision of Kant's apparent view that schematization was something in addition to deduction. But I think a careful reading of the section shows that no true further operation is involved here. For all its ambiguities, the section provides some necessary ingredients in the solution of the critical problem. Its brevity is nearly as regrettable as its obscurity, it is a rare occasion in the Critique where one feels that the Abbs' Terrasson's remark quoted by Kant in the Preface (Axix) may well be applied: "Many a book would be shorter, if it were not so short."

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Chapter II System of All Principles of Pure understanding

At length Kant has arrived at the point where he can address himself to a summary answer to the basic question of the Critique enunciated in the Introduction, and often put out of sight since then: How are synthetic judgments possible a priori? Only now do we gain significant acquaintance with the judgments or propositions whose "possibility" we are to determine. It is apparent that we have arrived at the all important movement in this philosophic sonata. Here "the past is prologue" for reasons that we have expressed as we have gone along and that may be stated once more. The clue to the principles is of course the table of categories, although the connection is often tenuous. The transition from one to the other is characterized by Kant as simply one of employing in judgments the a priori concepts of the understanding that have been expounded and deduced. This continues the rather mechanistic metaphor he has employed from the outset: parts, mechanisms, functors have been prepared and are now to be installed in a larger machine. It is understandable enough that a clarification of concepts may well be advisable in preparation for the exposition of judgments or propositions. But if the deduction is more than this, one may well ask what one needs to do twice over with concepts such as causality, substance, or existence, particularly when the first account is not simply a definition of these terms but a "deduction". Or looking back over the deduction, should we think of it as having reference to no categories in particular? It is difficult to see how we could find such an operation meaningful unless we knew what categories we were deducing or legitimizing and what their function was to be. Kant has been particularly vague on these two scores throughout the transcendental deduction. we have as yet been told very little what it is for a category to apply specifically to experience or to intuitions (cf. §§22-24). What appears to be at stake here is whether the 213

role of the categories by themselves, and their deduction, is truly functional in the Critique or only contributory to the principal matter, the Principles. In favor of the latter interpretation is the fact that, let us say, causality tout court is simply a word, a fragment of a judgment, and without significance apart from use in judgment. Moreover, one can scarcely speak of causality or any mere concept by itself as any sort of a priori knowledge such as Kant has been in quest of, although 'every event has a cause' may very well be, and indeed is, according to Kant. What purpose then has the labored account of the categories served? I am inclined to think that Kant was wedded to the idea of a logical model for the Critique and thus selfobliged to provide distinct accounts of conceptions, judgments, and reasonings. If we say that this was actually not necessary, we must distinguish between the logical necessity of the subject matters of the Critique to one another, and the material necessity of having some sort of framework for the problem of the Critique to arise in Kant's mind at all. The latter may have been a real necessity. The former is debatable and we cannot escape the need to consider it merely out of loyalty to Kant's memory as a philosopher of prodigious powers. We shall not.make this an actual topic of investigation but we may recur to it in the exposition of the Principles. It is evident that in terms of the program of investigation so clearly set forth in the Introduction, the main questions of the Critique are directly confronted only in the Analytic of Principles, and all else must be treated as either contributory or derivative in relation to it. What is the a priori knowledge on which experience and the whole natural science rests? In essence, though perhaps not altogether exclusively, it is the propositions demonstrated in the Analytic of Principles. Certainly it cannot be any proposition we please in which the term 'causality' appears but precisely the proposition that events are related causally in the manner expounded in the Second Analogy. The deduction so far has been preparatory in nature and some of it will be repeated. What Kant has done in the deduction is to show that there must be a priori knowledge, but he has not shown us what it is. This is only now to be revealed in detail. We shall interpret the foregoing deduction as a 214

purported proof that experience and scientific knowledge are possible only if we have a priori knowledge of a certain sort on whose basis alone we can suppose such knowledge to be objective, that this in turn rests on the presumption of a transcendental unity of consciousness, and that the objectivity of knowledge which this consciousness commands is effected by means of certain concepts whose identity may be learned from the logical form of judgments. But we have really no way to gauge their power or scope until we see what a priori truths or principles we actually are in command of with them. Having identified the key concepts we should now readily be able to determine the principles. And if we can offer proofs of them, the principal task of the Critique will have been completed. This then is the program that Kant now undertakes: the categories are our guide to the principles, and they should lead us to the totality of them; we must undertake proofs of them; this itself will tell us how those synthetic judgments on which experience rests are possible a priori.

215

Section 1 The Highest Principle of All Analytic Judgments Before turning to synthetic judgments which, if a priori, are Kant's main concern, he turns to his classification of all propositions into analytic and synthetic to set forth the basic principle decisive of the truth of judgments in each class. Reference to analytic propositions may appear unnecessary since Kant has made it altogether clear that the principles now to be presented are classic instances of the synthetic a priori. But he has a very good reason for adverting to them once more, namely, to show that reference to time enables us to determine a crucial difference between analytic and synthetic a priori propositions. As we have pointed out before, Kant's basic view of logic is entirely compatible with modern thought on the subject even though his particular logical doctrines are limited by the low horizon and moribund state of the subject in his day. He is careful to expunge every trace of psychological interpretation in the subject and with this goes a clear recognition that all time-determined considerations are out of place in it. The supreme principle of analytic judgments, he supposes, is the principle of contradiction. Thus, presumably if logic were to be formalized, one of its axioms would be the principle.It is impossible that something should simultaneously be and not be. 'Simultaneously' is zugleich and of course can also be read 'at once' or 'at one and the same time.' Kant's point is that reference to time is not only alien to logic but confuses a logical truth with a proposition about what may or may not be true about the material state of things. Thus, it is altogether possible in speaking of material, historical fact to find both 'A is B' and 'A is not B' to be true, for at one A may be B, let us say white, and at a subsequent 216

moment be not B, that is not white, but say yellow or blue. Logic has no interest in such purely material generalizations nor should its fundamental principles be put in these terms. The principles of contradiction should take the form: It is false that B is not B in which there is no reference to time. In this form, the highest principle of all analytical judgments is itself analytical. Kant also considers, as he did in the Introduction to the Transcendental Logic, the general question of a criterion of truth in order to take up the next section the proof of Transcendental Principles. The principle of contradiction serves as a negative criterion of truth because any proposition which is self-contradictory is false. It can be decisive of the truth of a proposition in the positive sense only when a proposition is already known to be analytic. But Kant offers as a criterion of analyticity only the vague rule that the predicate of an analytic judgment is contained in the subject. If we can apply this rule without reference to the principle contradiction on the latter may serve as a positive criterion of truth. If not, the question of truth has been begged. The more important result of the section is that of the exclusion of time from the consideration of the truth of analytical propositions. As we have seen in the Schematism, and as will be particularly evident in the Analogies, time is of central importance for synthetic a priori judgments.

217

Section 2 The Highest Principle of all Synthetic Judgments The supreme principle is stated in the last paragraph as follows: Every object stands under the necessary conditions of the synthetic unity of the manifold of intuition in a possible experience. It of course condenses the deduction once again, perhaps finally, into a formula that catches some of the essentials. 'Stands under 1 , steht unter, is of course not very lucid: one must reflect how much has been said that bears upon this "stands under" or "is subject to." We may attempt a gloss or excursus on the original in somewhat the following terms. What we apprehend as objects and processes in experience is to be accounted for not only by empirical intuitions but also by certain necessary conceptual conditions that organize them and give them unity. When we explore these we find them to be creations of pure understanding: (1) empirical concepts, which are in essence rules; and (2) rules for devising rules, which are characterized as categories or, less accurately "pure concepts" of the understanding. The unity they lend to experience must be traced back still further to a transcendental unity of apperception which "employs" them as its "instruments." Without such unity, experience, if one could call it that would be no more than a "rhapsody of perceptions." This then is the by now familiar train of argument that presents the categories by what I have called the diremptive method, analytically tracing or tracking down the components of experience. But we can and must also put the matter in the so-called transcendental manner. Beginning with the fact that we have knowledge, that science is knowledge, we find that such knowledge is possible only if certain propositions are true a priori. Among these propositions are particularly those which we are about to consider under the Analytic of Principles. Once we make the analytic-synthetic distinction we see that they present us with the problem that although synthetic, they are known to be true a priori: we will, according to Kant, under no conceivable circumstances give them up. Having therefore no usual way to account for their high probability as empirical 218

generalizations to which no exception is ever found, we are compelled to undertake a summary review of the foundations of all knowledge, of the understanding and indeed of the intellect or pure reason in general. As we narrow the problem we find this to be the problem of transcendental logic. After what may have appeared to be numerous digressions, and we may add, ceaseless repetitions Kant has now returned finally and firmly to the task of accounting for how there can be synthetic propositions known a priori. Taking them specifically, one by one, all that has gone before must now be clearly kept in mind. With the demonstration of the key prinples we shall have answered the basic problem of the Critique. The remainder of the story, the Dialectic, gives us perhaps an even broader view of matters by reviewing the pathology of pure reason, just as the study of ill health or of the growth of cancerous tissue may reveal to us much about organic function that we might not learn from normal or healthy organisms. Kant, however, does not simply deplore and dismiss these pathological conditions as aberrations as his fellow positivists have done. He demonstrates his ascendency over all of them by discovering a unique sweetness in these uses of adversity.

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Section 3 Systematic Representation of all Synthetic Principles of Pure Understanding It is of course Kant's aim to identifiy and to demonstrate certain principles which make knowledge possible. Among these principles we find in the Second Analogy a proposition which would generally be regarded as setting forth the Uniformity of Nature, or a Principle of Sufficient Reason or of Causation, or perhaps a principle to justify induction. Whether this is accurate or not, one can at least say that if anyone were to demonstrate such a principle the question of the status of scientific laws or of the justification of induction would be profoundly affected and certain age-old problems would by the same token be solved. We are in no position to go into these questions in the present context, either to ask after the current situation with regard to the demonstration of any such principles, or to judge Kant's success or failure in this. Our purpose is simply to help to gain a clear understanding of his views on the matter, which everyone recognizes as being of prime'significance. It is by now evident that much more acquaintance with specific laws of nature had to be gained than was available to Kant and that much more reflection on the methods of inductive and deductive sciences was necessary before one could hope to see what fundamental principles underlay the sciences and what their logical relation to the total economy of science was. Kant's work is a milestone of momentous progress in thought about these problems, but we must not expect either a perfect formulation of the principles, or a rigorous proof of them, or a perfect articulation of their logical status in a scientific knowledge as a whole. Only doctrinaire "Kantians" will balk at this or those who do not agree that the solution of philosophical problems is a gradual affair to which many hands must contribute. We must therefore keep constantly before us the question whether the principles Kant now formulates do play the role in knowledge which he says they do. I think this must raise grave doubts in our minds on 220

his formulation of the principles themselves and of their logical relation to the rest of the edifice of scientific knowledge, above and below. These will engage us .; fairly constantly as we proceed through the Analytic. \ The second point is touched on directly in the ! present introduction to Section 3. Kant repeats the ( oft-reiterated point regarding the relation of the ; Principles to the structure of knowledge that without such principles there can be no knowledge, and that "laws of nature stand under (are subject to) higher principles of the understanding and simply apply them to specific phenonmena. They supply the concept which contains the condition and, as it were, an exponent to a general rule, which experience furnishes the particular case that falls under the rule." (The term 'exponent is not further explained.) The question now is what precisely we are to understand to be the logic of ' the without—which—not that characterizes the principles? . Is it explained by the matter we have quoted? Is a particular law or generalization simply a particular instance of the principles Kant has formulated? No one who has followed the efforts of Mill, Keynes, Russell, Reichenbach, and von Wright can suppose that Kant has done much more than point a very determined finger in a certain direction for a solution. I think we must say that we cannot leave matters simply where he left them, but neither can we ignore his approach to it. This is the spirit in which we shall take up the Principles. It may be said that not all of the principles Kant formulates raise all the arduous problems that the Principle of Causality does (the Second Analogy). This is probably true. In most of the remaining cases Kant certainly ferrets out certain propositions which underlie science in the sense that if we confidently carry such and such cognitive operations, then we must be convinced that such and such principles hold. It remains to be seen whether this underlying is more than merely having certain things in^mind. Kant himself points out that there may be several orders or levels of generality among principles. He is not, for example, concerned in the following discussion with the axioms of various mathematical sciences. No mathematician disputes that axioms underlie the subject. What Kant is concerned about is something more fundamental, as we shall see in a few moments under the Axioms 221

of Intuition. It should also be said that it is rather specifically natural science that is the issue here and not mathematics, although the lines are not always perfectly distinct. Kant's final point is to prepare us for a subclassification among the Principles which appeared only in B. (It is made first in reference to the Screed of the categories in § 11, a section which was wholly added in B.) This is the characterization of the categories and principles of quantity and quality as mathematical, and of those of relation and modality as dynamical. It is possible that these do not deserve much attention although they are not quite trivial either. Kant of course does not mean that the princi-J pies are concerned with mathematics or with dynamics 'I in the narrow sense of the terms. I At B110 Kant spoke of the first pair of classes of categories as being "directed toward pure and empirical objects of intuition" and the second pair "toward the existence of these objects either in relation to one another or to the understanding." This is made only slightly clear in the present context. The mathematical principles which affirm that intuitions are extensive and intensive magnitudes, seem to Kant more intuitively certain than the dynamical (Kant's term is here explicitly intuitiven, and not as in most occurrences of the term in translation derived from his own Latin for Anschauung). If the analogies say that (a) although there is no intuitional evidence for it, there is always something permanent in experience, (b) from any existent we can always infer another existent as its cause, and (c) all existents exert mutual influences on one another, then I think Kant is quite right in detecting a distinctly weaker degree of intuitive certainty in them than in the Axioms of Inuition. The case is, however, unconvincing in reference to the Anticipations of Perception and the Postulates of Empirical Thought. Kant reverts to the point several more times in the Critique. We have at length arrived at a most important turn in the Critique. The Principles which are ostensibly "derived from" the categories are now introduced. Much more attention has been devoted over the decades to the deduction of the categories. I wish to suggest that the Principles, at least the Analogies and the Postulates, are inherently more important and more lucid. 222

Axioms of Intuition A:

Principle of the pure understanding: All appearances are, in respect to intuition, extensive magnitudes.

B:

Their principle is: All intuitions are extensive magnitudes. Proof

Before we examine the argument, let us ask what we have been led to expect of a principle based upon the categories of Quantity. First, all of the principles have been declared to be synthetic and a priori. There is therefore no procedure for proof or verification such as we may employ if a proposition is thought to be analytic or a posteriori. Kant has in any event not said what these procedures would be. Although the principles are already declared to be synthetic and a priori, I think we must not take this for granted. Rather, we should regard them as being proposed to serve as a priori principles and then assess the available means of proof and the particular proofs Kant has supplied. Since the analyticity-syntheticity of a proposition is always in some degree indeterminate, if not worse, for propositions in an unformalized system, it is safer to suppose the principles to be synthetic than analytic. The first general principle, for example, unless it is to be regarded as a definition of intuition, has none of the self-evidence which we generally expect of an analytic proposition in a natural language. It should be equally apparent that it is not a generalization about experience, learned from experience, and capable of being falsified by some future experience. So much may be said of the principle formally. We should keep rather more distinct than Kant does the principle "all appearances are extensive magnitudes" from the axioms of geometry he talks about in the course of the discussion. We shall concentrate not on these but the general principle. We ask next about the matter or content of the general principle. In this case the principle bears no relation to the categories besides the use of the 223

term 'quantity1. In the table of judgments (Screed I ) , Kant has classified propositions as to quantity under universal, particular and singular. How can this have any mathematical signficance, such as the principle evidently has? When the subject term of a proposition is "quantified" by 'all' and 'some' it is certainly not quantified in any mathematical sense. 'None' of course, quantifies, if 'all' and 'some' do, but Kant places this under the categories of quality, as negation. The principle speaks of the applicability of concepts of magnitude and quantity, arithmetical and geometrical concepts, to appearances; the forms of judgment and the categories of quantity have reference only to logical quantification. The matter, however, is really not very serious. No great consequence depends on the "derivation" of the principle from some particular class of categories. The categories should suggest the principles but no greater relevance is necessary. In this light we can see that Kant has discussed mathematics sufficiently in previous parts of the Critique J to justify his asking about the use of mathematics in ;•• natural science. This is, in fact, exactly what the { Axiom addresses itself to. It affirms that the concept* of quantity or magnitude is applicable to the intuitions to which natural science attends. Kant then offers • support for the general principle. All of the categories and principles are part of the formal apparatus that is brought to bear upon what is given in intution. They must bear some seal of legitimation, for although they apply to experience they are not derived from experience. It is evident that it rerequires more than empirical intuition to devise the notion of quantity. Synthesis and, as we saw in the Deduction in A, several levels of it are necessary. The principle now sets this forth explicitly. We need an a priori principle to apply mathematical notions to experience. We cannot learn from intuition what we apply to it, and we cannot learn from it that all intuitions are susceptible to mathematical techniques. The proof of this runs of course to the effect that without possessing some such principle a priori scientific knowledge is impossible.But since there is such knowledge, it is reasonable to posit the principle. What is of course necessary to carry out this proof is to show that empirical intuitions are capable of mathematical treatment. For this we must begin with the proof already offered in the Aesthetic that space 224

and time are a priori forms of intuition. Space is for Kant a system of an infinite number of homogeneous volumes. (He does not subscribe to the identity of indiscernibles.) Everything in space is likewise subject to the same condition. A planet, a house, or a trunk occupies so many exactly equal and homogeneous cubic feet or centimeters of space. Citing this number expresses is magnitude. But this we do not learn from intuition. It is w_e who decide that these twelve things are merely so many quantitatively identical members of some class or other; we do not prove this by reference to empirical intuition. We can do the same thing with time, for moments and intervals of time are also qualitatively indiscernible. Leaving this specimen in brine for one hour and that one in alcohol is one and the same so far as time is concerned. Once we have legitimized our use of the concepts of spatial and temporal magnitude we have two cornerstones of physical science. The two together enable us to develop the ideas of velocity and acceleration. If we can now add the notion of mass or matter we have the fundamental dimensions of the science of mechanics. (Kant proceeds to this task in the next principle.) Kant has thus affirmed a principle on which science itself rests. Without it our intellectual apparatus would sink to a level such as we can only surmise may be possessed by lower animal beings. It is a transcendental principle underlying the mathematics of appearance, or as we may say, of applied mathematics and mathematical physics. With it pure mathematics can find interpretation in the world of empirical intuition. The synthesis of spaces and times, makes possible both the apprehension of intuition and every outer experience, and thus our comprehension of objects. I think we should show some concern, particularly in the final paragraph of this section, whether Kant does not carry this principle too far. "This transcendental principle of mathematics," he says, "greatly enlarges our a priori knowledge. For it alone gives pure mathematics in its full precision, its applicability to objects of experience. What geometry says of pure intuitions is undeniably true also of empirical intuition." But can we really endorse this? Do we know, or dare we think that everything demonstrable in pure mathematics is bound also to be exemplified 225

in experience? Surely not. In order for there to be science we must be able to measure and to count. As Kant sees matters, the conditions that make it possible for us to measure or count are not present in empirical intuition. Only when we see them as subject to space and time which are a priori forms of intuition are we able to explain this for then the object and processes of appearance are seen as having measurable extension in space or time. But we must not forget that we are limited here by the nature of empirical intuition no less than by the conceptual apparatus employed. Space, for example, as a pure intuition is no doubt infinitely divisible. But this cannot entail that an object of appearance is so divisible. In other words we are always using the notions of pure mathematics at our own risk. The fact that there are six people in this room does not entail that there are twelve half-people in it, twenty-four quarter-people, etc. Kant's principle enables us to count persons or objects but this is subject to numerous "enabling conditions", as we might call them. There are, in other words, also other conditions than those prescribed by the axiom. One question which we will not be able to devote time to is the completeness to which Kant aspires in the a priori concepts and principles underlying science. Of course this is a current problem too.

