Chapter XXII: Section II: The categories are “the a priori conditions on which the (3)

Fortunately, if Vaihinger’s theory be accepted,[932] section A 98-104 enables us to follow the movement of Kant’s mind in the interval between the formulating of the doctrine of productive imagination and the publication of the _Critique_. He himself would seem to have recognised the unsatisfactoriness of dividing up the total conditions of experience into transcendental activities that issue in schemata, and supplementary empirical processes which transform them into concrete, specific consciousness. The alternative theory which he proceeds to propound is at first sight much more satisfactory. It consists in duplicating each of the various empirical processes with a transcendental faculty. There are, he now declares, three transcendental powers--a transcendental faculty of apprehension, a transcendental faculty of reproduction (=imagination), and a transcendental faculty of recognition. Thus Kant’s previous view that transcendental imagination has a special and unique activity, namely, the productive, altogether different in type from any of its empirical processes, is now allowed to drop; in place of it Kant develops the view that the transcendental functions run exactly parallel with the empirical processes.[933] But though such a position may at first seem more promising than that which it displaces, it soon reveals its unsatisfactoriness. The two types of mental activity, transcendental and empirical, no longer, indeed, fall apart; but the difficulty now arises of distinguishing in apprehension, reproduction, and recognition any genuinely transcendental aspect.[934] Apprehension, reproduction, and recognition are so essentially conscious processes that to view them as also transcendental does not seem helpful. They contain elements that are transcendental in the logical sense, but cannot be shown to presuppose in any analogous fashion mental powers that are transcendental in the dynamical sense. This is especially evident in regard to recognition, which is described as being “the _consciousness_ that what we are thinking is the same as what we thought a moment before.” In dealing with apprehension and reproduction the only real difference which Kant is able to suggest, as existing between their transcendental and their empirical activities, is that the former synthesise the pure _a priori_ manifolds of space and time, and the latter the contingent manifold of sense. But even this unsatisfactory distinction he does not attempt to apply in the case of recognition. Nor can we hold that by the transcendental synthesis of recognition Kant means transcendental apperception. That is, of course, the suggestion which at once occurs to the reader. But however possible it might be to inject such a meaning into kindred passages elsewhere, it cannot be made to fit the context of this particular section.

Vaihinger’s theory seems to be the only thread which will guide us through this labyrinth. Kant, on the eve of the publication of the _Critique_, recognising the unsatisfactoriness of his hard and fast separation of transcendental from empirical processes, adopted the view that some form of transcendental activity corresponds to every fundamental form of empirical activity and _vice versa_. Hastily developing this theory, he incorporated it into the _Critique_ alongside his older doctrine. It does not, however, reappear in the _Prolegomena_, and its teaching is explicitly withdrawn in the second edition of the _Critique_. Its plausibility had entrapped him into its temporary adoption, but the defects which it very soon revealed speedily led him to reject it.

One feature of great significance calls for special notice. The breakdown of this doctrine of a threefold transcendental synthesis did not, as might naturally have been expected from what is stated in the prefaces to the _Critique_ regarding the unessential and seemingly conjectural character of the subjective deduction, lead Kant to despair of developing a transcendental psychology. Though in the second edition he cuts away the sections containing the earlier stages of the subjective deduction,[935] and in recasting the other sections gives greater prominence to the more purely logical analyses, the older doctrine of productive imagination is reinstated in full force,[936] and is again developed in[937] connection with the doctrine of pure _a priori_ manifolds. Evidently, therefore, Kant was not disheartened by the various difficulties which lie in the path of a transcendental psychology, and it seems reasonable to conclude that there were powerful reasons inclining him to its retention. I shall now attempt, to the best of my powers, to explain--the task is a delicate and difficult one--what we may believe these reasons to have been.[938]

THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN PHENOMENALISM AND SUBJECTIVISM

A wider set of considerations than we have yet taken into account must be borne in mind if certain broader and really vital implications of Kant’s enquiry are to be properly viewed. The self has a twofold aspect. It is at once animal in its conditions and potentially universal in its powers of apprehension. Though man’s natural existence is that of an animal organism, he can have consciousness of the spatial world out of which his organism has arisen, and of the wider periods within which his transitory existence falls. Ultimately such consciousness would seem to connect man cognitively with reality as a whole. Now it is to this universal or absolutist aspect of our consciousness, to its transcendence of the embodied and separate self, that Kant is seeking to do justice in his transcendental deductions, especially in his doctrine of the transcendental unity of apperception. For he views that apperception as conditioned by, and the correlate of, the consciousness of objectivity. It involves the consciousness of a single cosmical time and of a single cosmical space within which all events fall and within which they form a whole of causally interdependent existences. That is why he names it the _objective_ unity of apperception. It is that aspect in which the self correlates with a wider reality, and through which it stands in fundamental contrast to the merely subjective states and to the individual conditions of its animal existence. The transcendental self, so far from being identical with the empirical self, would seem to be of directly opposite nature. The one would seem to point beyond the realm of appearance, the other to be in its existence merely natural. The fact that they are inextricably bound up with one another, and co-operate in rendering experience possible, only makes the more indispensable the duty of recognising their differing characters. Even should they prove to be inseparable aspects of sense-experience, without metaphysical implications, that would not obviate the necessity of clearly distinguishing them. The distinction remains, whatever explanation may be adopted of its speculative or other significance.

Now obviously in so fundamental an enquiry, dealing as it does with the most complicated and difficult problem in the entire field of metaphysics, no brief and compendious answer can cover all the various considerations which are relevant and determining. The problem of the deduction being what it is, the section dealing with it can hardly fail to be the most difficult portion of the whole _Critique_. The conclusions at which it arrives rest not merely upon the argument which it contains but also upon the results more or less independently reached in the other sections. The doctrine of the empirical object as appearance requires for its development the various discussions contained in the _Aesthetic_, in the sections on _Inner Sense_ and on the _Refutation of Idealism_, in the chapters on _Phenomena and Noumena_ and on the _Antinomies_. The metaphysical consequences and implications of Kant’s teaching in regard to the transcendental unity of apperception are first revealed in the chapter on the _Paralogisms_. The view taken of productive imagination is expanded in the section on _Schematism_. In a word, the whole antecedent teaching of the _Critique_ is focussed, and the entire subsequent development of the Critical doctrine is anticipated, in this brief chapter.

But there are, of course, additional causes of the difficulty and obscurity of the argument. One such cause has already been noted, namely, that the _Critique_ is not a unitary work, developed from a previously thought-out standpoint, but in large part consists of manuscripts of very various dates, artificially pieced together by the addition of connecting links. In no part of the _Critique_ is this so obvious as in the _Analytic of Concepts_. Until this is recognised all attempts to interpret the text in any impersonal fashion are doomed to failure. For this reason I have prefaced our discussion by a statement of Vaihinger’s analysis. No one who can accept it is any longer in danger of underestimating this particular cause of the obscurity of Kant’s deduction.

But the chief reason is one to which I have thus far made only passing reference, and to which we may now give the attention which its importance demands, namely, the tentative and experimental character of Kant’s own final solutions. The arguments of the deduction are only intelligible if viewed as an expression of the conflicting tendencies to which Kant’s thought remained subject. He sought to allow due weight to each of the divergent aspects of the experience which he was analysing, and in so doing proceeded, as it would seem, simultaneously along the parallel lines of what appeared to be the possible, alternative methods of explanation. And to the end these opposing tendencies continued side by side, to the confusion of those readers who seek for a single unified teaching, but to the great illumination of those who are looking to Kant, not for clear-cut or final solutions, but for helpful analysis and for partial disentanglement of the complicated issues which go to constitute these baffling problems.

The two chief tendencies which thus conflicted in Kant’s mind may be named the subjectivist and the phenomenalist respectively. This conflict remained, so to speak, underground, influencing the argument at every point, but seldom itself becoming the subject of direct discussion. As we shall find, it caused Kant to develop a twofold view of inner sense, of causality, of the object of knowledge, and of the unity of apperception. One of the few sections in the _Critique_ where it seems on the point of emerging into clear consciousness is the section, added in the second edition, on the _Refutation of Idealism_. But this section owes its origin to polemical causes. It represents a position peculiar to the maturer portions of the _Analytic_; the rest of the _Critique_ is not rewritten so as to harmonise with it, or to develop the consequences which consistent holding to it must involve.

I shall use the term _subjectivism_ (and its equivalent _subjective idealism_) in the wide sense[939] which makes it applicable to the teaching of Descartes and Locke, of Leibniz and Wolff, no less than to that of Berkeley and Hume. A common element in all these philosophies is the belief that subjective or mental states, “ideas” in the Lockean sense, are the objects of consciousness, and further are the sole possible objects of which it can have any direct or immediate awareness. Knowledge is viewed as a process entirely internal to the individual mind, and as carrying us further only in virtue of some additional supervening process, inferential, conjectural, or instinctive. This subjectivism also tends to combine with a view of consciousness as an ultimate self-revealing property of a merely individual existence.[940] For Descartes consciousness is the very essence, both of the mind and of the self. It is indeed asserted to be exhaustive of the nature of both. Though the self is described as possessing a faculty of will as well as a power of thinking, all its activities are taken as being disclosed to the mind through the revealing power of its fundamental attribute. The individual mind is thus viewed as an existence in which everything takes place in the open light of an all-pervasive consciousness. Leibniz, it is true, taught the existence of subconscious perceptions, and so far may seem to have anticipated Kant’s recognition of non-conscious processes; but as formulated by Leibniz that doctrine has the defect which frequently vitiates its modern counterpart, namely that it represents the subconscious as analogous in nature to the conscious, and as differing from it only in the accidental features of intensity and clearness, or through temporary lack of control over the machinery of reproductive association. The subconscious, as thus represented, merely enlarges the private content of the individual mind; it in no respect transcends it.