226

Anticipations of Perception A:

The principle which anticipates all perceptions as such reads as follows: In all appearances, the sensation and the real which corresponds to it in the object (realitas phenomenon, phenomenal reality) has an intensive magnitude, that is, a degree.

B:

Its principle is: In all appearances, the real that is an object of sensation has an intensive magnitude, that is, a degree. Proof

The principle is reformulated in B in part no doubt because of the ungrammatical structure of it in A (a plural subject with a singular verb). But even when we correct this, the original sentence does not lay the emphasis where Kant seems to want it in B, on the notion of the variable intensive magnitude of reality rather than on the intensity of sensation. Of course there is no doubt that sensations are capable of variable intensity; this is plain fact. What Kant is concerned about is rather to attribute intensity or intensiveness to reality. Kant is speaking entirely in terms of a notion of reality that is serviceable to science, not to transcendent metaphysics. It is in fact his theory of matter that is being presented in this section. The principle of the anticipations, like all the others, affirms a synthetic proposition that must be treated as known a priori, as a presupposition of natural science. Again like all the others, it is a part of the metaphysics of science: it is not known as confirmable by scientific methods or instruments, but science presupposes such a principle or some alternative to it. The issue eventually is, should we understand the physically real in terms of atomism, which assumes only physical bodies and the void they inhabit, or should we suppose nature is a plenum and a continuum that is more intensely or densely filled in some places than in others. The opinion of physicists has varied on this question. The idea of the plenum, particularly in the

227

form of the ether, enjoyed a potent revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It began to lose ground with the Michelson-Morley experiment in the late eighties which failed to confirm the velocity of the earth through the ether and eventually led to the abandonment of the idea of the ether itself. The notion may however, recur because the alternative involves "action at a distance." A fully successful "unified field theory" would be likely to decide the matter, but this has apparently not yet been realized. Before propounding a "dynamic theory of matter" as a possible alternative to atomism Kant must first show how we can interpret the data of experience conformably to such a theory. He does not put this forward dogmatically but as what he finds workable alternative. The first principle Kant affirms here and elsewhere, precisely as we would expect from a natural scientist and in repudiation of rationalism, is that we must regard perception, sensation, as the origin and foundation of knowledge, even though we seem occasionally to find reasons to "doubt" our senses. In the end the question whether we can or cannot use this as a foundation is not something that can be proved or disproved in experience. Thus, the Principle of Existence, corresponding to the eleventh category specifying existence in terms of perception is a synthetic and a priori proposition, a principle unproved b_y science but necessary to it. Of course we learn how to crosscheck the deliverances of the senses. They may sometimes seem to deceive us, but how could we possibly dispense with them and have anything other than mathematical, logical, deductive but not natural science? Given this, we must now observe some of the properties of sense. The data of each sense-modality appear to be entirely unique but they also have some resemblance to one another. For example, the data of vision, touch, pain and temperature are or appear to be extended in space. Those of smell and taste have perhaps something less of this trait. Most of the data are also extended in time. As we learned in the previous section all intuitions are extensive magnitudes. In the present section Kant reminds us that all data of sensation also have a dimension of intensity• Under each of the classifications just mentioned we can observe data as being fainter or stronger. A given tone of a given pitch as a given intensity, which we 228

call its loudness or softness and the loudness can be increased or diminished by appropriate means. A color can be fainter or more prominent. Virtually the only variation possible in temperature, besides its extensity, is intensity. Tastes, smells, pains, electric shock, and kinaesthetic sensations are similarly capable of intensity. Kant's point now is that as sensation indicates the real, or as he says in the Second Postulate of Empirical Thought, since "what is bound up with the material conditions of experience, that is, with sensation, is actual," so we must suppose that the degree or intensity of sensations is indicative of the degree of actuality or reality. Of course we have learned by observation that intensity is correlated, but not identical with, the measure of the physical equivalents of sensation: frequencies of the vibrations of sound or color mediums, heights of columns of mercury, the speed of motions of molecules, etc. But the present principle goes beyond this. What Kant does is to offer an interpretation of the data of sense. What we apprehend in sensation as real may be regarded as filling a space or time to a certain degree. Between this and the absence of the phenomenon is a continuum in space or time of limitless degrees, from zero or non-being up to the intensity possessed by any given sensation. Such a sensation can be considered a synthesis that is, as it were, built up of component intensities. This is independent of its extensity, its extent in space and time. In this way Kant pursues still another application of this view of the construction of reality by synthesis. But Kant also has the purpose of offering a different notion of matter from that of neo-atomism which had reasserted itself and was eventually to proceed to a virtual confirmation in the twentieth century. In his day, the question was still far more of a speculative question than it now is. Even so, the matter is even now not altogether closed: empty space poses some stubborn questions about the transmission of light, energy, and force. Kant's point is that we can never empirically confirm the existence of empty time or space. "The complete want of reality in sensate intuition cannot be perceived nor can it be inferred from any given appearance." Kant boldly suggests that space and time are never empty. His suggestion that it is filled evinces a 229

radical empiricism that affirms the truth of sensation as against the view of Descartes, Locke and later natural scientists that the real is an impenetrable, physical but unobservable stuff that is everywhere uniform and varies only in its distribution in a void of space and time. Since such a void is inherently inconfirmable, the opposite hypothesis, says Kant, is much more reasonable, less "metaphysical," and more faithful to that intuition which must be for us the touchstone of reality: space and time are everywhere filled, but what fills them varies in intensiveness, not only in extensiveness or quantity, and this intensiveness is the measure of reality. Our sense data themselves provide us with an intuitive understanding of the dimensions of reality. Kant affirms this, in characteristic fashion, as a transcendental theory. He is astonished that science should lean so far in the other direction, toward what in his day at least was still a metaphysical supposition. (As we have said, in our day the supposition of particles appears to have become virtual fact though even now confirmable still only in its consequences.) Whether this chracterization ("metaphysical") is deserved or not, Kant regards his own view as an at least equally plausible hypothesis and one that something can and must be said in advance of, in anticipation of, experience, something a priori. We affirm either metaphysical atomism or the alternative to it. I think it must be said that until all the outstanding problems of cosmology are solved, Kant's view must remain in some greater or lesser degree a live option. This section shows how keenly aware Kant was of the inexorable dualistic difficulties that remain for the philosophy of physics and psychology in the standpoint which was affirmed by Locke and which is still in our time so largely taken for granted. Kant's interpretation, even if it is not thought to be demonstrated, draws attention to one of the basic presuppositions of science. The popular alternative to it is not obvious, not empirically confirmable, and not the sole imaginable explanatory possibility. Kant characterizes his own alternative to it as a synthetic proposition, a priori in intent. If this holds, the same is true of all forms of atomism. This is the challenge of Kant's theory.

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Analogies of Experience A:

The general principle of the analogies is: All appearances are in respect of existence subject a priori to rules that determine their relation to one another in time.

B:

The principle of the analogies is: Experience is possible only through the representation of a necessary connection of perceptions. Proof

The Analogies comprise the most important pages in the Critique. They tie together all that has gone before in the Aesthetic and the Analytic of Concepts and evolve principles regarding the key concepts of substance and causality that determine experience. Accordingly they deserve the most careful study. The Principles are rather uneven both in their content and structure. We have been led to expect them to develop on the lines of the categories. The first three categories are developed from the logical notion of the quantity of a proposition, while the Axioms of Intuition are concerned with mathematical quantity, something very different. Kant says that "their principle is: all intuitions are extensive magnitudes." This whole statement cannot be the axioms, since it is but one principle. If we look for axioms in the plural there is only the rather vague discussion in the third and fourth paragraph which does not seem to be integrated with the stated principle at the head of the section. Finally there is no principle corresponding to each category. In the Anticipations, Kant again begins the A formulation with "the principle . . . is as follows." This leads us to expect the actual anticipations to be found elsewhere. But if so, they are never formulated: we learn only that in experience we are constantly anticipating perceptions. The formulation in B suggests that i^t is the principle itself, that "the real . . . has a degree." But then again this is one principle not many: why does Kant speak of anticipations, in the plural? Finally, although reality and negation are explicitly discussed, we are left to our 231

surmises about a possible principle of limitation, the sixth category. Since Kant was so explicitly concerned to offer a rigorous deprivation of a priori concepts and principles, the loose organizations of these topics is not easily explained. In the Analogies, we have principles that strictly correspond to the categories (seventh, eighth, and ninth). No doubt because of the weightiness of the subject matter Kant now adds an extra principle governing all three and serving as an introduction to them. I suggest that this principle is closely related to the twelfth category: the key term in it (in B) is necessary , the subject of the final Postulate of Empirical Thought. The reason is that what Kant means by 'necessity' in the Postulates is simply that the universe is pervasively conformable to natural law. This is, of course, exactly what the Analogies maintain. In the instance of the Postulates, finally, Kant has a principle for each category, but unlike the present set, no general principle for all three. I think Kant must himself have been somewhat uneasy about the architectonic he himself invented: he is certainly indifferent to it when it suits his thought. At other times he refers to it confidently as virtually dictating and necessitating certain results. The Analogies are no doubt the best expounded of all the Principles, as befits their importance. They also, I think, exhaustively divide their subject matter, which is the "necessary connection of perceptions." We may first review the principle of division. As we have learned in the Schematism and elsewhere, the key difference between purely logical and metaphysical notions (in the sense of metaphysics or philosophy of science) is time. Time is the most pervasive feature of all experience, inner and outer. It may or may not be a feature of the world independent of experience, the world as a thing itself: but what we are concerned with here is experience alone. We have distinguished between two senses of 'experience1. It may mean either (E-|) the multiplicity or manifold of empirical intuitions without regard to their order or character, or (E2) the live tissue of events and occurrences with its temporal and spatial dimensions, organized by memory and anticipation, in short, the world "we know our way around in." Human ^32

experience may begin with the former but much must be added from elsewhere for it to eventuate in the latter. There must first of all be the comprehensive systems of space and time, beyond the turmoil of phenomena, Gewühl der Erscheinugen. Again there must be notions or functions that connect one event with another. The mind has or develops the powers to effect this result. Kant's broad analytic approach begins with experience in sense E2 and tries to either unpack its every content or reconstruct it out of its elements so that we have eventually a complete philosophical grasp of it — we may select either of these images to characterize the operation. The need for categories arose from Kant's doctrine that experience is relating, that the relata are discrete, perishing elements, and that the relating process involves time. As we have seen, Kant begins at the fundamental level with an atomism of intuitional elements. He then undertakes to show not only how this process of relating proceeds but how its outcome can inject necessity into experience, can account for the necessity he believes inheres in experience in the broad sense of the term ( E 2 ) . If one begins with such elements the construction of any complex or manifold involves taking one or two or more elements in some fundamental relationship to one another and repeating the operation. The elements, or micro-events as we may call them, must be distinct and it must be possible for them to occur with one another or apart from one another in time. There will then be four possible ways of relating them : (1)

Not concomitant

Not different (Identical)

(2)

Not concomitant

Different (Not identical)

(3)

Concomitant

Different (Not identical)

(4)

Concomitant

Not different (Identical)

We may diagram the alternative ways of relating as follows: (1) v. sup. 2 08 (2) 233

(3) v. sup. 2 09

(4) Here the dimension of time runs from left to right; from A to B, and so on. (1) The first case is that of two (provisionally distinguished) elements which are qualitatively identical but not concomitant. what answers to this? It can only be that of something that is permanent, that abides, and presents itself twice (or more t i m e s ) . One and the same thing that reappears must, to that extent, be thought permanent. The question of how we can explain such a possibility , how we "realize" such a notion, involves schematizing and categorizing. This takes us beyond the mere modus of time that we know as permanence . (2) The second case is that of two elements that turn out to be neither concomitant nor identical. In this case one of them must precede while the other follows: they are related by the relation of succession. But how can we decide between the two? As in the previous case, we must bring in other notions if we are to say anything about this, one way or the other. If we say, first this one occurs and only then that one, we have introduced a new factor into the situation. What this is remains to be seen. (3) The third case is that of two or more different contents which are, however, concomitant. In this instance we take note of the fact that a differentiation has been made within the same moment of time: two events are simultaneous. In E-| we are in a position to grasp no more than one element in one moment; every moment is unity. But in the E2 of the present case more than this is asserted. A synthesis unlike both (1) and (2) must have occurred: in the former case we had an identical and in the latter a non-concomitant event; here we have non-identical and concomitant events. In order to provide for this kind of synthesis we need still another new concept or functor. (4) Suppose finally that we are thinking of two (provisionally distinguished) contents or elements which are in fact found identical and concomitant. What we have is of course a distinction without a difference. 234

Every content may be thought to conform to this way of looking at it. Here we need no new concept or functor because in fact we have not gone beyond the immediate moment in any way. The result is that we are in need of devising or discovering three conepts or mechanisms that enable us to explain how in E2 these three syntheses are effected; each of them transcends the immediate given E-|. These three relations between discrete contents in time are distinguished by Kant as permanence (duration, continuity), succession, and simultaneity (Beharrlichkeit, Folge, and Zugleichsein). The question then is, in view of the fact that in E.. we have only perishing impressions, how do we arrive at a command of time in E 2 in terms of the permanence and succession and simultaneity of events? The answer is, that we (the paradigmatic we) devise the notions of substance, causality and reciprocity , or as we may also express them: thing and property, necessary connections of events, and nature as a systematic whole. The three together comprise the notion of the lawlike character, of the complete determination of events: occurrents related to continuants, related to their determining conditions, and reciprocally related to the whole in which they occur. Not only science, but experience itself (E2) is a comprehension of the what and why of things, and science is but an extension and refinement of experience. Without these three functors in full operation, our experience would be little better than that of molluscs. Man's greatest invention by far is -- experience! Kant's point is that contrary to what the empiricists had to say, experience is not where they said it was, right under our noses, ready to be discovered . The mathematical-dynamical distinction which reappears here need not engage us long. Once again Kant in effect offers us not very good reasons for doing something that is in itself immensely valuable. He proceeds sometimes like the Evangelists who felt they had to cite ancient prophecies as being fulfilled in every act of the Savior, as if these needed extrinsic corroboration of their power.

235

First Analogy A:

Principle of Permanence: All appearance contain the permanent (substance) as the object itself and the transitory as the determination of it, that is, as the manner in which the object exists.

B:

Principle of the Permanence of Substance: In all alteration of appearances, substance remains and the quantum thereof in nature neither increases nor diminishes. Proof

We may first observe the difference between the principle as formulated in A and B. In A the phrasing is oriented toward metaphysics. It makes the point that in experience we must have the notions of the continuant and the occurrent, the inherent and the subsistent. In B Kant clearly has in mind one of the laws of motion formulated by Newton in the Principia. The presentation of the laws at the head of the Principia as unproved axioms is undoubtedly the model for Kant's formulation of all the Analogies. The clue to this is already given in the Introduction (B17, added in the second edition) where Kant speaks of natural science, or physics, as containing a priori judgments as principles. He explicitly cites the third law of motion and the so-called principle of the conservation of matter. In the section on mechanics in : the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science he cites the same as the third and first laws of mechanics. He then adds regarding the first law, "from general metaphysics we may draw the principle that in all alterations of nature no substance comes into or goes out of existence, and here we merely exexpress what substance is in matter" (was in der Materie die Substanz sei); regarding the third law he says, "from general metaphysics we must draw the principle that all external effect in the world is reciprocal." The second law of mechanics is formulated as "every change in matter has an external cause" , and more specifically, "every body remains in its conditioning rest or motion and of the same velocity unless it is compelled to change this state by an external cause." He then adds as in the other two cases, "from general metaphysics we may draw the principle that all change has a cause; here we intend to show only that every 236

change in matter must have an external cause." It seems reasonable to assert therefore that the Analogies are based upon the Newtonian laws, formulated in more general terms, as befitting the science of nature in general. Kant is not invoking or appealing to metaphysics in a Rationalist or Cartesian sense. In speaking of substance and causality, as we shall see, Kant is indeed formulating the metaphysics or the philosophy of science, but only in the sense of presenting the concepts and presuppositions of science. His notion of substance is virtually devoid of the metaphysical overtones of the "substratum" that Descartes and Locke invoked and that Berkeley discussed, particularly in the Hylas-Philonous dialogues. 'Substance' and 'causality' defined in such and such a way, Kant is saying, are simply indefeasible parts of the vocabulary of natural science. So far as Kant presents an analysis of causality in a narrow sense, we shall not find it too different in essentials from Hume's account, but he has much to say of this topic that Hume neglected to say because he was more concerned about the precarious condition in which Hume had left the problem of knowledge . Kant's intention is to prove that experience presupposes the existence of something permanent. Such an existent is not apparent in E-j which is a mere coming and going of representations, but we are certainly convinced of it in E2- As in all other areas in which this problem arises for Kant, if a claim in E2 cannot be made good in E 1 , we must seek elsewhere; we cannot ignore the claim, as Hume often does, or proposes to do. What is the character of the chaos of representations in E1? It is not even one of a succession of representations: if it were felt or found to be successive it would already be ordered and we would have no problem with it. But representations in our actual experience, in Eg, are found to be successive or coexistent. What then makes this possible, since it cannot be E1? There must, says Kant, be something permanent if there is anything successive. Permanence and succession are correlative notions, meaningless without one another.

237

Where then is the permanent? If we scrutinize E-|, so far as this is possible, we find nothing that answers to it. All the representations perish, and even this is saying too much, for in order to be found to perish they must be identifiable as having previously existed. E-) simply cannot and does not afford us a substance or substratum of any sort. To E-|, even if we close our eyes to the anomalies of what we are saying, we see now the piece of coal, and now some ashes, tar, smoke, and gas, if we collect them: at most so far as E 1 knows, this has merely replaced that; it is incompetent to declare one identical with the other. But as Kant points out, unless we know this there can be no experience at all, let alone a science such as chemistry, in Kant's later years on the verge of a fabulous development. At this point the suggestion may come to us that of course the successive occurrents are existent in time. Do we not think of time as like the permanent, pre-existing track on which the train runs with many events occurring in it, the crew working, diners dining, and so on? Time itself must be the permanent j in which passing events transpire. The difficulty with this is that time in and of itself, time as a summed up, funded series cannot be perceived at all. Another permanent must be sought and found. What is needed is in fact the reality of time, but at best we will have to be content with something that will serve as a kind of symbol or embodiment of this notion for us. The only thing that can body forth the notion of the whole time series is that of a substance and its states or properties. The latter come and go, the former remains: a state, property, or event is o_f something. Kant's point is that we are now looking upon the discrete "blips" or "representations" of E-| as such states, properties, and events , etc . Three proofs, all essentially the same, are offered at the outset of this section. The first paragraph, added in B, contains the first, the second contains two more. There follow concrete illustrations and explanations . What makes Kant's deduction interesting is that it assimilates the apparently metaphysical problem to the physical problem. He is pointing out that 238

fundamentally physics has no evidence of a permanent matter that remains throughout physical and chemical transformation. The problem is not one that scientists can afford to shrug off as important only to woolyheaded metaphysicians. unless you take this question seriously, Kant is saying, your science is like history, merely "a fable agreed upon." It is perhaps too much to say that Kant has disposed of the question, but he has certainly set it in an altogether new light. The word, 'substance1, is redolent of all metaphysics back to Aristotle, but the direction of thought is altogether new. It is not surprising that Kant offended or at least stirred up the philosophers far more than he did the scientists. The philosophers could readily say that his 'substance' was altogether a misnomer. Not so, says Kant, I am helping it to catch up with the times which are not those of Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus but of Lavoisier. (And soon, Dalton.) Kant is anxious also to maintain the continuity of his doctrine of substance in line with the traditional use of the notion. But he believes that no one has ever really succeeded in proving what needs to be in previous attempts, nor to observe carefully the necessary restriction of the notion to possible experience. It is particularly the latter point that differentiates his use of it from that of the a priorists before him. Kant is not saying over again what was said before him of material and mental substance. He has made of substance an extremely workaday notion, a necessity of experience and natural science. This can perhaps best be shown by keeping distinct his views on substance and the other matters likely to be associated with it. We must distinguish between (1) the object of awareness, (a) both that of Ej , the momentary sense data or empirical intuitions, and (b) of E2» the organized, named, and described object of experience in the broad sense, (2) substance and the correlative notions of attribute, state, event and, (3) things in themselves. Untold confusion is the result of mingling these notions which Kant has in practice resolutely sought to keep distinct. We must be careful not to confuse (la) and (lb), as already noted. It is best also to make certain that (lb) is regarded as the whole object of experience,whereas (2) is really an ingredient in (lb) as in another sense (la) is. The most important aspect of (lb) that which makes it what it is, among other things, is (2). Without this 239

function we are again on pre-human psychic and epistemic level. It is equally important to distinguish (lb), (2) and (3). Kant has begun to offer reasons for distinguishing (lb) and (3) almost on the first pages of the Critique• In view of the derivation and the discussion of his notion of substance in this analogy we must also carefully distinguish (2) and (3). Kant might have been better advised to appropriate some other term than 'substance.' Metaphysicians are a tenacious lot: they do not ride loose in the saddle over names and words: if one speaks of substance, only Aristotle's view of it may be thought decisive and every other way of reading their term thought to be in error. Kant's notion of substance departs markedly from the tradition. It is not really "metaphysicial" but wholly in the service of natural science. It is not the transcendentally real but a function of the empirically real,to use Kant's phraseology. Yet he took pains to try to reconcile his view of substance with the older one. The term 'substance', and 'accident' as well, must not be left to perish. The discussion of alteration at the end of the section forms the starting point for the Second Analogy. It is worth remarking that Veränderung makes Kant's point about substance and its states or attributes more obvious than 'change' does in English. In order to bring out the point one might coin the term 'othering' as a translation of Veränderung. Then in the formula below at B233 we would read, "All change (succession) appearances is but othering." That is, in change what alters persists and only its state changes, becomes other. The conservation principle which Kant affirms remains as a cornerstone of science. It is not that it is never assailed but that the burden of proof is always on any alternative to it. If a student finds the products of oxidation, radiation or combustion to differ qualitatively from the originals of the experiment, he does not immediately announce that the principle has been disconfirmed. He is advised to check his apparatus and his calculations more carefully. Creation, annihilation, and even transmutation of substances are not readily accepted as characterizations of natural process. Although developments of this sort are now realizable, the day to day faith of science is rooted in the conservation principles. Exceptions will prove to be truly extraordinary events. 240

;

This is after all what Kant is driving at in speaking of synthetic a priori principles. We can scarcely even tolerate the thought of their falsity, yet they are not confirmed in experiment, since they are among the presuppositions of experiment, and they are not merely analytically true or true by definition. We simply will not give them up. If we do, or if we must, science has gone through a veritable convulsion.

241

B Second Analogy A:

Principle of Production. Everything that happens begins to be, presupposes something upon which it follows according to a rule.

B:

Principle of Succession according to the Law of Causality. All alterations occur in accord with the law of the connection of cause and effect. Proof

This should properly be the most important section in the entire Critique because it finally presents and presumes to prove the most important synthetic a priori proposition of all, the causal principle, or, in effect, the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) and because more than any other part of the Critique it is committed to making finally clear to us where the element of necessity in knowledge that Kant has. pursued from the beginning is to be located. Kant's argument for this all-important Principle is not very rigorous or concise. Even though one may not agree with the "stratification" theories of various Kant scholars, one may yet concede that there is repetition several times over of the main proof of the analogy. For the sake of convenience we may divide the text as Adickes does into some six proofs solely for the purpose of acknowledging these repetitions. His division runs as follows (in Edition B ) : 29 Paragraph Recapitulation of the First Analogy 1 First Proof

2

Second Proof

3-6

Third Proof (Recapitulation of previous proof)

7-10

Fourth Proof (Recapitulation of the Second Proof

11-12

Fifth Proof

16-18 242

Sixth Proof(Recapitulation of the Second Proof) Predictables of Causality

19-20 19-20

On Alteration 21-28 On this view, the first proof may be regarded simply as a condensed version which Kant added in B. The second proof is the basic proof of A and the most decisive, since much of it reappears in the later proofs. These offer much that is redundant. We shall not emphasize all the proofs equally. We shall omit discussion of the two supplementary topics in paragraphs 19-28. The first of these relates the notions of causality and substance to one another. Substances, Kant says, must manifest themselves through action, while the ultimate source of force and action involved in causal functioning must lie in substances themselves. (The latter is of course a basic Leibnizian thesis.) The second argues that all alteration in causal processes must be continuous. Neither topic is necessary to the exposition of the analogy itself. The proofs are much less transcendental than we might expect, that is, less emphasis is placed on the need to presume a basic causal principle if we are to explain the possibility of knowledge and rather more on the analysis of the notions that enter into our grasp of the occurrence, succession, or production of events. In our terms we may say the approach is rather more explicitly diremptive or analytical than transcendental . We must recall the four ways in which we can relate events or entities solely in respect to their sameness-difference and their occurrence in time. In the present case we ask what basic notion must govern our relating events or entities that are different and that occur at different times (not identical and not concomitant). Between these events, we need to establish a connection, taking them two at a time in an ordered couple so that one must precede, the other follow (since they occur at different times). There must, that is to say, be succession. This connection and succession can be realized only if the occurrence of one of them becomes a condition of the occurrence of the other. We presently see that this relation is one of causation. Hence to establish connection between 243

what are not identical and not concomitant events we need to supply the idea of causality. This idea can never be gained from sense-impressions or intuitions alone but must be supplied by the paradigmatic self, that is transcendentally. We must now see what enters into this idea. It should be added that although the foregoing has the appearance of merely relating one local particular event to another such event what is ultimately of importance is the relating of kinds of events: relating not just one event to another event but one kind of event, a cause, to another kind, an effect. For example, the application of heat to a rod and the expansion of the rod. This involves generalization and theory. Kant, however, speaks of little more than particular events and these of a familiar and simple kind. First Proof (Paragraph 2 ) . We begin again with experience in the full sense (E2 ) and the problem is to offer a kind of reconstruction which will exhibit what enters into this. In the First Analogy we were interested only in what enters into the notion of the persistence or permanence in time of some given existent. Now we are asking about connections which different existents have in time. We are not confronted with only one existent which has different properties at different times but with many and differing existents that may be connected and may recur.' All such conditions may be reduced to concatenations of ordered couples in which one member is always accompanied (preceded or followed) by the other. When we now examine what we believe to be such a causal couple in experience (E2) and seek to explain why one always preceded or follows the other we find that attention to mere perceptual aspects (Ei) reveals something, but not enough. So far as this aspect is concerned the couple which we find to have occurred in the order A-y B might just as conceivably have occurred as B-»- A, or A or B might have occurred independently, or with C or D or E. Of course A and B are together: this was apparent at the outset. For that we need only to suppose that there is a capacity to revive or maintain A in being in some sense, so that one can speak of a couple. This involves imagination which Kant described earlier as "the capacity to represent an object without its being present in intuition" (B151). Powerful as this faculty is, it would at most only summon up A. 244

(•

when B, or B when A, was present. It does not unite them to one another in any but a contingent manner: and if contingencies had been different anything whatever might have accompanied A and B, Thus neither experience (E-,) nor imagination (in this largely reproductive sense) explains the couple. Something else is involved. Only when A is identified as cause and B as effect have we an ordered causal couple of existents. We have not yet explained what it means to declare A and B to be cause and effect: this Kant explains as he goes into more detail in the second proof. fierond Proof (Paragraphs 3-6) The second proof offers some welcome examples to help us to interpret its necessarily abstract account of causality. But the first paragraph offers more problems than mere abstractness. The trend of thought seems to be the following. A firm tenet of Kant's which we first encountered in the deductions is that fundamental apprehension (Ei) is always successive and that it is always of one representation at a time. Kant never explains what one representation would be. Locke and Hume at least made some attempt to explain what a simple impression or idea was from which complex ones were built up. Kant unfortunately maintained that synthesis had to proceed piecemeal, but if we try to visualize such an operation we can only bring to mind the fabulous processes in television tubes and computers. Even if credible, this removes the whole of E^ to a subexperiential level. What we call objects of appearance or phenomenal processes are of course the end products (E2) of this process. We do not, cannot, witness the synthesizing process. (We have remarked earlier what a problem this poses: if the process cannot be witnessed what reason have we for believing it to have occurred?) Let us, however, grant the reality of the synthesizing process and of its atomic ingredients or raw materials. The question Kant now raises is, although the synthesis is always successive so far as our representations are concerned, how do we know that this is really what happens "in the object"? May not the synthesis which testifies to the effort of the imagination, be a tissue of fantasy? Could not processes that really ran M-v N->- 0-> P be represented as P-»- N->- 0-> M by the imagination? Assuredly this could happen, says Kant. But before we ask how we can avoid failing victim to this error or deceit we must ask what we mean by 'object' or 'objectivity'. 245

There are really only two possibilities : things themselves and appearances. Kant has made himself clear on the former possibility from the very beginning. No graver error can be made by metaphysicians than transcendental realism, which means locating objectivity in things themselves. Kant holds that 'real1 and 'object' and the rest of the vocabulary of experience refer solely to appearances. These are structures in space and time of both empirical and a priori elements. The question above then is, what is it about appearances that establishes their reality and objectivity so that we are not deceived when, for example, our experience convinces us that some process runs M-> N-* 0-> P ? This is of course where the functor of causality enters in and here we may profit by the concrete examples Kant has devised. Let us set aside thorny questions about levels of synthesis mentioned earlier, which, if pressed hard, make it very difficult to offer a realistic interpretation of Kant's analysis. Kant now employs examples of a house and a ship, the successive glimpses of which are matters of appearance. But the argument really needs examples that are worked up from the "microlevels" of synthesis that Kant is thinking of elsewhere. I think there is no remedy for this: it is a basic fracture or geologic fault that runs through the systems of Locke, Hume, and Kant. Suppose then that we have successive glimpses (or sense data, or empirical intuitions) which, merely to identify them, we say are "of a house". All we really need to surmise is that these glimpses suggest a house. They run in an order m,n,o,p and may also be labelled 'foundation1, 'first story', 'second story', and 'roof1. The question is whether the series m,n,o,p reveals a causal series M-* N-»- 0-y P where M is cause of N, N of 0, etc. Of course in this case we will say,no. It will immediately be said that the procedure begs the question since we already know that situation is not like the baseball player's hitting a ball, where we have : m

approach of a ball of a certain mass and shape, moving at a certain speed,

n

the batter's swing of a bat of a certain mass and shape, moving at a certain speed, 246

o

contact of bat and ball in some specific manner,

p

specific motion of the ball towards the field.

But although the example does invite this rejoinder, I think it does not invalidate Kant's point. When he presently comes to tell us what precisely must enter into a situation besides m,n,o, and p to yield M-»- N->- 0-+ P, I think we see that Kant has made an effort to explain the differences between the house and a common causal process, as in the baseball situation. (It should be said that our example is only very crude, since of course more than M is involved in causing N, and other factors must also be taken into account. But I think this does not hurt the comparison). In Kant's second example we have a ship moving downstream. He describes it as follows (I abbreviate) : "i see a ship moving downstream. My perception of its position farther down follows upon the perception of its position farther up in the course of the river; it is impossible that in the apprehension of this appearance the ship should first be perceived farther down and after that farther up. Thus the order in the succession of perception is here determined and the second position is fixed by this. In the example of the house my apprehension could begin at the top and end at the botton, or vice versa; and also move indifferently to the right or to the left. " I think we have to flesh out Kant's ship example somewhat. It would be even more apt of the camera had been invented in 1781. Suppose we have a series of snapshots in which the wake of the ship is clearly visible. As we see the ship move from right to left in two frames, A and B, in that time order, we also have in view a pine tree on the other side: over the bow of the ship in A, over the stern in B. At the same time we see the wake of the ship at the right, both in A and in B. If we show the two pictures to a friend and ask which came first he will say, A. The ship moving from right to left, as we see from the wake; this is further confirmed by the points occupied as we see from the position of the pine tree in the picture. If someone now asks, but how do you know that this must be the sequence, 247

Kant would answer, because a wake is never produced ahead of a ship if it is going forward, nor do riparian objects appear to move from bow to stern if the ship is moving astern. This means that A has preceded B because A is a causal condition of B. Let us take another example. A motion picture camera has caught the action of the knockout blow in a boxing match. One boxer strikes the other a massive blow: he staggers and collapses. Afterward for some reason all the frames of the film have been detached from one another and scrambled. The problem is to reassemble them to depict a convincing sequence of events. It should not be difficult to do this. Very closely resembling frames will be placed in series next to one another. Finally, the sequence will be made to run in one direction or other. Why will we reject as running backwards the sequence that shows the vanquished boxer rising from the canvas and regaining his vigor as the victor's fist retreats from his body, and so on? Because, we say, this is not a plausible causal sequence of events. Boxers do not rise in this way, but rather, in the reverse sequence; this is how they fall. This must precede that because, of these two, this one must be considered the cause of that one. Kant's point is f similarly that causality is a condition of succession. J We recall our problem to begin with was this. If *, we have representations m, n, o, p, how do we know that the real, the phenomenal order must be M->- N-> 0-»- P, or any other? The answer lies in showing that M causally conditions N, N conditions 0, etc. In ordinary experience the dates of corresponding representations m, n, o, p are more or less established by association but if necessary we can and do cite causal reasons for saying that a process really ran from M through N to 0 and P. In court the prosecutor asks us about the details of an accident or altercation. We have given him a coherent consecutive account when we can say what led from one event to another. Even associations can be misleading. In themselves they can be established indifferently in any order. A person who knows nothing of the slow speed of sound or of projectiles as compared with that of light may build up very erroneous opinions about the causal interrelation of events. The distinction between representation and objective processes brings with it the need to distinguish between succession in one and in the other. Ob248

jective succession cannot be inferred from subjective succession,for imagination, as an instance of the latter, is capable of presenting what is not now present in any order whatsoever. Subjective succession, says Kant, must on the contrary be derived from objective succession, meaning we must test the subjective by the objective succession. The latter is embodied in a rule stating that the succession cannot occur otherwise than in a given manner. We are certainly impatient by this time to know what this rule is that will enable us to decide between cases of apparent and real succession or causality. When Kant at last offers us something of an analysis of causality it is done altogether too hastily and casually, giving the excuse that the matter is well enough understood by philosophers. But in view of the tremors sent up by Hume's analysis this is scarcely justified. Even Hume was in the end convinced that he had to distinguish mere association from causality and conceded that "since 'tis possible for all objects to become causes or effects to each other, it may be proper to fix some general rules, by which we may know when they really are so" (Treatise, I-III-XV) . This he then proceeded to do, offering some eight rules (among them priority, continuity, constant conjunction, a kind of method of agreement, of difference, and of concomitant variations, to use Mill's phrases). Kant's analysis is not incompatible with Hume's nor does it go beyond it in any "metaphysical" sense: it is simply more casual, less careful. I think it will be universally agreed that neither Hume's, Kant's, nor Mill's rules are in themselves decisive of the question of causal conditioning. If anything, it is known that no rules can be given to decide the question as it is usually formulated: a more comprehensive theory of scientific inference is what is needed. But this result would probably never have been arrived at without prior investigations such as just these three. Third Proof (Paragraphs 7-10) The analysis of causality which is now urgently needed is not forthcoming until virtually the last proof. Paragraph 7 once again repeats that mere subjective succession proves nothing about real or objective succession: a rule of some sort must be given. 249

Without mentioning Hume by name, Kant now undoubted!' edly refers to him in saying that the prevailing view is inadequate because it formulates only an empirical rule of succession which, he thinks, would have "no universality or necessity," being founded only "on induction." But, as with space and time, we can derive clear notions from experience "only because we ourselves have put them into experience." A rule is necessary. Nothing new is offered in this proof. Fourth Proof (Paragraphs 11-12) In this proof Kant makes a first effort at formulating his own "rules by which to judge of cause and effect" as follows: (l)The irreversibility of cause and event (the event does not occur prior to the cause). (2) The sufficiency of the cause to the event (produces it without exception and necessarily) . What Kant says is "first I cannot reverse the order, setting the outcome before what it follows; second, if the prior condition is positied, this determinate event follows without exception and neces- | sarily." The second amounts in current terminology t to making a cause a sufficient condition of an event ' which is its effect. Kant is, like Hume, saying that what is cited as a cause, or rather as the cause, of an event is always followed by that event (an event of that sort). The first part of Kant's rule follows from the second: if B must follow A, A must precede B. Since this will generally be accepted in all views of causal relation, Kant must be attaching a greater emphasis to the necessity of the connection, but he has not located or identified it. Since nothing further is said at this point, we must leave the matter by saying that Kant is still only at the point where Hume begins: the mystery of "necessary connexion", as everyone knows, is what initiated Hume's inquiry. Kant certainly offers nothing new at this point. Fifth Proof (Paragraphs 13-15) These three paragraphs are hardly a proof. What they contribute is the notion of universal causal determination and, for the first time, the Leibnizian phrase, 'principle of sufficient reason', Satz vom zureichenden Grunde, which essentially repeats the Principle of the analogy. The point is formulated with the first antinomy plainly in the mind. All events are in the time series. 250

A cross-section of the universe at a given time (what is described in a "state description," in Carnap ' s phrase) is determined by all that has occurred in the past. "The appearances of past time determine all existence (j edes Dasein) following time." With this Kant simply affirms his basic adherence to determinism for the world of appearance. It is apparent,.. both here and in the antinomies, that all three parties, the dogmatists, the empiricists (as Kant sees them),and Kant himself subscribe without reservation to what with Kant himself we may now call the principle of sufficient reason (PSR). It should, however, be pointed out that it may not mean exactly the same to all these three. Kants1 empiricists (the side of the antithesis in the antinomies) are metaphysicians in an important sense, unlike Hume. Both sides to the antinomy controversy apply the PSR to things themselves, says Kant, whereas his own point, made repeatedly is that such a principle is valid only for, and is in fact in part definitive of,"possible experience." Sixth Proof (Paragraphs 16-18) This proof begins with a recapitulation of the points made in earlier proofs. Imagination or fancy may order representations in any way it pleases. What then distinguishes a real or objective sequence from one produced by fancy? Only the subjection of appearances to a rule can guarantee their objectivity or their place in possible experience. The rule, which is of course no other than that enunciated by the Second Analogy itself or the PSR, is here called the Axiom of the Causal Relation. Finally and fortunately, an example enables us to throw a little more light on what Kant means by causal determination. In the discussions of the Fourth and Fifth Proofs Kant has emphasized the time sequence and irreversibility in time as definitive of the causal relation. Kant now re-formulates and generalizes this point without, as he hopes, altering it. It is not, he says, the lapse (Ablauf) of time but its order (Ordnung) that is decisive. That is, a cause may in fact be contemporaneous with its effect: this is in fact necessary in all causal action, as Kant points out. "In the moment in which the effect first arises it is always contemporaneous with the causality of the cause." The warmth of a room and the heat of a stove are contemporaneous. But our way of determining causal sequence may involve before and after: 251

first this, and only then, that. Later, citing two more examples, he says succession in time is the only empirical criterion of the production of an effect through the causality of the cause. In reality it is the order of events that is decisive, but for the observer this may mean a lapse of time. When we now examine this order of causal events we discover that what it involves is the necessity of the cause to the effect: "If the cause had ceased to be a moment earlier, the effect would not have arisen." This is his main point. In all the cases Kant has discussed he has emphasized that by 'necessity' he means that the cause truly suffices to produce the effect, that it is the sufficient condition of it. In this passage he apparently regards it also as a necessary condition. Unfortunately Kant does not carry this point through. An understanding of necessary and sufficient conditions is essential to the solution of the nature of causality. But Kant does not examine thoroughly any of his causal examples. At this point he breaks off the needed analysis with the plea that "since I do not wish to clutter up my critical plan, which looks solely towards the sources (Quellen) of synthetic a priori knowledge, with fine analyses which only contribute to the clarification but not to the extension of concepts, I shall leave their detailed exposition (Erörterung) to a future system of pure reason" (emphasis mine). Such an analysis is in any event already supplied in existing textbooks, he says. It is ; evidently Kant's view that the particular analysis of ^ the causal relation has no bearing on the problem of the Analogy and of the Critique itself, otherwise he would certainly have undertaken a study of it in this •'; very place. What interpretation then must be placed on this? The outcome I believe is that Kant ought to be content with any such analysis of causality as would be provided by, let us say, Hume's rules (Treatise IIII-XV) or at least that such an analysis would be compatible with the outcome of the Critique. We may also ask what one might find on the subject in the textbooks Kant refers us to. At first one will be disappointed to find causal propositions treated as if they were anlytic. For example, in 252

Wolff's Cosmologia Generalis (1731) we learn that "in a determinate proposition there is a connection(nexus) e between the predicate and its subject." The first example he gives is that a triangle has three angles. Then he says, "similarly, 'the hot stone warms' (radiates warmth) is a determinate proposition. Heat is contained in the notion of the subject: through this we learn why the stone can warm: the reason is that there is a power of warming in it" (Cosmologia Generalis #19). This may seem disappointing but there is little else in Wolff that improves upon it. Speaking specifically of cause and effect (causa et causatum), he says, "Between the materials of a house itself there is a connection such that without them the house itself would not exist; ...in the same way, if there were no architect there would be no house" (C.G•#16). Wolff is unaware of the difficulties his views of causal connection raise. Examples such as the last one do add the idea of a necessary condition to it, but no effort is made to analyze it. Kant failed to see that a particular and detailed analysis of causality was needed. He thought it enough to insist that Hume's analysis was insufficient because it had neglected to explain the element of necessity in causality. But in Kant's account the only way in which necessity is finally brought in, is as a necessary condition. This is entirely compatible with other accounts of causality. If Kant ignored the import of the important section on rules in Hume he is no more to be blamed than others to this day who ignore the attempt it represents and look only to the psychological account of the mental act of causal inferring that is presented earlier in Book I, Part III. Hume made it clear that there was not only a psychology but also what he himself called the logic of causation. This is present already in the section immediately preceding the rules in Section XV. It is true that neither this account, nor Mill's, answers the crucial questions definitively, simply because they can be answered if at all, only in a comprehensive account of the nature of scientific theory such as has been undertaken by philosophers such as Carnap, Hempel, Braithwaite, Popper, von Wright, and others. I do not think we can endorse Kant's program here and elsewhere in the Critique of totally segregating the critical and the analytical tasks. Here he spells out his reasons for this once again: "Since I do not wish to mix my critical undertaking, which con253

cerns solely the sources of synthetic a priori knowledge, with analyses which only clarify but do not enlarge our concepts, I leave all such expositions to a future system of pure reason. Indeed such analysis is already to be copiously encountered in existing textbooks" (A204/B249). But as the study particularly of this analogy shows, it is not really possible to establish a conclusive transcendental argument for the Principle in question without a truly detailed exposition of the causal necessity, causal inference, and causal laws the Principle is supposed to support. One cannot deplore too much the fact that Kant himself never got around to composing any but a small portion of the qrand "system of pure reason" he contemplated. Kant contents himself with casually taking up a few examples without studying them in any detail: water rising in a glass, a ball impressing itself on a pillow, a room being heated with a stove, and so on. He does not address himself to the manner in which causal laws are formulated, confirmed, and invoked for the purpose of explanation. Even in the simple examples he considers his explanations are expressed in an extremely loose manner. In the end he identifies no single element or relation in causality beyond those found by Hume: "Sequence in time," he says, "is the only empirical criterion of the effect in relation to the causality of the cause that precedes it" (A203/ B249). This oversimplifies even Hume's account. Hence his claim to have advanced beyond Hume's account must be carefully specified or qualified. It is true that he makes a stronger case than Hume does for a general causal principle, the PSR, but he fails to show exactly what role it plays in the whole economy of natural science. If the PSR is a kind of grand axiom for science, he does not show us what it means for particular laws to be subject to it, or to be inferred or established with its aid, although he makes the interesting suggestion that it is a kind of prudent advice for , the scientist to follow in order to discover laws. : The general result of the analogy is the same as that of the third Postulate of Empirical Thought, namely that the world that is revealed to outer and to inner sense and studied by the scientist is regular, predictable, law-governed, determined. In the end, Hume and Kant are determinists in the same sense and degree. Where Kant may claim the greatest originality is in his arguments for the indispensability of a causal principle and in his approach to its demonstration by a 254

transcendental argument. Here he advances beyond Hume in originality. His bold insistence that we must reach beyond what is only superficially manifest in experience, while at the same time rejecting every obscurantist and occultist liberty that might be taken with this, evinces philosophic imagination of the highest order. Without more detailed study of the procedures of science neither Hume or Kant could have advanced the understanding of such matters as causality much further than they did. The next needed step was first of all the extension of the use of the scientific method into more and more areas of reality and also more elaborately constructed and interrelated theories: all this was to develop with a dizzying increase of momentum throughout the nineteenth century. What we can best learn from both of them is their place in the gradual development of the understanding of theory construction. The microscopic study of the nature of the "causal bond" had to give way to the study of explanation, of the nature of hypothesis and theories and their confirmation, and of much else besides in mathematics, logic, and the philosophy of science.

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c Third analogy

A: Axiom of community: All substances to the extent that they are simultaneous, are in thoroughgoing community with one another, that is, they exercise reciprocal action. B: Axiom of contemporaneity in accordance with the law of reciprocal action or mutual relation : All substances to the extent that they can be perceived simultaneously are in thoroughgoing reciprocal relation to one another. Proof There are some four proofs of this principle, the first being added in B. Numbering the paragraphs in B we have the first proof in paragraph 1, and the others beginning in the second, fifth, and sixth paragraphs. The proofs are all similar in content. We recall that the third modus of time is that ... of co-existence or simultaneity. In the other two j! modi we had first, one and the same thing related to ' itself at different times, and second, different but '•• related things existing at different times. Now we must consider different but related things existing at the same time. In all cases we must go beyond the given of E]_, experience as empirical intuition, in order to find anything that realizes these possibilities. If we are to have one and the same thing related to itself at different times we must invoke or introduce the notion of a permanent thing and the notion that answers to that of the subsistent and the inherent. In order to say that two different things or events at different times are united by some relation that is more than one of casual concomitance in perceptions we must introduce the notion of causality. As we have seen, if Kant had carried through his analysis he might have said that this relation is established if and only if two events are such that one is the neeessary and the sufficient condition of the other. 256

This is the nearest I think we can come to his oftrepeated notion of causality as a "necessary relation" . In the third modus of time we must now see what is needed for experience, E2, to grasp different but related things existing at the same time, that is, simultaneously. What Kant has to say on this matter holds up very well in view of the theory of relativity, which is very much concerned with how events can be found simultaneous. Let us see what conceptual resources are needed in order to declare events to be simultaneous. We recall that Kant thinks that at the basic level the mind can grasp only one "blip" at a time and that if we grasp more than that there has already been an act of synthesis: anything that takes us beyond "here-now-this" already involves something more than is furnished by sensation. It must then be furnished by the mind itself, that is, it must be, as he says, a priori. If I am now connecting two or more different things or events this involves the notion of a system that embraces them. For example, I look at a large house or building, Kant's example in the previous section. I scan it from top to bottom and bottom to top, perhaps several times. I cannot detect any change from one glance at the roof to another glance at it. It seems the same house. Of course if the glances are forty years apart I will almost certainly not have this conviction at all. I must take the system of time for granted. But this has no effect on the present situation: similarity and difference are what really count here. And when I find it a matter of indifference whether I now see A and now B, or now B and now A, I say that A and B are contemporaneous. (Of course if I can see both A and B at once there is no problem — for us, that is, although there is for Kant unfortunately, because, we remember, he believes we can grasp only one element at a time.) But now we must dig deeper into this experience (E2). What makes this situation of "successional indifference" possible, Kant asks. At this point someone may say, the situation is really quite simple. Ignoring relativity problems such as those raised by the finite velocity of light, simultaneous events simply coincide in their dates. We 257

may suppose a kind of universal clock which ticks on through an untold number of events: these may be pegged to coincide with a simple tick or with a series of successive ticks. Very good, says Kant, that _ij3 the picture we have of time. Unfortunately this system of ticks and tocks must itself be built up and held together. Time may be pictured like a railroad track from Chicago to New York, but we are never the inhabitants along the way who can see a long stretch of track and wave at the passing train: we are on the train and can only infer or construct the reality of the permanent track which we cannot see. Kant puts this point very forcefully several times in the analogies: "time itself cannot be perceived" (B219,B255, B257,etc). In order to have a notion of time as a one dimensional system which can be pictured by the series of real numbers, we need an a priori aid. This Kant has already developed in the notion of a permanent substance, which is also fundamental to the notion of causation, as we saw in the final paragraphs of the Second Analogy. It is just as necessary in order to affirm the possibility of distinct but simultaneous event s. The First Analogy considers what is involved in affirming one continuant, the second with one sequent or ordered couple, the third with a system of things in continuous interaction. The first two are not sufficient by themselves to display all the a priori elements that enter into E 2 : we must have also the notion of nature as a whole in which everything bears on everything else. A famous physicist once said, when we scratch our ears we shake all the stars. This is undoubtedly an exaggeration but contains a truth. A scientist is alert to causal influence (the term is used by Kant himself, Einfluss) everywhere, in every direction of time and space. Hence he is interested not only in the fact that the earth exerts an attraction on the moon, but the moon on the earth, as we see in the tides. He may then go on to try to determine how the effect on the earth's tides is determined by moon's force as determined by the earth. This can be carried still further. Since all such comparatively large bodies exert influence on each other reciprocally we can real— ily see that determining the amount in each case becomes rather startlingly complex. We have a feedback problem on our hands, and not only here but in other causal situations as well. 258

Thus what Kant is saying is that the scientist interests himself not just in isolated causal ordered couples but in the mutual interaction of all of nature. Now, nothing in sensation or perception reveals this to us, any more than it reveals the conservation of matter or causal connection. It is an a priori idea of the (paradigmatic) mind's own construction. Close study of nature reveals the complexity of mutual relations between substances. We do not observe these directly in perception but they are constantly assumed and confirmed. In physics the equality and complementarity of action and reaction is set forth at the outset in the third of the three laws of motion. As in the previous analogy we must distinguish between the order of perceptions and the order of reality. (And we must be particularly careful not to equate the latter with any order attributable to things in themselves.) In the instance of causal order we find that in themselves perceptual glimpses or snapshots do not reveal what their objective time order is: either one may have preceded, or followed. Only if and when we in effect, establish a rule, when we establish one occurence as the cause of another, as its necessary and sufficient condition, have we finally established a real order between them and offered a reliable explanation of a phenomenon. Kant therefore holds that perceptual order is no infallible guide for any determination of real order. What has to be established is the necessity of one occurrence to another. Of course for all practical purposes the order of perception is a reliable guide. But we need only reflect on the lapse of time in the visual and auditory registry of an event to see that it must be understood in connection with other processes. We may misinterpret the auditory and visual order when we see and hear a bat hit a ball a hundred meters in the distance. Or we may err in judging precedence and simultaneity in observing events on cosmic bodies. What is needed, Kant is saying, is a grasp of the presence or absence of determinations. Suppose we have two events, A and B. be related as follows: I

A determines B

II. B determines A 259

They may

III. A and B are mutual determinants IV. A and B are wholly independent We cannot tell from mere perception, from, let us say, isolated frames of a motion picture sequence* whether one or another of these cases obtains. If I obtains, we must consistently find B to occur when A occurs. (As Kant has said in the case of the ball on the pillow, the order, not the lapse of time is decisive.) If II obtains, we have the same situation, with A and B exchanging places. If III obtains, A determines B only if B determines A in some corresponding manner. If IV obtains, no determination between A and B can be detected. In this case we cannot say whether A really precedes B, or B really preceded A, or A and B are really simultaneous. If Kant is right, this situation cannot prevail. But I think it would be harmless revision of his system to say rather, if IV prevails A and B are in two different universes -- if this is meaningful. Kant has thus sought to show that our belief in the reality of the world begins with perception but it does not arise from it, that is, it has components which cannot be ascribed to or learned from perception, "whether there may be any knowledge independent of experience (that is, E^) and all impressions of the senses." His answer is, there not only may be, | there must be. This in no way "downgrades" perception | but shows how,with the aid of a priori functors,per' ception, far from being qualified and compromised, is in the end far stronger then Hume's. In one of those passages in the vein of despair that appear towards the end of Book I in the Treatise Hume says: "I begun this subject with premising, that we ought to have an implicit faith in our senses, and that this would be the conclusion, I shou'd draw from the whole of my reasoning. But to be ingenuous, I feel myself at present of a quite contrary sentiment, and am inclin'd to repose no faith at all in my senses" (I-IV-II). It is doubtful if Hume later regains his confidence in the senses. What is necessary to knowledge, Kant is saying, is perception "properly instructed." We must allow due weight to both factors when Kant says, "Experience does indeed teach us that something is thus or so only it does not teach us that it cannot be otherwise." Experience here is E^, and what is needed I beyond experience in this sense, cannot of course be 260

learned from it. This is the import of these all-important portions of the Critique, the Analogies of Experience . A closing section sums up the point of the anallogies, the need for them, and the inadequacy of other derivations. They could not have been demonstrated "from mere concepts", says Kant. The point is the same as that repeatedly made by Hume, that relations of matters of fact particularly of identity (corresponding to Kant's first analogy) and of causality (corresponding to the second) are not demonstrable, that is, logically necessary. "One cannot infer one object and its existence from any other object and its existence by means of mere concepts, no matter how one analyzes them." But there is an alternative, and that is, if we can show the very conditions on which the possibility of these very objects as such depends. As we saw much earlier this possibility is rooted in acts of synthesis by "the synthetic unity of the apperception of all appearances" and the functors through which such synthesis is effected. Lacking the categories as the clue, indispensable principles such as the principle of sufficient reason have never previously proved to be capable of demonstration. This lack, Kant believes, has now been made good.

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Postulates of Empirical Thought

1. Whatever agrees with the formal conditions of experience (that is, conditions of intuition and of concepts) is possible. 2. Whatever conforms to the material conditions of experience (that is, sensation) is actual. 3. Whatever conforms to the actual in accordance with the general conditions of experience is, or exists as, necessary.

We now encounter three notions which have already been woven into the fabric of the Analytic up to this point. In the second paragraph of the section Kant says that the three principles are merely definitions Erklärungen). It would no doubt be an awkward afterthought if only now, at the end of the exposition, Kant were to define the terms he had been using. A more serious question would be how we are to reconcile the definitional character of the principles with the synthetic and a priori character that Kant attributed to all of the principles of the Analytic at the outset. But it is undoubtedly more important to try to see beyond the character that is here being casually attributed to the principles. The first paragraph makes the point that the final three categorial notions do not add any further determination of objects but only specify a relation to the cognitive faculty. Although Kant seems to forget that the preceding notions did not themselves really add determinations, either, in the present instance another implication is really more significant. In the refutation of the ontological argument Kant will emphatically pursue the point that a notion such as existence does not help to determine, that is, add a quality or property to, an object. Essentially this point had of course been made by Hume previously in the Treatise (I-II-VI) in the section "Of Existence and External Existence." One will agree that necessity and possibility add such a determination even less.

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One should, however, ask whether by comparision, reality, the fourth category adds it. Kant does not clear up these questions for us. Possibility. Turning to the first principle, 'formal conditions' alludes to several types of possibility: logical possibility, conformity to the general conditions of space and time, and the categories. As soon as Kant begins to discuss possibility it is evident that there is a basic ambiguity attaching to its placement among the categories, amounting to what in later days has come to be known as a "category mistake." The categories themselves specify the limits of possibility and are restricted to possible experience. Yet now we find a specific category named possibility. It cannot be both a qualification of all the categories and one among them, at one and the same time. Again the charge that the notion turns up here solely for architectonic reasons must occur to us. It is best simply to ignore these structural considerations and consider what Kant's thoughts are on three obviously important subjects. In the sense in which Kant is referring to several distinct kinds of possibility we shall have first of all logical possibility. Conformity to logical principles is of course a necessary but not a sufficient condition of truth. It is only a canon of truth (A58/B82 ff., A150/B189 ff.). In order to set forth not merely the form of thought, Kant says in the present second paragraph, but the possibility, actuality, and necessity of things, only experience itself suffices, or in the case of mathematics, an intuition that enables us in some manner to construct the object or figure. Experience as such must conform to the categories, whereby Kant means essentially those of relation: the ideas of substance, causality, and community through which alone we can have the notion of a world of permanent, successive, and simultaneous things and processes. To reinforce the point, Kant alludes to notions which will illustrate impossible, fictitious notions that violate the categories. Examples are a permanent substance that is present in space without filling it, or something between matter and mind, or a power of prophesying and of intuiting the future (not merely of inferring it), or a power of telepathic communication. These are neither derived from nor confirm263

able in experience, nor are they conditions of experience. Hence they are null concepts. Kant considers also something of the other side of the formal conditions of experience, namely the pure intuitions, particularly space. He reiterates the point that we cannot exclude a space enclosed only by two straight lines on the ground that this would be self-contradictory. We cannot pronounce it impossible solely on the ground of the concepts involved. The impossibility, he says, rests rather on the possibility of the intuitive construction of such figures. Spatial intuition is a formal condition of experience. It is evident that nothing new emerges in the discussion of possibility. The puzzle is the obscure reasons which dictated to Kant the necessity of repeating already thoroughly expounded material as if it were new, to complete the structure of system of principles. Actuality. In this subsection, unlike the other two, we have, I believe, not only new material but something of first importance in the structure of the Critique: the doctrine what we may trust perception to reveal the real to us. We have already noted that Kant concedes all three of these principles may be only definitions (Erklärungen der Begriffe). One may, however, make so bold as to take issue with Kant over this and hold him rather more strictly to his characterization of the principles as synthetic and a priori, at at least not merely as verbal definitions. The point is that Kant needs somewhere to affirm explicitly what appears only incidentally in the Anticipations of Perception: that the real is the object of sensation or perception. A glance backward at the two versions of that principle will make this plain. Kant makes the point repeatedly that sensation or perception reveals to us the real. It is not of course altogether sufficient by itself: sensation is subject to misinterpretation, but Kant never stirs from the doctrine that it is the beginning of all knowledge even if not its exclusive source. So we read in the discussion of the antinomies that "everything is real (actual) which stands in connection with a perception in accordance with the laws of empirical advance." (alles ist wirklich, was mit einer Wahrnehmung nach Gesetzen des empirischen Fortgangs in Einem Kontext stehet A493/B521). I think it would be difficult to 264

exaggerate the importance of this as a principle on which experience and science rests. What Kant is saying is that with proper safeguards we can and must trust experience, that is, Ei, sensation, perception, empirical intuition. This will be widely, if not universally, granted. What is even more important is that science itself cannot demonstrate any such principle: it assumes or presupposes it. We cannot appeal to perception to prove that we can trust perception, nor to experience in some similar sense to prove that experience reveals to us at least the raw material of reality. There is in fact, Kant should say no conceivable proof of the principle along any familiar lines. It is not itself an empirical truth: it is a pillar underneath all empirical truth. The version of the principle presented in the antinomies is not an analytic truth: the contradictory of this principle is not self-contradictory. In the end, what Kant holds is, as we have often noted before, that we simply will not give it up under any circumstances. The Leibnizians or other rationalists may refuse to acknowledge this. Kant's answer is simply, they are wrong: without this there is no knowledge. It is equally apparent, I think, that such a principle is not merely a definition, at least in Kant's scheme. In that form it simply will not accomplish what is needed: what is real cannot be a matter of mere fiat. Hence we must strengthen what Kant says at the outset of this section regarding the definitional character of the Postulates. Proceeding now to the substantial matter of the subsection we see that Kant proceeds directly from the formal conditions (logical consistency, space, time, the categories) in the first postulate to the material conditions: perception, empirical concepts, generalizations, and laws we have been able to develop through perception. The two therefore make explicit what has been set forth from the beginning as the framework of experience: pure and empirical intuitions and pure and empirical concepts, together with resulting generalizations, hypotheses, and theories. The very slight development Kant accords the principle offers little opportunity to see its consequences. He describes briefly what we can infer from our perceptions when we see iron filings move in the presence of a magnet, namely "a magnetic matter that pervades all bodies." Such a magnetic matter, perhaps what we nowadays call a magnetic field, is of course not itself an object of 265

perception,but he believes this is owing only to the limited nature of our sense organs in this sense-modality. If they were more refined, he thinks we would be able to perceive it as we now see the motion of the iron. Suggestions of this sort are of course better judged in terms of their full development in theories of science such as logical empiricism in our own century. The direction in which Kant's hand is pointing is unmistakable.

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Refutation of Idealism Kant had already undertaken a refutation of idealism in the first edition under the fourth paralogism. This section was completely revised in the second edition and an explicit refutation was attached to the second Postulate of Empirical Thought, that of actuality. It was emphatic if not slightly emotional in tone and appeared in response to the criticism of the standpoint of the Critique from certain reviewers or commentators on the first edition. Kant wished to distance himself from Berkeley's idealism. Since Kant's time it has generally been thought that his response was ill-conceived and rested on a mistaken view of Berkeley's views, possibly because of inadequate acquaintance with Berkeley's writings. (Kant knew little English, but there were French editions of certain works available to him, and he could have read Berkeley's De Motu.) The question of the appropriateness of Kant's response has recently been re-opened by Professor Henry Allison in an article defending Kant's response in the Critique and elsewhere.^ The issues are too complex to be gone into here, and the historical question is not directly relevant to the validity of the argument. It should, however, be said that the prevalent view has been that Kant should have recognized an ally rather than an adversary in Berkeley. For if Kant could call himself an empirical realist Berkeley could do so as well. Is there a significant difference between Berkeley's view that objects are constructions of ideas and Kant's view of them as appearances? Kant was convinced that on Berkeley's view, and not on his own, "things in space are merely imaginary entities." He determined to put an end once and for all to the philosophical scandal that even then no proof of existence of the external world had been produced. He proceeded therefore to offer such a proof and at the same time to refute those who either called the existence of the world problematic or dogmatically denied it.

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Theorem The purely empirically determined consciousness of my own being proves the existence of objects in space outside me.

Proof Kant argues that I am aware of the passage of events in time in my experience. Time, if so grasped, involves its various modi, particularly that of permanence. If now I am aware of change or alteration there must correspondingly be something permanent, as we saw in the analogies. Moreover, the permanent and the transitory must of course be distinct: they are necessarily related but different. If one then is "in me" the other must be "outside me." Since indeed I have experience of the transitory, I can infer the permanent — by a kind of modus ponens. Thus the data of my own consciousness awareness prove the existence of a permanent real distinct from myself, and thereby the external world is demonstrated.

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We should if possible interpret this argument in harmony with the foregoing parts of the Critique and then try to see what kind of "object" is in fact demonstrated. I believe Kant is here not talking about things in themselves nor undertaking to prove that there are things in themselves. What he has done is to apply the distinction between these and appearances and has shown rather by the use he has made of the distinction that it has some truth or significance to it. He has tried to show what problems it helps us to solve, what errors it helps us to avoid. It would be curious, in a way, if only now in a second edition a proof for the existence of things in themselves occurred to Kant. Moreover, things in themselves are necessities of thought rather than objects of knowledge,and this would comport ill with what purported to prove their existence. We can think them, but we cannot know them, have Erkenntnis of them. (See Preface to B,xxvi.) For these reasons a proof of an external world, in the sense of a proof of things in themselves, would not appear to be consistent with what has gone before. One should study carefully the footnote in the Preface to B (page Bxl) in which Kant speaks still another time of the proof of the external world and the refutation of idealism. He there amends the wording in the above Proof, though not materially, and remarks what a scandal to philosophy it is not to have up till then come forth with a proof of "the existence of things outside us." He is very emphatic that what he has proved is the existence of things "distinct from our representations." If that is so, they may very well also be other than appearances. Hence, may he not be intending to prove the existence of things themselves? But Kant never, I think, specifically says that he means things in themselves when he is speaking of "things outside ourselves;" if he had meant things in themselves, would he not somewhere have flatly said so? The proof as amplified in the Preface takes still another turn when Kant explores further the relation of outer sense to inner sense. What I think he is saying there is simply that outer sense itself, once this can be made out, is itself "in relation to something outside me." The reason is that outer sense is not merely the presence of a multiplicity of representations before me but is possible only through the organizing power of the Self, that is, the transcendental unity, 269

the source of all experience, and thus of what is reliably objective. The only outcome I can see is that Kant is throughout the Critique, in A and in B, in the Refutation and in the Prefaces, affirming the reality of appearances; in the Refutation he is specifically demonstrating the reality of appearances, not things in themselves. He is saying I am in first and last place a realist, an empirical realist; experience as a structure to which representations deriving from perception and thought contribute reveals a real world, the only world there is. As we have seen in the Anticipations of Perception and again in this second postulate, Kant is a zealous defender of the reliability of perception, when it is carefully scrutinized. He is not a representative realist, a realist for whom a real world is "problematic." Appearances do not represent things themselves: they are numerically identical with things themselves but speaking of them as appearances reminds us that there is much about reality we do not know. Our powers are limited and others are conceivable. We shall assume that the proof is directed toward the affirmation of appearances. It will be said that the result is question-begging: of course appearances are proved by our awareness of ourselves; self-awareness has been shown to be equivalent to an awareness of an objective world in the deductions, one being necessary to the other. Perhaps it is better to say that Kant merely for polemical purposes here casts his exposition in the form of a proof, whereas all that he is really doing is affirming and expounding once again the ground of his realism. If realism means that the mind is directly aware of reality, Kant is a radical realist. It should be said finally, that both the transitory and the permanent in the Proof above are equally part of the world of appearance. This is evident particularly from the first analogy. The permanent is not a substratum which we "infer": permanent thingtransitory state is a correlative concept, transcendental in origin, and indispensable in the description of the world of experience and science. With this we can, I think, finally and conclusively identify the external world that is demonstrated in this Proof with the total world of appearance, realitas phenomenon. 270

Note 1. Kant counters the claims of those who think that all we can be aware of is some kind of inner experience and that from it we infer a real world beyond. On Kant's view, the natures of objects in their construction is such that we are in no sense making any such "problematic inferences." We are directly aware of what is real. The "outer" is not inferred from the "inner." The situation is more nearly the opposite: from there being organized, continuant objects and processes we can trace our way back to the subject, and these two are necessary to one another. As Kant says with obvious relish, the game played by idealism can be turned against it. The epistemologies that have preceded him have simply been too simple and naive to realize the complexities of the problem. There is an interesting paradigm case argument in the footnote to Note 1 that even our contemporaries would have difficulty in improving upon. it demands to know the meaningfulness of the "inner-outer" distinction if, like the subjectivists, we suppress the validity of outer sense. Kant restores 'outer' to its proper common sense use after the misuse of it (and of the term 'inner' as well) by subjective idealism. As elsewhere, Kant is steadfast in his defense of common sense. Note 2. Kant further underscores the primacy of outer experience by saying that all time relationships, such as permanence and change are dependent upon it. There is nothing in inner experience from which it might be derived. Note 3. A most important consideration bearing upon the main thesis of the second postulate, which is after all the subject matter here, is presented in this note. We have learned that perception is the material mark of the real and that the degree of its intensity is the degree of its reality (v. Anticipations) . But how can we resolve our lingering queries about the reliability of perception and establish its summary difference from illusions which we might be unable to distinguish from veridical perceptions? No real rule is expounded here except "coherence with the criteria of all actual experience" (Zusammenhang mit den Kriterien aller wirklichen Erfahrung). In an ordinary way of speaking, "intuitive representation of things" sometimes prove erroneous. The only test is the corroboration afforded by the cross-relations of 271

theories and hypotheses of science and experience generally, and their repeated confirmation in empirical intuition. Kant's standpoint is throughout that of the scientist at work developing and demonstrating hypotheses. To the sceptic he turns a deaf ear: he does not find him even mildly interesting. With the return to the question of the reliability of perception Kant brings to a close the discussion of the second postulate. It is apparent that no principle is more important than this one. If there is one thing the scientist is confident about it is the empirical evidence of perception. Kant is not concerned to call this confidence into question but to say that it is a cornerstone of science which is, however, not within the powers of science to prove. Only a transcendental demonstration is possible. Necessity. If we had puzzled over what meaning Kant from the beginning attached to the term necessity and awaited the outcome of the present section to learn what it is, our response might be either one of disappointment that no very "strong" definition of it now emerges, or perhaps of relief at the modesty and good sense of it. All that is surprising about it is that Kant made such a point of declaring defective just those approaches to the matter, such as Hume's, and as we have seen, Berkeley's, which in the end are most compatible with it. One cannot feel that Kant had as firm a grasp of Hume's views as his repeated repudiations of them would seem to justify. Even very great minds often fail in this respect. The reason is, I think, that if they had a supremely fair and judicious view of all other standpoints they would never undertake to state one of their own. In any event, for us, the consonance of Hume and Kant in so many respects should be a cause for rejoicing rather than chagrin. Hume in "Of Liberty and Necessity," (Treatise, II-III-I) which takes the analysis of Book I of the Treatise for granted, affirmed universal determinism. "Tis universally acknowledg'd," he said, "that the operations of external body are necessary, and that in the communication of their motion, in their attraction, and mutual cohesion, there are not the least traces of indifference or liberty... The actions of matter are to be regarded as instances of necessary actions." Later in the same section he says, "necessity makes an essential part of causation." Kant never managed 272

to be more emphatic than this about necessity. Yet there is not the slightest doubt that even in these passages, necessity essentially meant, for Hume, uniformity and predictability. What then do we here find Kant saying of necessity? "Necessity concerns only the relations of appearances in accord with the dynamic law of causality and the consequent possibility of an inference from one existent ( a cause) to another (an effect). Everything that occurs is hypothetically necessary: this is a principle which subjects all alteration in the world to a law, in other words, a rule of necessary existence, without which there would be no nature at all." The necessity Kant has been speaking of is universal determinism. It is only the source from which he derives it that differentiates his standpoint from that of Hume . Kant proceeds to articulate determinism into several distinct guiding principles which come down to saying that nature leaves no gaps, vacuums, exceptions, or leaps in the series of appearances and that nothing happens blindly but is always in principle explicable and intelligible. Only so is the unity of experience possible. (The four Latin formulae he cites may be condensed to read, in mundo nondantur hiatus, saItus,casus, et fatum.)

273

General Note to the System of the Principles The subject of the categorial principles should terminiate with the identification of all of them and the demonstration that they hold and are indispensable for all experience. Kant, in the sequel to the Postulates, adds nothing to the proof of them that has not appeared previously. The final principle, necessity, sums up the exposition by enunciating universal determinism which of course refers more specially to the content of the Analogies. It is almost superfluous to add, as Kant does, that the categorial principles are "not themselves knowledge but merely forms of thought by means of which knowledge may be developed from given intuitions." The necessity of reference to intuitions if there is to be knowledge, is made even more specific in this brief appendix, added in the second edition, by the requirement that these be outer intuitions. Only in the presence of these is it possible to demonstrate the reality of a substance, and only when there is motion is it possible to speak of causality and of the relation of substances in a community. Kant here seems to make spatial or outer intuition rather more of a touchstone of reality than he has done elsewhere, where time has received far greater emphasis. We recall the decisive role he has given to "the existence of objects in space outside us" in the Refutation of Idealism just concluded. Possibly he wishes to correct the "subjectivist" impression the first edition had made upon some of his readers. (Of course the whole Refut- \ ation must be taken in conjunction with the first and ';• the revised version of the Paralogisms. A refutation 1 had appeared under the fourth paralogism in A. It also occupied Kant's further attention in the Prolegomena and elsewhere. In all of these passages he emphasized "external existence".) He asks that we keep these matters in mind when we come to the question of selfknowledge in the Paralogisms, where we must see what can be determined about our inner nature without the aid of empirical or outer intuition. Kant himself best sums up the massive effort of the Analytic, now virtually concluded, in the last paragraph: 274

All principles of pure understanding are nothing other than a priori principles of the possibility of experience; all synthetic a priori propositions relate in fact only to experience and indeed the possibility of these propositions rests wholly upon this relation.

275

Chapter III On the Ground of the Distinction of Objects in General into Phenomena and Noumena The discussion in the present chapter may be considered as transitional from the Analytic to the Dialectic but already looking more in the latter direction. The distinction between appearances (phenomena) and things themselves (although these are not the only things that come to be called noumena) is fundamental to the Aesthetic and the Analytic. The Dialectic will show us what serious errors are made when the distinction is ignored or defied. The first question is, how in general the fateful errors are made. Then we can see how they are made in three specific areas, the study of mind or soul, the scientific investigation of the world of nature, and speculation on divine existence. The question is whether we can meaningfully speak of things outside or beyond sensibility or sensuous intuition. It is not so simple that one could say one must never speak of such things lest we fall into nonsense and absurdity, as the more dogmatic positivists maintain. As everywhere, Kant finds things are never as simple as that. He begins with a romantic metaphor of an island of truth set in a vast sea of ignorance and confusion. Having now explored the island over which we have dominion, we should be clear as to what it is we possess and by what title we hold it before we venture out into an ocean that may be filled with fogbanks of illusion. We should also ask whether we should be content just to remain on the island. Some of this has implicitly been answered in the foregoing pages, but a clear summary is advisable before we proceed to the Dialectic. We have seen that what the understanding produces of itself, its concepts and its principles, can be applied only in and to experience, which remains the key source of truth, but also how far it extends and where it ends, what its limits are and what lies outside them. We are bound to reach beyond this because we are not only interested in what is true: there may also be a great deal more that we desire to know. Who knows where that question may lead us if it is pursued? Also, to know under what title we possess the land of truth, one must not only be acquainted with it but also with the surrounding terrain, in order to recognize where the 276

boundaries lie. The issue of this comes down to how we use our concepts, to what we apply them. We may begin by distinguishing two uses of a concept, particularly the pure concepts of the understanding. In the transcendental use of a concept, the concept is applied to anything whatever, to things in general, or as such, the empirical use of a concept, it is limited in application to objects of possible experience and thus to intuition, particularly to what exists in time. The latter defines meaning in special sense, empirical meaning. The use of a concept in the first manner is from the standpoint of the second, illegitimate, and thus meaningless, though Kant grants that one can still accord it meaning. Bedeutung, in a special sense (A 248). Meaningfulness here extends not only to pure concpets, the categories, but also to the principles of pure understanding. The transcendental use of a concpet means application to things in general, and it is well to pause over the phrase, 'things in general', which is Dinge überhaupt• 'In general' is so colorless as to attract almost no attention in English. überhaupt, on the other hand, is of first importance almost anywhere Kant uses it. Here, as elsewhere, it is particularly linked with 'transcendental'. That is, the transcendental use of a term is that use in which no limitation is thought necessary to be made in it, the limitation to sensibility, in intuition. What is not so limited may then be applicable even to things in themselves. Kant is here following a strict empiricist line of thought regarding the nature of concepts and their meaning, including of course the categories. He now proceeds through the Screed of the categories to show what their empirical use involves. It is, in a word, reference to time. Exactly as in the Schematism, they must be seen in relation to possible experience, which always and necessarily involves time. If this reference is omitted, they become nothing more than "logical functions of judgment," or what was earlier referred to as "categories without schemata". Time is the measure of reality and the key to the empirical use of the categories. The empirical 277

use of the idea of magnitude, the categories of quantity,is the successive repetition in time of a unit until the limits of the object are reached and measured; of reality and negation, stretches of time which are filled or empty of intuited content; of substance, permanence in time — if I abstract from reference to time, substance is merely the notion of something that is, in a given context at least, to be designated as a subject, not as a predicate. Time is essential to the notion of causality. It involves the notion of two events whose occurence is governed by a rule enabling us in some sense to infer one from the other. That gives meaning to these and the other categories (community and the categories of modality): not their mere formal character but their function in terms of time. The categories then, apart from time, and thus intuition, have no empirical meaning. These paragraphs have some of Kant's most important thoughts on the criterion of significance. It remains to be seen what must be said of concepts when they are used transcendentally, applying them to things in general, without regard to the manner in which we may intuit them. Kant distinguishes the objects involved in the two uses, empirical and transcendental, as phenomena and noumena. The latter are objects only of the understanding, unrestricted by time and empirical intuition. If they have any significance (since they have no empirical meaning) they would seem to have to be related to some other sort of intuition, non-sensuous intuition, for no one would suppose that what were objects of mere thought or understanding apart from some sort of intuition would possess any reality. Pursuing this possibility further, there appears to loom the possibility of dividing the world into two: a Sinneswelt and a Verstandeswelt, (mundus sensibilis and mundus intelligibilis). One of these would seem to be the world as it appears in sensuous intuition and the other the world as an object of non-sensuous intuition or of the understanding. The latter would presume to reveal to us an absolutely objective reality (schlechthin objektive Realität) beyond the limitations of sense. Kant returns to this presumed world again towards the end of the chapter (A 255ff) . The foregoing division of the world into the sensible and the intelligible, or the world as it 278

appears and the world as it is, enjoyed a vogue among the rationalist philosophers, but it is entirely repudiated by Kant. He regards it as failing to assign proper and meaningful roles to sensibility and the understanding. We should be careful not to confuse the division phenomena and noumena with that of mundus sensibilis and the mundus intelligibilis of the rationalists. The world that is to be comprehended "as it really is" is not an object of understanding or intellect alone, but is itself the world of phenomena. This comprehension can be realized by the understanding only in cooperation with intuition. Noumena are ideas which can serve a useful (regulative) purpose as necessities of thought, but they can never be known, that is apprehended as appearances, through understanding and intuition. The pretense to knowing them through the instrument of pure reason is what generates the illusions of the dialectic. The understanding in the framework Kant supplies for it has none of these pretensions to revealing singlehandedly the world as it really is, nor does it in the framework require anything further besides sensuous intuition. The understanding in and of itself, of course, refers all our representations to a transcendental object which is, however, a mere x, a thing in itself, which is a correlate to the synthetic unity of apperception, and may be thought of as a noumenon. That is the nature of the understanding, of cognitive thought. Das Denken ist die Handlung-, gegebene Anschauung auf einen Gegenstand zu beziehen: "Thought is the operation of referring given intuitions to an object" (A 247). But his use of a noumenal and transcendental idea is defensible and necessary as a limiting case only, and not a claim to knowledge: we are merely allowing for the fact that what appears so and so in experience may be quite other apart from experience, as a thing in itself. Of the latter, we know nothing of course, but the mere fact that we know nothing of it is not the same as knowing that it does exist. Our acquaintance with it is inherently negative. These ideas are now summed up in the idea of a negative noumenon and a positive noumenon. The phraseology is somewhat clearer in B, in which the passage is re-written, but not the exposition. We can make a restricted use of the notion of things in themselves without being acquainted with them directly: this is the altogether defensible and useful notion of the negative noumenon, for example, things in themselves, 279

things which are necessary to our thought but about which we cannot and do not claim to know anything. A positive noumenon is also in some sense thinkable, but unlike the foregoing, it is not a necessary and useful fixture in explaining the cognitive transaction. It presumes, moreover, to meet the requirement of reference to intuition by positing a nonsensuous intuition. We do not know, of course, that sense-intuition is the only kind there is, but what non-sensuous intuition is, almost literally no one could know, except God. We are confined,by the circumstances of our being,to sense intuition. Thus the positive noumenon is an affirmation of an object of non-sensuous intuition. The negative noumenon disclaims knowledge of anything not supported by sense-intuition and in particular disclaims having access to non-sensuous intuition without denying its existence or possibility. It is evident what use may and may not be made of the notion of positive noumena. They are problematic in the sense that, we have no knowledge of any form of intuition but our own, but have also no knowledge of the impossibility of non-sensuous intuition. We are in no position to speak of them is assertoric fashion. For us, the notion of the negative noumenon is the only one we can make use of. It is a limiting case,showing us how far our knowledge can proceed. We must retain the notion of things themselves as noumena in this sense: the understanding is thus restricted by our form of sensibility. By designating noumena, we refrain from thinking of all objects in general as appearances. It is safest to think of the negative noumenon simply as an "unknown something." The distinction of appearances and things in themselves, phenomena and noumena, has now been worked out in detail by Kant. He often expresses the nature of the Dialectic as a defiance of this distinction, though it can be characterized in other ways as well. He will now address himself to the penalties paid for allowing pure reason, or in general, the intellect, to proceed to solve the problems it assigns itself without asking itself whether these are truly cognitive problems-problems whose subject matter is accessible to intuition. By overlooking this, it emerges with pseudosolutions to impossible questions. Rational psychology, cosmology and theology suppose themselves qualified to bear the name 'science' in the same sense as 280

the natural sciences, but offer us unconfirmable transcendent asseverations about the simplicity or immortality of the soul, or the existence of the first cause, or a most perfect being. We must examine carefully what genuine knowledge demands and what its limits are, recognize the point at which we transcend or step beyond them, and seek to comprehend what use may and may not be made of whatever transcendent results we arrive at. These are to be the tasks of the Dialectic. The exposition of the entire Deduction is now complete. Even with all its shortcomings, the work is bound to endure. It is a monument of analytic thought that amply repays work and study.

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Appendix The Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection Through the Interchange of the Empirical Use of the Understanding with the Transcendental Use I.

Introduction

The curious and archaic title may easily tempt one to pass this section by altogether, particularly when it involves very real difficulties in the way of understanding. In fact, however, like nearly every other part of Critique, it repays determined effort to comprehend the issues and the line of argument, and the reward is not just a better understanding of Kant and his reasons for repudiating Leibniz, but a better comprehension of, perennial philosophical issues and methods. Kant is not only aware of the countless problems his critical method stirs up, but he is also conscious of philosophical discourse itself, his own first of all, of course. Nothing shows this so well as the present section, and from it we can learn some lessons that have current application and significance. One of the ways in which philosophy can particularly benefit numerous other intellectual enterprises is to study carefully the different kinds of assertions that are made in them and to bring to light the appropriate criteria for appraising them. The study of judgments of value is a particularly good example. The criteria for deciding which, or which kinds, of judgments deserve our belief or other support have been under study by philosophers for a long time. We need to know whether these are confirmable like reports of feelings, or statements of facts, or generalizations about them, or like none of these. It is apparent that questions such as these are raised also about purely cognitive matters. We make statements about the past, about the future, both the fairly accessible and the remote and essentially inaccessible. Appropriate methods are devised by researchers themselves to confirm them and these in turn are studied by philosophers to see what is involved in 283

such confirmation. Besides these, there are many even more familiar philosophical studies of the nature of science, mathematics, religious discourse and other subjects, each one disclosing very different types of discourse and demanding unique methods of appraisal and confirmation. (We may think of the differences among assertions about real or imaginary numbers, nuclear particles, the existence of God.) What emerges here is the fact that in all cases one must begin by deciding what is the appropriate cognitive approach in each such enterprise. We do not suppose that mathematical propositions are to be confirmed by perception, nor do we expect mathematics to be appropriately called upon in matters that call for close perceptual inspection. In most cases, we are quite ready with what we think is an appropriate assignment of the task, to perception, to mathematical analysis, to empirical generalization, to other appropriate areas. In ethical matters, as we know, the greater part of the issues debated for a long time have concerned the question whether ethical questions are a matter of taste, or of intuition, or of some kind of empirical discovery, or of self-evidence, or of necessary truths. In all matters there is no way to avoid deciding what is the appropriate general area in which a science lies and which of our cognitive capacities will be called on to decide its questions and carry on its work. Now this is exactly what Kant is concerned with in the section on Amphiboly. The latter term is used by Kant to designate a misassignment of a given task: submitting to the decision of the senses that which is essentially a conceptual matter, or vice versa. Kant has explored this in detail. It can be said in general that dialectical issues are under consideration in the Critique wherever Kant detects and discusses a serious neglect of the distinction of appearances from things themselves in the philosophical efforts of others. The same is true whenever concepts and intuitions, understanding and sensibility fail to contribute equally to the pursuit V of knowledge; or where either of them is permitted to |; claim the entire field of knowledge. In this sense, * the Amphiboly is not an appendix to the analytic but rather an introduction or appendix to the dialectic.

284

What is particularly under consideration in the Amphiboly is the adverse consequences of Leibniz's proceeding in the directions just mentioned. Although Kant is often thought to have set out to rescue what he could of rationalism in the face of Hume's attack, this should only be asserted after due allowance is made for the masterful attack which Kant himself mounts in this difficult section against Leibniz. It should never be forgotten that Kant's insistence on the real distinction of concept and intuition, understanding and sensibility cannot be reconciled with Leibniz's view, for Leibniz thought this not a real distinction: intuition and everything that could be regarded as phenomenal he regarded as but a confused form of thought or concept. This has consequences which are altogether unacceptable to Kant who thinks that natural science, not mathematics, is the ideal of knowledge. Kant's use of the term 'amphiboly' to designate certain intellectual errors has little to do with the fallacy of this name in the classical logic. As he used the term there is an interchange, Verwechselung, the mistaken replacement of one thing by another (one recalls Little Buttercup's mixing up the two babies); the objects of intuition distinct from the understanding. In Locke, the objects of understanding, whose pedigree is traceable to sense or intuition, the opposite error is committed. "Leibniz intellectualized appearances, just as Locke sensualized the concepts of understanding, according to his system of Noogony." (A 271/B 327). What now are the concepts of "reflection", a term that has not appeared previously in the Critique? The German equivalent, Überlegung, also appears. Either of them can be used loosely like the English 'reflection', thinking over, turning over in one's mind. Kant here gives it a very specific sense; it also plays a role in the third Critique. The first, broad distinction that is made in order to specify the term 'reflection' is between Untersuchung and Überlegung. An Untersuchung is simply verification , an examination in which one looks toward whether a statement is true or not. One might also call this a confirmation (or verification) procedure. An Überlegung, on the other hand, might be called a transcendental assignment or destination, that is, a 285

destining, a decision to assign a concept or a judgement in the area of the understanding or to that of sensibility. Kant warns that although statements do not always need a verification procedure, every statement in principle must have a transcendental assignment, to understanding or to sensibility. I believe this may not always be an exclusive assignment but simply means that we must consider whether the representation belongs to one or the other or to both of . these faculties. Kant's point regarding verification is well taken. We do not demand a verification procedure for every proposition. For if a proposition is immediately certain (e.g., between two points only one straight line may be drawn), there is no other more precise token of its truth that must be sought than what it already expresses. Most propositions do demand more in the way of verification. But it is a serious mistake to subject a proposition of sense to conceptual treatment or a conceptual proposition to empirical treatment. Specifying the term 'reflection' somewhat further, Kant explains reflection as a "condition of mind" (Zustand des Gemüts) in which we make an effort to find out the subjective conditions under which we can arrive at concepts: the consciousness of the relation of given representations to the different sources of knowledge. We must ask to which cognitive faculty the representations in a given judgement belongs or from which they arise, whether the senses or the understanding, and whether the relating or comparing of representations (for example, subject and predicate, or other relata) in a judgement is thought of as occurring in the understanding or in the senses. The next development is not so clear. Deriving some of his points from the treatment of truth in Locke's Essay but also reflecting the fourfold system of categories, Kant reduces to four the relations between concepts in a proposition : 1.

Identity (Einerleiheit) and Difference.

2.

Agreement (Einstimmung) and Incompatibility.

3.

Inner and Outer.

4.

Determinable and Determinate(or Matter and Form) 286

The correct specification of these relations depends upon transcendental reflection, what we have called their transcendental assignment to understanding or to sensibility. But before he explains this, he suggests that there may actually be two kinds of reflection, logical and transcendental. We have given an outline of the second. What is the first? Kant makes his oft-reiterated point that logic abstracts from all content, is perfectly formal and general. Yet he seems to think that we could make som,e sort of determination about a proposition in respect to the four distinctions just listed while totally abstracting from all agreement and incompatibility, identity and difference, of concepts if they were indeed "formal" and "empty". It would seem that logical and transcendental reflection could differ only if conceivably we might find, for example, that the concepts of a proposition were in agreement from the standpoint of logical,but were incompatible from that of transcendental reflection. But Kant offers no examples. We shall have to pursue the question of reflection wholly in reference to transcendental reflection. (Kant refers again to logical reflection below, A 279/B 335.) It is argument that can be treated wholly independent of content since the validity of argument depends wholly on form and order of sentences, provided, however, that we have come to some decision as to what is form as distinct from content in sentences. What has appeared so far, then, is essentially the distinction between conformation procedure and transcendental distination. In regard to the first, what we are said to be doing when we inquire after the truth of a proposition is deciding as to the identity and difference, agreement and incompatibility (and so on) of the concepts involved. In respect to mortality, all men resemble one another, and this we express in the universal proposition, All men are mortal. Specific differences within a class lead us to say some men are healthy, and perhaps some are not, that is, lead us to the particular proposition. An invariable agreement or concomitance between having scales and being a fish, or having feathers and being a bird, yields corresponding affirmative propositions, and between feathers and fish, scales and birds, negative ones. At this 287

point, Kant unfortunately says simply "et cetera". But it is not clear how we are to think of 'inner' and 'outer' in relation to the verification of propositions, or matter and form, or determinable and determinate. Kant appears to be leaning on the fourfold classification of forms of judgment and of categories but no clear application is made. The application Kant makes to transcendental destination or reflection is, however, unambiguous, if this is compatible with the inherent difficulty of his exposition. What Kant has said so far, as well as the application he will make of it, comes down then to this. Not all propositions or thoughts need a confirmation or verification procedure, but all need a transcendental destination, that is, a determination of the cognitive faculty (the understanding or intuition) in or by which the relata of the proposition are connected or compared: because, unless we determine the faculty in which this occurs, we cannot determine the relation of the relata correctly. Correct transcendental destination is necessary to determine the correct relationship of the relata in thoughts and propositions. What he will now say is that Leibniz made a faulty destination of the objects of knowledge, putting under the understanding what should be under sensibility, and that he decided each of the four issues mistakenly. He has intellectualized all experience . II.

The Amphibolies

1. Identity and Difference. In order to present the first example of amphiboly, let us use the term 'objective' approximately as Kant does 'representation' or as here, Gegenstand, object.If we now assign to the understanding an objective which appears and reappears, let us say, six times, it is really one and the same, not six. A zoologist who takes up the study of the horse and recurs to it repeatedly has one objective before him, not many. If he makes distinctions among breeds or varieties, then each of these is one objective designated by a particular name or concept. But a groom in a stable may have little interest in abstract zoological matters: he is charged with the care of six horses, all individually distinct. They are for the groom first of all objectives of sensibility, of intuition. The six animals are, in six 288

different places, numerically distinct. The horse of the zoologist is of no interest to him compared with these six horses. Appearances and intuitions can be even "more particular" than this. I can open and close my eyes twice having as my objective six horses, and have a dozen glimpses, which are also intuitions or appearances. Kant points out the error inherent in Leibniz's regarding objectives such as the groom's six horses, as intelligibilia, as objects of the pure understanding, not as sensibilia. True, he designates them as phenomena because they are "confused" objectives, but, in fact, no real distinction is permitted between concepts and intuition: intuitions are objectives whose concepts are confused. Leibniz did not recognize anything as a true attribute of any objective except what was part of its concept. Accordingly if two drops of water had the same concept, they were identical. He did not recognize space and time as more than phenomenal (but not phenomenal in Kant's sense) because he regarded two spaces, each of some given size,as inherently not discernibly different. Hence, they can make no difference to the drops of water when they are attributed to them as their "place". There is for him only one faculty in which cognitive apprehension takes place, the understanding and all sensible properties are but confused aspects of concepts since they are aspects of monads of a less than perfect order. Kant simply refuses to go along with the amalgam of. concept and phenomenon (or intuition) in Leibniz. They are two irreducibly different classes of attributes which we employ to speak of objectives. Far from allowing that even in principle, say from God's standpoint, every true statement about an objective is a priori, he resolutely affirms that whatever pertains to objectives as given in intuition in space and time is a posteriori (except, of course, statements about space and time themselves, as explained in the Aesthetic). What can be said of objectives a priori is the general presuppositions of science, as presented in the Analytic. From Kant's point of view even though Leibniz makes concessions to bring his view into harmony with common sense in allowing a distinction between concepts and phenomena, though it is merely one between distinct and confused conception; 289

and in treating space and time as phenomena] that is, Erscheinungen, which in this case, Kant would say, is indeed Schein, that is, illusion, he still does not do justice to experience. Leibniz has intellectualized experience, reduced intuition to confusion and illusion, replaced intuitions by concepts, and asked us to accept a miracle (pre-established harmony) in place of communication. In every way, Kant proves to be the defender of common sense, of common idiom: we d_o_ know something, we are acquainted with a real world in space and time, we d£ communicate information to one another, we live in a world of real contingency and not just in one that appears to be so though it is all necessitated and predictable in the mind of God. Kant refused to a priorize about the world: his a priori is simply the basic rules of science. He refuses to accept the notion that for any and every leaf that falls from a tree I can, without consulting any observation whatever, predict that no one will ever find another leaf that totally resembles this one. His point is: Nothing whatsoever can be said significantly about the world without the support of intuittion. All of the difference between these two points of view comes down, for Kant,to a surreptitious substitution ('subreption' is the term Kant sometimes uses, that is, 'surreptition') between concept and intuition, intuition and understanding. In Leibniz, there are really only intelligibiiia and only apparent sensibilia, only the intellect is involved in knowledge and thus in science; the world of the senses is that of things in themselves confusedly revealed. All of this still breathes the air of the dead past, of medieval and Aristotelian metaphysics. Kant is lifting the curtain on the world as revealed in science. The pure interlect has been dethroned in favor of a co-regency with empirical observation. There is no way to go back to the perfect logicized, mathematized world of the rationalists though Kant makes an adequate place for perfectly formal logic, a respect in which he is far in advance of Locke and Hume. 2. Agreement and Incompatibility. Here Kant is speaking of the nature of opposition. Logical incompatibility is the contradiction of one proposition by another which is its precise negation. In this sense, any two or more propositions are compatible, can be true together, asserted in conjunction with 290

one another, if they do not contradict one another. But this tells us something only about concepts, assertions, propositions. If with Leibniz we make no real distinction between thought and intuition and make intuition into a confused form of thought, reality is represented only through pure understandina says Kant. We can then conceive of no incompatibility between realities for all truths or realities are compatible, can be true together, so long as they do not contradict one another. Contradiction is the only incompatibility that is here allowed. But, says Kant, the real in actual appearance does conflict; for example, forces can be in opposition to one another in a straight line. Pleasures and pains may oppose one another. This point is by no means as well taken as the former. There is, in fact, little to be gained by insisting on the common sense notion of conflict, as between forces or inclinations for these are perfectly adequateXy described by reference to the mass and motion of bodies moving in given directions. (There also seems to be nothing in what Leibniz says that would make vector addition impossible.) A collision is only a set of motions that may have a certain special interest for us. It does not seem that such facts as these have the consequences Kant speaks of: a confusion in Leibniz's system arising from an intellectualization of the object of appearance and making it impossible for him to recognize palpable facts such as opposition of forces. 3. Inner and Outer. In this subsection Kant presents another well-known aspect of Leibniz's philosophy which again concerns the intellectualization of reality at the expense of what is truly and distinctly intuition. What do we mean by inner? In general, that is inner which never reveals itself and is never detectable by anything other than itself. The inmost of some person may be defined as that which one cannot know about a person without being that person. Phenomenal substances are quite different from this. Their inner and outer being are one and the same. Their being is exhausted in the relations they have to other things: each of them is a complex (Inbegriff) of such relations. Substances in space are known only through their powers, their exertions, their pushes and pulls. All of this, however derives from the fact that these are objects in space, apprehended through 291

intuition. But according to Leibniz, intuition is only illusory and everything is apprehended only through the understanding, distinctly, albeit sometimes confusedly. If there is no real intuition of outward things affording some knowledge of the properties of things, there remains only inner sense. Things must then reveal properties of thought or what is analogous to thought since this is the essence of inner, as against outer, activity. This occurs with Leibniz ' s intellectualization of the cognitive faculties. All substances are noumena rather than phenomena, and their being is only inner rather than physical or spatial. Having only powers of inner representation, they are monads. Kant's objections are amplified in the section that follows ("Comment on the Amphiboly"). 4. Matter and Form. The intellectualization of the world has still another serious consequence: a reversal of the formal and material aspects of experience. Here Kant hopes to set matters straight from the "pan-logism" of Leibniz. Kant already employs the classical concepts of matter and form in a unique way: pure and empirical concepts, and pure intuitions fall to the side of form, empirical intuitions to those of matter. In this section, our attention .is first drawn to older, more scholastic or Aristotelian uses of these notions. Matter is the determinable, the to-be-determined; form is the determining or determinant. In the older logic, the general is the matter, the specific difference is the form. Thus, the form makes something specific of the general, which is a kind of raw material. In a judgment the mere concepts, in and by themselves, are mere matter for which form must be supplied by the actual assertion which links concepts by the copula and other logical particles. In general, parts are matter and only the structural relation of them gives form. Limitless reality is the matter of all possibility ; the limitation of it to distinguish one thing from another is form. It is characteristic of the understanding to put matter before form in the sense that it exercises itself upon it and specifies it. Accordingly, in Leibniz the substance, the monad, comes first and is the source of its determinations (actions, properties, relation). Thus, space and time are but relations of substances. (Kant expounds his own rival views of 292

space and time in §8 in the Aesthetic, in B ) . That, in fact, is how things would have to be if space and time were determinations (properties, relations) of things themselves. But, in fact, the reverse is the case: sensate intuitions are determined by the forms of intuition. We do not grasp a readymade, pre-existing world of things in themselves which is at all levels (whether the higher logical or lower intuitional levels) a world apprehended by the understanding. Space and time, instead of being determinations arising out of substances, precede the matter of appearances, sensations, as their form, and make appearances possible. The world we perceive is not a finished datum, something given, presented to us but rather a dandum, something to be given, on which the categories and pure intuitions impress their form. Thus, according to Kant, Leibniz's error lies in the scope of the operations of thought, extending itself over all experience. On the contrary, says Kant, we must totally and really distinguish intuition and thought. We must accord priority to the forms of intuition, space and time, over the matter of experience, empirical intuition. The consequence of not doing so would, of course, be that the explanation of the synthetic and a priori character of the propositions of mathematics, the burden of the Aesthetic, would have to be abandoned, and there would be consequences also elsewhere if the distinction between appearances and things themselves were not recognized. It is these larger consequences which are ultimately to concern to Kant in the Amphiboly. III.

Comment on the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection

Drawing on a comparison with Aristotle's doctrine of topoi, Kant begins these amplifying comments by characterizing as transcendental topics, the operation we referred to above as transcendental destination. (Topics is made plural in analogy with mathematics, physics, and so on, though it is topic in Kant.) The assignment of concepts to sensibility or to the understanding (which would be designated its transcendental place, or topos) is then the task of transcendental topics. Care in following this procedure will prevent those vacuous efforts whose consequences have already been shown. Without careful consideration of 293

the place of concepts or objectives, only a very uncertain use will be made of them, and what may appear to be synthetic principles will turn up which critical reason cannot acknowledge. Kant now re-states the criticism of Leibniz, amplifying the account here and there. (It is repeated still another time below.) 1) Leibniz compared the objects of the senses in respect to their identity and difference only in the understanding. Since he did not consider them as objects in intuition, fully distinct from understanding, he extended to objects of the senses his principle of the identity of indiscernibles, which really applies only to concepts. If I consider a drop of water solely from the standpoint of concepts, I cannot distinguish it from any other drop if it is truly coextensive with its concept. But if I take seriously the fact that it is a sensible object, that it and its concept are not one and the same, and that, in general, the objects of the senses are not just confused concepts, I must admit that it has its place not only in the understanding, but in sensate intuition, in space. An object which occupies place b_ can resemble fully and perfectly another object in place a_. The difference of place makes the distinctiveness of objects not only possible but necessary. Leibniz's law of indescernibility is not a law of nature: it is only an analytical rule of the comparison of things through mere concepts. Thus, by making a mistaken assignment or destination to representations (or objectives, as we called t h e m ) , by assigning to the understanding what belongs in intuition, Leibniz was compelled to make false assertions about the identity and difference of these representations. The faulty assignment is an example of amphiboly. 2) The second erroneous consequence of Leibniz's intellectualization of experience concerns agreement and incompatibility. So long as we restrict opposition to logical contradiction, and interpret all the data of experience as being conceptual in nature, whether distinctly or confusedly, there can be no conflict between realities: all true assertions are compatible with one another. But Kant thinks that restricting opposition to logical contradiction eliminates the possibility of the manifestation of opposing mechanical forces. Real opposition, he says, 294

"occurs whenever A - B = 0, that is, where one reality totally cancels the effectiveness of another, something which the conflicts and contrary workings of nature ceaselessly exhibit to us1.' He says that mechanics even formalizes this in a priori rules which allow for the opposition of directed forces. Of this, he says, the (Leibnizian) transcendental concept of reality knows nothing. But all that Kant has in mind here is probably the law of the addition of vectors. It is not obvious that Leibniz would wish to or would have to repudiate this. Kant's application of the amphiboly to Leibnizian doctrine of the illusory nature of evil is perhaps more convincing. He holds that here a real conflict, between good and evil, is only seemingly eliminated by Leibniz because appearances are not taken seriously as distinct from things in themselves. Evil is presented in analogy to phenomenal space and time, as the consequence of but a confused and limited view of things just as perception is but a confused form of thought. 3) The third conflict between Leibniz's philosophy and the more empirical view which Kant defends turns on the question of inner and outer. We begin again with the fact that Kant demands a transcendental assignment or, in fact, re-assignment of objectives not as in Leibniz, wholly to the understanding, as things in themselves, but as the situation demands, some to the understanding, others to intuition. For Leibniz the outer is merely apparent: All reality is essentially inner. There only appear to be external relations, determination and causation from without as if it affected each substance. There is, in fact, nothing either external or composite. The real is to begin with the simple and indivisible, the monad. Since the monads do not affect, touch, or move one another, their activity is wholly inner, a condition which is wholly one of representing (Zustand der Vorstellungen). As a consequence, their apparent communication can only be regarded as one of manifesting complementarity or in concert by a pre-established harmony, since it cannot derive from physical influence. The alternative would be to have the harmony derive from a constant divine re-adjustment of one substance to another (systema assistentiae). Leibniz chooses a perfect pre-establishment that is possible only with a life that is wholly one of ideas (at higher and lower levels of clarity); with anything subject to contingent external influences this would scarcely be thinkable. 295

Kant's point is to suggest (he does not say) that all of this, although vastly impressive, is just as incredible as it sounds, and he refuses to say, credo quia incredibile. The mistake derives from a faulty assignment. We must recognize the ultimate difference of concepts and intuitions, of intuition and understanding, and of appearances and things in themselves. A faulty assignment will lead us to try to believe that all experience is inner, that there is no real communication . Although Kant's own account makes appearances vircually inner, he would remind us that he is merely not claiming to know things in themselves, and that he never either obscures the distinction between intuition and understanding, between concepts and intuitions, or accepts either Hume's sensualism or Leibniz's conceptualism as universal formulas for the mind or experience. He never regards intuitions as projections of ourselves. He merely claims that whatever the character of what they reveal to us may be, apart from experience, it is an analytic truth that we are in no position to say what it is. 4) The fourth error which Kant wishes to expose is Leibniz's view of space and time. Kant takes everything for granted here, offering only the merest suggestion of what Leibniz actually said about these topics. But his approach is like the previous. Leibniz has, in effect, either made the wrong decision in the transcendental assignment of space and time, or he has proceded wholly without submitting the question of their destination to transcendental reflection. Things are intelligible substances for Leibniz (substantiae noumena), space is a certain order in the community of substances, and time is the dynamic consequence of their states. Space and time are at once thought to be both merely confused (inner) states of the substances (monads) and also self-subsistent entities that are prior to things. He has tried to see them both as appearances and as things in themselves. But space and time are not things in themselves or even confused aspects of them. Even if we would say something significant (that is, in the form of synthetic propositions) of things in themselves, it could not be applied to appearances. Space and time are not aspect or relations of things themselves but are formal determinations of appearances. We have no knowledge of things themselves. Space and time have thus been erroneously assigned by Leibniz. 296

Kant makes no effort to continue the program he worked out for the four areas of reflective amphiboly. The fourth concerned matter and form. Instead, he considers the amphiboly involved in faulty reflection on the transcendental place of physical matter. Here again, the doctrine Kant has in mind is that of regarding matter as a substratum into whose inmost nature we cannot penetrate with the mere powers of our senses. This is the approach of certain metaphysicians -Leibniz may not be meant. Kant here not only strikes some well-directed blows against these but also anticipates and, in effect, attacks our own turn of the century "intuitionists" (not in Kant's sense) such as Bergson, whose philosophy represents a strong reaction against nineteenth century materialism and positivism. The burden of this reaction is that intellect can never offer anything but the general or formal account of the physical world. Science uses an ever finer sieve of relations through which however this knowledge inevitably slips. Bergson1s Introduction to Metaphysics sets forth as the end which the philosopher should seek with the aid not of scientific method, classification, generalization and theory (though these are conceded to have value of a certain sort) but ,of intuition, an intuitive penetration of the mystery of being. Kant is always a sworn enemy of anything that smacks of mystagoguery since it represents a misunderstanding of both science and metaphysics. Science will continue to examine the inner aspects of nature (in the only sense that has any meaning for us) and no one can know in advance how far this can or cannot proceed. Had he lived to witness the triumphs of science in the next two centuries, he would have seen how deep the penetration would prove to be. It is nonsense, Kant thinks, to suppose science somehow "doesn't carry us far enough". The complaint that we cannot penetrate the inmost nature of things is unfair and unreasonable because it demands the impossible, namely that we should grasp with the pure understanding what escapes the senses. Intuitionists want to apprehend cognitively, even to intuit things (this fits Bergson literally), without senses. They presume to find in man a cognitive faculty which is not only in degree but absolutely different from mere finite powers, and to ask us to be not human beings but beings of which we cannot even know whether they are

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possible, let alone know how they are constituted. Transcendental questions, touching the so-called inner nature of things, are not even in principle answerable, and the last thing Kant wants is to have his thing in itself interpreted as an inmost mystery of nature which we may with some unique, strenuous effort come to behold. We can answer them neither by deeper and deeper scientific investigation, even if the depths of nature were laid bare to us, nor by other means. They are, in effect, nonsensical. "We can understand only that which involves something that corresponds to our words in intuition" (A 277/B333). Even if there is some kind of unity that underlies and connects the world of the senses, it is not something we shall be able to unravel. We are limited in our knowledge to our intuition and indeed are limited to this even in our acquaintance with ourselves. The conclusion Kant draws is that these errors are owing to a faulty assignment of matters of cognitive decision, treating as things in themselves those which can only belong among appearances, or the reverse. IV.

(Supplement 1)

The want of transcendental reflection, or a mistaken use of it, misled a great philosopher, Leibniz, says Kant, into constructing a system of intellectual knowledge which undertakes to determine its objects without the cooperation of sense. For this reason, if for no other, it is worth inquiring after the source of amphiboly in it. (This section may be condensed since it repeats much of what has gone before.) We can say, whatever agrees with or conflicts with a concept in general also agrees with or conflicts with a particular comprised under the concept (dictum de omni et nullo). But we cannot say, whatever is not contained in a concept is not contained in a particular comprised under it, because in fact, particulars inherently contain in themselves more than is contained in their concept. But Leibniz's system is built on •< this. We may illustrate this as follows. ;

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a)

Leibniz takes propositions about substances in intension. ' In 'S is P', P is a notion comprised in S, which embraces it. (Whatever holds of S, the concept in general, holds also of any P comprised under it.) P is contained in S.

b)

Kant wants to take propositions about substances in extension. In ' S is P' , P is a set of objectives in whose membership S falls. (We cannot say, what does not hold of S does not hold of P . ) The S's are among the P ' s.

Leibniz's interpretation universalized, leads directly to a notion which underlies the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles: if in the concept of a thing in general a certain discrimination is not to be encountered, neither will it be encountered in any of those things themselves. It follows that all things are altogether alike (einerlei, numero eadem) if they are not distinguished from one another (in respect to quality and quantity) in concept. This ignores the fact that in a concept of a thing, we ignore the conditions of the experience of it. Three of the four amphibolous results in faulty transcendental reflection are gone over again in the fourth paragraph in this subsection. (This is the third time Kant has gone through it. The first began in A 263/B 318, the second in A 271/B 3 2 7 ) . Kant has argued that in mere concepts of things, much is abstracted from, and thus left to one side, in what is present in actual intuition. The philosopher, he says, is in such a hurry to draw a total to the nature of things that he omits what can be found only by the laborious pursuit of experience, through intuition. He now repeats what he regards as the consequences of this.

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1) One cubic foot can be repeated over and over again. But two cubic feet or two objects in space each two cubic feet in volume, are distinguishable by their place: this is not contained in their concept. It is space itself, which is a condition for appearance in addition to concepts. Both must be present . 2) Two concepts are identical if not logically incompatible, contradictory of one another. This cannot be literally said of objects in appearances: it conflicts with and cannot be reconciled with the fact that there are true opposites in experience, according to Kant; for example, opposing forces annihilate one another, set one another at zero. 3) The third example is, of course, the inner and the outer. Here Kant adds little that is new to this question beyond what he has already said. Treating appearances as if they were objects of the intellect rather than of both thought and intuition, they can only be thought to be wholly inner, the model of thought being inner representation. As a result, substances can only be thought to be monads which have a wholly intellectual existence ranging from the most rudimentary to the most exalted type. There is no real distinction between intuition and thought for the first is only a confused form of the second. With this, however, the system cannot do justice to our experience without distortion and unintelligibility, as already noted above. In the remainder of the section, Kant goes over many by now familiar topics, some already considered, such as the role of categories and intuition in experience, the error in ignoring the distinction between appearances and things in themselves, the limiting or regulative role of things themselves or noumena, and the cautious, essentially negative manner in which we must speak of these. He repeats that the greatest temptation to be avoided lies in taking concepts without intuitions, thought without perception, logical form without content, as if this could reveal to us something that can exist in itself as a transcendent, noumenal object. Any scheme which, like Leibniz's, universalizes the conceptual, allowing intuitions or phenomena only a place i as degenerate forms of this, has misused concepts and 300

displaced them from their inherent direction and purpose. This, the topics of the amphiboly are already a part of the transcendental dialectic which follows after the second supplement. V.

(Supplement 2)

As an appendix to an appendix, Kant adds a brief note regarding the idea of negation which it is worthwhile to have although it scarcely adds anything essential to the Critique. He thinks it necessary to round out the system of the Transcendental Analytic, which is now finally concluded. "The highest concept with which one is accustomed to initiate transcendental philosophy," he says, "is that of the possible, and the impossible." If we are surprised by this, since the Critique has really had no peers or predecessors, we must recall that he is still formally "working inside the system" (to borrow a useful current political phrase). This can be seen by a glance at what he envisages of philosophy and metaphysics as a whole in the penultimate section of the Critique, the Architectonic of Pure Reason, A 832/ B 860ff: he is determined to clean out the Augean stable, not to burn it down. If now the possible and impossible occupy the whole terrain itself, we must ask what the terrain itself is that is exhausted in this division. This he identifies as that of an object in general, or as such (Gegenstand überhaupt). The categories refer inherently to objects in general, that is, to any and all objects, but not to particular objects. They can refer to something in particular only when there are available intuitions which of course are nothing in general but are absolutely particular. For such reasons, Kant thinks he must follow the general pattern of the screed of categories (Screed II)to spell out the particular negations of each of the classes of categories. We might call these the "counter-categories." It should be remembered that negation here only has to do with the categories. The argument seems somewhat artificial, but it is nevertheless ingenious and well deserves the page Kant devotes to it. Neither here nor of course anywhere else in Kant is there the kind of pious mystification about nothing that Hegel unfortunately originated and that the existentialists have suffered from as an occupational disease. He simply 301

thinks we had best devote some thought to the different kinds of negations we utter. in a more congenial place, Kant might well have said more about it since it deserves thoroughgoing study. 1) Turning first to the categories of quantity which are built on judgements involving the particles all, many and one (or as we would say, universal and existential quantification, and sentences about individuals) , Kant asks what is excluded by or opposed by judgment of this sort. Opposed to them would be the judgment in terms of keines (none, or none at a l l ) , that is, a category to which no specifiable intuition corresponds. Such an "entity" (and, in fact, it proves not surprisingly to be but a thought-entity, a Gedankending) will be, for example, a noumenon. Such a thing cannot be reckoned among possibilities, experience being what it is ( the emphasis is important) but which also cannot be declared to be flatly an impossibility. It is that kind of possibility and im' possibility. It is, as Kant says, an ens rationis, an empty concept without an object. These qualifications are of the utmost importance in the sequel in the Ideal of Pure Reason, where Kant allows and insists upon the usefulness of such a notion in the total economy of thought and practice. 2) The classes of the categories of Quality and of Modality already seem to have negative categories: the fifth category, Negation, and the complement to the tenth category, Impossibility. (Perhaps this is only a minor anomaly, since of course Kant often follows his own threefold and fourfold divisions very loosely. ) What we have here is simply the notion that some predicate or other has been denied of a subject without specification of what is present in place of it. So I can say, the rose was not red, there was no light in the corner, the house was not warm, and leave matters at that. These are a kind of privative sentence (cf. the term deprivation). We seem to have said something with each of them though we have really only denied something,, and we may even convey information with such sentences, but only because of the inferences people are bound to make, the physical world being what it is. Thus, if I sayl the house is not warm, you will probably infer that it is cool, cold, chilly, uncomfortable, lukewarmish, or what not, though I have not asserted any of these. This Kant calls the empty object of a concept; that is, the concept is, for example, warm or red and there is no object for it, no

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corresponding physical state. There are also predicates which are explicitly of a privative sort: Kant cites cold and shadow. This form of negation he calls nil privativum. 3) In the third case, Kant confines himself to the category of substance and the example is somewhat less convincing than the others. What have we before us when we have the other necessities of reality but not substance? It would be a thing that has formal characteristics such as extension in space or in time but is not truly an object that is being intuited. Dream objects would be like this, though we also seem to lend credence at the time to their being substances. In any event, imaginary objects are like this. Kant says that here we have an empty intuition without an object, an ens imaginarium. 4) In the fourth class, the example and the remarks are quite clear, but some questions must be raised about this particular form of negation. Kant describes it as one of simple self-contradiction, a concept incompatible with itself. Kant should have noted that what the tenth category covers is not logical contradiction,for the categories have nothing to do with logic (except that self-consistency must of course be m a i n t a i n e d ) . The example Kant gives, however, is almost consistent with the test of the Critique : it is impossible to draw a closed rectilinear figure with two sides only. If we concede to Kant that the propositions of geometry are synthetic and a p r i o r i , this sort of figure will have to be excluded as something other than a logical impossibility. But then we recall that mathematics is not under the sway of the categories as are natural science and psychology, yet Kant has said at the outset that these negations follow the order and direction of the categories; and it is evident that categorial impossibility is what is really called for here (see Postulates of Empirical Thought, A 219/B 266 to A 2 2 4 / 2 7 1 ) . Kant should have produced a more appropriate example. But if he had produced an example of something that negated the proper use of the categories (interpreting the present sense of negation as the opposite of the tenth c a t e g o r y ) , would it also be an example of nihil negativum, an "empty object without a concept," as he says here? I am strongly inclined to doubt it. That it would be an Unding, as he less formally characterizes it, may be accepted without much argument. 303

Kant declares 1) and 4) to be empty concepts whereas 2) and 3) are vacuous or absent data for concepts. The purpose of his remark is uncertain although its point is well taken. Negation, he says, no doubt meaning 2 ) , and the mere form of intuition, meaning 3 ) , are, without something real, no objects. Perhaps he wishes to say that dark or shadow or cold have significance only because certain positive co-relatives are significant, for example, light or warm.

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1: 7 In 1787 a reviewer of B took note of a contradiction between the last sentence of I and the second sentence of the second paragraph of II. Replying to this in an essay on the use of teleological principles in philosophy (1788), Kant maintains that the term 'pure' is used in different senses in these two passages. "In the first passage I said that those a priori modes of knowledge (Erkenntnisse) are pure which have no admixture of anything empirical", and he used as an example of a mixed judgment, "every alteration has a cause." In the second passage, "I mentioned this very proposition as an example of pure a priori knowledge, that is, one which does not depend upon anything empirical." Kant concedes he might have avoided misunderstanding "through using an example...'whatever happens has a cause.1 Here there is no admixture of anything empirical." He says that in the Critique he is concerned only with the second of these. The latter proposition is the thesis of the Second Analogy (see Transcendental Analytic) where it reads in A: Everything that occurs (begins to be) presupposes something upon which it follows in accordance with a rule. In B, on the other hand, Kant has actually returned to the version which involves the concept of alteration: All alterations occur in accordance with the law of the connection of cause and effect. (For further discussion of Kant's use of the terms 'a priori' and 'pure' see Kemp Smith's Commentary, p. 53-56 The essay of Kant referred to is "Über den Gebrauch teleologischer Prinzipien in der Philosophie", 1788.) 2: 14 Kant more properly uses 'a priori1 as an adverb: How are synthetic judgments possible a priori? I have generally but not invariably followed the current convention. The convention in fact rests on a fundamental mis-reading of Kant. It is no more grammatical change to go from adverb to adjective here. As an adverb, Kant emphasizes that we judge in an a priori manner: the mental or intellectual act of judging is what is adverbially qualified. The current convention makes it appear that the "a priority" is an adjectival property of some entity called a judgment which is then always equated with proposition of sentence. Hence I follow the convention reluctantly in speaking of Kant. Kant sometimes, but rarely, says Satz (sentence) instead of Urteil (judgment). 3= 15 It should be observed that both sections V and VI make their appearance only in B and that nearly the whole of the first three paragraphs in V appeared in 305

almost identical form in the Prolegomena. Thus it appears to represent Kant's considered thought on the subject. 4: 29 The subsection symbol § appears for the first time in Edition B. 5: 30 At the outset of this section we read that "that kind of intuition which relates to the object only through sensation is empirical" (A20/B34) while in the Conclusions of §3 he says that colors, tones and heat "are only sensations and not intuitions." Since the inclusion of sensations under intuition is again repeated in B (Transcendental Deduction) we may presume this to be his more considered opinion (B 147). 6: 3 2 Kant presents a formal system of definition of. all the things he is speaking of as "representations" only when he introduces the last of these, idea. The list includes, among others, sensation, intuition, concept, category, and notion. It appears at A319/B376. 7: 36 At this point an explanation is necessary to set an important textual matter straight. In A the Metaphysical and Transcendental Expositions, Erörterungen, are not separated. What is essential to the latter is found in argument 3 for space and also in argument 3 for time. In B, Kant separated out the matter of the Metaphysical from that of the Transcendental Expositions in both the space and the time section. The material of argument 3 (the Transcendental Exposition) for space was now shifted to §3, the previous argument 4 now reappeared as § 3, and previous argument 5 was rephrased and reappeared as 4. But in the time section, a different revision occurred. The five arguments previously presented as I, II, III, IV, and V, now appeared merely renumbered as 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. But argument III, that is, what amounts to the Transcendental Exposition of time, remained as 3, instead of being taken over wholly into §5, as had been done under space. Despite this, an explicit Transcendental Exposition also appears, as §5. Editions and translations usually show the changes quite explicitly, but the reader may easily be confused at first. 8= 3 6 For another textual point I may refer the reader to what Kant says at the paragraph beginning just after mark A89 (middle of B121) about the purpose of arguments in the Aesthetic. 9= 42

cf. Preface to B, xxii n. 306

10= 51 George Boas, "The Acceptance of Time", University of California Publications in Philosophy, Volume 16, no. 12. 11: 56 Albert Einstein, Relativity, the Special and General Theory, tr. by R. W. Lawson, New York, Henry Holt and Company, 1921. p. 32. 12: 56 Op. cit. p. 36 13= 58 As anticipated in §4 (3) . 14: 71 We can perhaps best explain this phrase, which turns up on some important occasions in the Critique, by trying to realize what Berkeley and other theologians had tried to say when they attributed to God a direct knowledge of the physical world without having to rely upon a sensorium. If in imagining something remote from me in time and space I could now have it before me but without stimulus to my sensory apparatus or if in the very act of imagining something I realized it, I should be having an intellectual intuition of it. Perhaps telepathy, if established as real and not explicable by physical means, would furnish a further example. Our own intuitions sensate or formal, Kant is saying, are not like this. 15: 95 In B Kant here resumes the numbering of subsections in this manner. The preceding §8 is found towards the end of the Transcendental Aesthetic. The series continues through the Transcendental Deduction to §27, where it terminates. Kant may have wished to suggest or to underscore further a certain unity or continuity running through the Aesthetic and the Analytic of Concepts; possibly that these two together set forth the first part of the threefold transcendental doctrine of concepts, judgments, and inferences. 16: 9 8 Of course we are thinking of the analogous implicative formula or sentence for Barbara rather than an inference in accordance with Barbara. 17:114 A rulei is category or a categorial principle. A rule2 is typically an empirical concept or an empirical generalization. 18:12 0 it is well to pause at this point to get a few textual matters clearly in order. First there are comparatively minor matters of titles and numberings of chapters and sections. It is well, I think, to follow 307

Kemp Smith, who cites Michaelis, in revising the heading of the chapter that now begins so that it reads "Analytic of Concepts" rather than "Transcendental Analytic," which appears in the original editions: what Kant now presents is not the second chapter of the latter (which is divided first into Books and only then into chapters) but rather the second chapter under the "Analytic of Concepts." The first chapter, just concluded is the Clue, or Leitfaden. The numbering that continues in the next subsection as §13 is added only in B and continues throughout the Deduction in B up to §27. The text of §13 is otherwise the same in both editions. §14 is slightly enlarged by some three paragraphs at the end which replace the paragraph closing this section in A. As everyone knows, the actual deduction is totally recast in B, that is, what Kant calls Section 2 under Chapter II. Following the example of Kemp Smith and others, we first consider the version of Section 2 in A and then proceed to the restatement in B. At the end we then come to the second grand division of the Transcendental Analytic, the Analytic of Principles. Since we have not quite arrived at the revisions of B, we shall delay further comments regarding the two editions until we come to the deduction proper, section 2 in A and §15 in B. 19:12 7 The paragraph that closes §14 in A may well be taken up at the beginning of Section 3. 20:129 Adickes supposed that the deduction set forth in Section 2 and Section 3 amounted really to some six distinct deductions. Numerous cross connections are proposed and suggestions are made as to how bits and pieces may have been moved from one of these "deductions" to another. His division is as follows. I.

II. III. IV.

First Deduction: A98 to the middle of Alll, at the beginning of subsection 4, "Preliminary Explanation," etc. This deduction comprises the threefold synthesis. Second Deduction: The first three paragraphs only of subsection 4. Third Deduction: The remaining paragraphs of subsection 4. Fourth Deduction: Beginning of Section 3, almost to A120 where a paragraph begins with the words "We will now, starting from 308

V. VI.

below" etc. (Kemp Smith's translation). Fifth Deduction: Beginning at about A120 and running to the middle of A125. Sixth Deduction: The last deduction begins at the paragraph just preceding A126 and runs to the "Summary Representation."

We may follow Adickes' division for certain purposes, perhaps other than those that led him to propose it. That is, one does have a certain sense of Kant's having a go at the deduction several times over. He confessed having had great difficulty with the deduction. Repetition in the Critique is often explicit. When we compare the titles and subject matters of Section 2 and Section 3 we do not detect much of a difference between them. Both the sections are concerned with the same material except for the fact that the imagination has a more prominent place in the second. Kemp Smith proposes several different "stages" as the way to define and delimit the course of the argument. His division is four-fold. I.

II.

III.

IV.

First Stage: That of the transcendental object without co-operation of the categories: A104-110; A84-92 (B116-124). That is, most of subsection 3 in Section 2, and all of §13. Second Stage: That of the categories without co-operation of the productive imagination: A92-94 (5 14 as originally presented in A) ; A95-97 (introductory paragraphs in Section 2 ) ; A110-114 (all of subsection 4 ) . Third Stage: That of the productive imagination, without mention of the threefold synthesis: all of Section 3 in various subordinate stages: A94-95 (last two paragraphs of §14 in A ) ; A76-79 (first five paragraphs of §10). Fourth Stage: That of the threefold transcendental synthesis: A98-104 ("Preliminary Reminder" and Subsections 1, 2, and first two paragraphs of 3 ) ; A97-98 (two paragraphs next preceding Preliminary Remark).

21:138 Moritz Schlick, "Die Kausalität in der gegenwärtigen Physik," Naturwissenschaften, Bd. 19, 19 31. 22:140 i may remark again that if we wish to learn what Kant formally intended by his terminology we should 309

examine the table of the dichotomous divisions that are comprised under representation1 in the introductory discussion of the Transcendental Dialectic, A319/B376. 23=159 The designations 'objective deduction1 and 'subjective deduction' are introduced by Kant in the Preface to A, at A xvii. 24=160 This is further developed in B in §16. 25=165 Zweig, Arnulf, editor and translator, Immanuel Kant, Philosophical Correspondence, 1759-1799, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967. 26=167 This we have previously spoken of also as the Self. 27=168 These were sketched out earlier, p. 93. 28=208 Discussed in further detail below, p. 319 ff. v. also K. Aschenbrenner, "The Derivation and Completeness of the Analogies of Experience," Akten des 4. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, Mainz, 1974. W. De Gruyter, Berlin, New York. 29=2 42 It will be convenient to number the paragraphs in this section from 1 to 28 for handier reference than is afforded by the usual numbering. We follow the text of B which adds paragraphs 1 and 2 but is otherwise identical with A. 30=251 A rather difficult textual question arises here. The first edition reads "Der grosste Teil der wirkenden Ursache in der Natur ist mit ihren Wirkungen zugleich, und die Zeitfolge der letzteren wird nur dadurch veranlasst, dass die Ursache ihre ganze Wirkung nicht in einem Augenblick verrichten kann. Aber in dem Augenblicke, da sie zuerst entsteht, ist sie mit der Kausalität ihrer Ursache jederzeit zugleich," etc. Rosenkranz thought that Ursache in the first line should read Ursachen, and accordingly that der grosste Theil meant "the majority of cases.' Kemp Smith and even Max Mueller follow this. Görland, however, in Cassirer's edition lets Ursache stand, as I believe it should. If it stands, the result is that Kant's meaning is clearly this: the larger part of the effective causal action of a cause on its effect is contemporaneous with its effect, and not the great majority of efficient causes, etc. What Kant means is that cause and its effect overlap. Only after the cause begins to act is there a noticeable change, which from then on we regard as 310

the effect; the cause may also continue to act. To read the passage as the translators do is to attribute to Kant the inconsistency of saying in one sentence that in most cases causes are contemporary with effects and in the very next that in the moment in which they arise effects are invariably (jederzeit) contemporaneous with their causes. 31:267 "Kant's Critique of Berkeley", Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. XI, no. I, January 1973. 32:274 This subsection added in Edition B. 33:276 This metaphor, it may be remarked, may be of more than incidental interest if with Karl Groos-we see in it a possible evidence that Kant had some acquaintance with Hume's Treatise (cf. "Hat Kant Humes Treatise Gelesen?" Kantstudien, 5: 177-181, 1901. Hume uses the same metaphor for a not dissimilar purpose (Treatise, Book I, part IV, Section VII) and it may have lodged itself in Kant's thought to emerge at this appropriate moment. The point is, Kant is thought to have known very little English but of course Hume is everywhere present in his thoughts in writing the Critique. Only the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding was available in a German translation to Kant and it has only certain of the fundamentals of Hume's philosophy of mind, though by no means all. If on the other hand, he had somehow a knowledge of Hume's Treatise we would have to take this into account in appraising his response to Hume in the Critique. Quite often he seems to misunderstand Hume's purpose or meaning, or to ignore the most salient aspects of the argument. Kant's relation to Hume is in fact in most ways rather baffling. Of course, no one should overestimate what may be a mere coincidence in stylistic detail, that is, the ocean metaphor, nor does Groos. It just may, however, be relevant.

311

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kant, Immanuel: 1962 (1956, 1930), Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, herausgegeben von Raymund Schmidt. Felix Meiner (Philosophische Bibliothek, Band 37a) Kant, I.: 1889, Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, mit Einleitungen u. Anmerkungen, herausgegeben von Erich Adickes. Berlin, Mayer s Muller. Kant, I: 1889, Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, herausgegeben von Benno Erdmann. Hamburg und Leipzig, Leopold Voss. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: 1915, translated into English by F. Max Muller, New York, Macmillan and Company. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: 1929, translated by Norman Kemp Smith, London, Macmillan and Company. Kant, Philosophical Correspondence, 1759-1799: 1967, Edited and translated by Arnulf Zweig, University of Chicago Press.

Adickes, Erich: 1887, Kants Systematik als Systembildender Factor, Berlin, Mayer & Muller. Bennett, Jonathan: 1966, Kant's Analytic. at the University Press.

Cambridge,

Paton, H.J.: 1936, Kant's Metaphysic of Experience, 2 vols. New York, The Macmillan Company. Smith, Norman Kemp: 1962, A Commentary to Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason." New York, Humanities Pre s s. Strawson, P.F.: 1962, The Bounds of Sense, An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. London, Methuen and Co. Vaihinger, Hans: 1881, 1892, Commentar zu Kants Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 2 vols. Stuttgart, W. Spemann; Union Deutscher Verlagsgesellschaft. 312

Berkeley, George: 1948 et seq., The Works of George Berkeley, Edited by A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop. London, Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd. Descartes, Rene: 1912, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, rendered into English by Haldane and Ross, 2 vols. Cambridge, at the University Press. Hume, David: 1888 et seq., A Treatise of Human Nature, Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford University Press. Leibniz, G.W.: 1908, The Philosophical Works of Leibnitz, translated by G.M. Duncan. New York, Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor. Locke, John: 1967, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , Edited by John W. Yolton. Everyman's Library, London, J.M. Dent & Sons.

313

INDEX OF NAMES

Adickes, E., 129, 156-57, 194, 242 Aebi, Magdalena, 95 Albertus, Magnus, 239 Allison, Henry, 267 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 239 Aristotle, 81, 106, 116, 292-293 Baumgarten, A. G., Preface Bergson, Henri, 297 Berkeley, George Bishop, 47-48, 64, 193, 262 Boas, George, 51 Braithwaite, R. B., 253 Browning, R., 3 Carnap, R., 251, 253 Cassirer, E., 251 Note 30 Dalton, John, 239 Descartes, R., 7, 49, 68, 113 Einstein, Albert, 56 Fichte, J. G., Preface Frede, Michael and L. Krüger, 104 Galen, 116 Görland, A., 251 Note 30 Groos, Karl, 2 76 Hegel, G. W. F., Preface, 51, 75, 117 Hume, David, Preface, 3, 21, 23, 47, 54, 60, 79, 121122, 126-127, 135, 137, 140, 168, 171, 246, 249, 253-254, 260, 262, 272, 285 James, William, 61 Kant, I., Critique of Judgment, 119 Kant and the Romantic Agony, Preface Keynes, J. M., 221 Lavoisier, Antoine L., 239 Leibniz, G. W., Preface, 25, 49, 66-67, 119, 126, 207, 250, 283 et seq. to end of section on the Amphiboly 314

Locke, John, 4, 7, 67, 126-127, 137, 140-141, 163, 285, 290 Marx, Karl, 51 Mates, Benson, 206 Michelson-Morley Experiment, 228 Mill, J. S., 221, 249, 253 Mueller, Max, 251 Note 30 Newton, Sir I., 59, 236 Nietzsche, F., 148 Paton, H. , 129 Plato and Platonism, 51, 68, 81, 184 Plotinus, 116 Popper, Sir Karl, 253 Prolegomena, 16, 53, 99, 100, 136, 178 Reichenbach, H., 221 Rosenkranz, Karl, 251 Note 30 Russell, B., Preface, 71, 221 Scheffer, H. M., 103 Schlick, M., 138 Smith, N. K., 7 Note 7, 10, 53, 55, 129, 129 Note 20, 251 Note 30 St. Ansein, 27 Stoics, 116 Strawson, P. F., 73 Vaihinger, H., 129 von Wright, H., 221, 253 Whitehead and Russell, 103 Wittgenstein, L., Preface, 103, 54 Wolff, C , Preface, 25, 66, 68, 119, 135 f, 253

315

TOPICAL INDEX

Action at a distance, 228 Aesthetic, transcendental, 29-74 Affections, intuitions rest on, 88 Affinity of representations, 160 Amphiboly of the concepts of reflection, 283-304 Analogies of experience, 231-261 Analytic and synthetic, definition of, 9 Analytic Propositions, various interpretations, 10 ff Analytic of concepts, 86 ff Analytic of principles, 195 ff Analytic, transcendental, 83 ff Anticipations of perception, 227-230 Axioms of intuition, 223-226 Canon and organon, 22, 81 Clue to the discovery of pure concepts of the understanding, 87-119 Empirical apperception, 152 Empirical realism, and transcendental idealism, TIER, 64 ff Enlightenment, the, Preface Ether, the, 228 Euclid, Theorem, 17 Functions, concepts rest on, 88 Geometry and space, 44 German Idealism, Preface Highest principle of all analytic judgments, 216-217 Highest principle of all synthetic judgments, 218-219 Inaugural Dissertation of 1770, 46 Incarnation in Christian theology, 184 Inner sense, and time, 60 "I think", not an object known, 187 Judgments of experience, judgments of perception, 99, 178 Logic, general and formal, 76-77, 79 Logic, transcendental, 75 ff

316

Medieval negative theology, 173 Metaphysical deduction of the categories, 87-119, §26 Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, 23, 59, 84, 236 Need for critique of pure reason, 42 Negation, nothing, 301-304 Neo-Platonism, 173, 184 Objective deduction, 123, 132 Paradigm case argument, 271 Paradigmatic self, 17 and passim Permanence, 236 ff Phenomena and noumena, grounds of the distinction into, 276-281 Postulates of empirical thought, 262-273 Pre-established harmony, 288 ff Productive synthesis, 159 Productive imagination, 185 Pure and empirical knowledge, difference between, 3 Refutation of idealism, 267-272 Rules, 18 Rules for devising rules, categories as, 111, 114 Schematism, 198 Screed I, of the categories, 96 Screed II, of the table of judgments, 96 Space, metaphysical and transcendental expositions, 35-48 Species of logic, 76 State description, 251 Subjective deduction, 124, 132 Synthesis, of apprehension in intuition, 139-143 " , of reproduction in imagination, 143-147 " , of recognition in concepts, 147-154 Synthetic a priori contained in science, 14 Three notions of Self, 169 Time, metaphysical and transcendental expositions, 51-59 Transcendental deduction of the categories, in A, 129-163 in B, 165-194, §26 Transcendental ideality and empirical reality (of space), 49, 65 Transcendental logic, 78-79, 82

317

Unified field theory, 228 Unity of apperception, transcendental, 147-181, 168-169, 231 ff