The genuinely Critical view of the generative conditions of experience is radically different from this Leibnizian doctrine of _petites perceptions_. It connects rather with Leibniz’s mode of conceiving the origin of _a priori_ concepts. But even that teaching it restates in such fashion as to free it from subjectivist implications. Leibniz’s contention that the mind is conscious of its fundamental activities, and that it is by reflection upon them that it gains all ultimate _a priori_ concepts, is no longer tenable in view of the conclusions established in the objective deduction. Mental processes, in so far as they are generative of experience, must fall outside the field of consciousness, and as activities dynamically creative cannot be of the nature of ideas or contents. They are not subconscious ideas but non-conscious processes. They are not the submerged content of experience, but its conditioning grounds. Their most significant characteristic has still, however, to be mentioned. They must no longer be interpreted in subjectivist terms, as originating in the separate existence of an individual self. In conditioning experience they generate the only self for which experience can vouch, and consequently, in the absence of full and independent proof, must not be conceived as individually circumscribed. The problem of knowledge, properly conceived, is no longer how consciousness, individually conditioned, can lead us beyond its own bounds, but what a consciousness, which is at once consciousness of objects and also consciousness of a self, must imply for its possibility. Kant thus obtains what is an almost invariable concomitant of scientific and philosophical advance, namely a more correct and scientific formulation of the problem to be solved. The older formulation assumes the truth of the subjectivist standpoint; the Critical problem, when thus stated, is at least free from preconceptions of that particular brand. Assumptions which hitherto had been quite unconsciously held, or else, if reflected upon, had been regarded as axiomatic and self-evident, are now brought within the field of investigation. Kant thereby achieves a veritable revolution; and with it many of the most far-reaching consequences of the Critical teaching are closely bound up.

This new standpoint, in contrast to _subjective_ idealism, may be named _Critical_, or to employ the term which Kant himself applies both to his transcendental deduction and to the unity of apperception, _objective_ idealism. But as the distinction between appearance and reality is no less fundamental to the Critical attitude, we shall perhaps be less likely to be misunderstood, or to seem to be identifying Kant’s standpoint with the very different teaching of Hegel, if by preference we employ the title _phenomenalism_.

In the transcendental deduction Kant, as above noted, is seeking to do justice to the universal or absolutist aspect of our consciousness, to its transcendence of the embodied and separate self. The unity of apperception is entitled _objective_, because it is regarded as the counterpart of a single cosmical time and of a single cosmical space within which all events fall. Its objects are not mental states peculiar to itself, nor even ideal contents numerically distinct from those in other minds. It looks out upon a common world of genuinely independent existence. In developing this position Kant is constrained to revise and indeed completely to recast his previous views both as to the nature of the synthetic processes, through which experience is constructed, and of the given manifold, upon which they are supposed to act. From the subjectivist point of view the synthetic activities consist of the various cognitive processes of the individual mind, and the given manifold consists of the sensations aroused by material bodies acting upon the special senses. From the objective or phenomenalist standpoint the synthetic processes are of a noumenal character, and the given manifold is similarly viewed as being due to noumenal agencies acting, not upon the sense-organs, which as appearances are themselves noumenally conditioned, but upon what may be called “outer sense.” These distinctions may first be made clear.

Sensations, Kant holds, have a twofold origin, noumenal and mechanical. They are due in the first place to the action of things in themselves upon the noumenal conditions of the self, and also in the second place to the action of material bodies upon the sense-organs and the brain. To take the latter first. Light reflected from objects, and acting on the retina, gives rise to sensations of colour. For such causal interrelations there exists, Kant teaches, the same kind of empirical evidence as for the causal interaction of material bodies.[941] Our sensational experiences are as truly events in time as are mechanical happenings in space. In this way, however, we can account only for the existence of our sensations and for the order in which they make their appearance in or to consciousness, not for our awareness of them. To state the point by means of an illustration. The impinging of one billiard ball upon another accounts causally for the motion which then appears in the second ball. But no one would dream of asserting that by itself it accounts for our consciousness of that second motion. We may contend that in an exactly similar manner, to the same extent, no more and no less, the action of an object upon the brain accounts only for the occurrence of a visual sensation as an event in the empirical time sequence. A sensation just as little as a motion can carry its own consciousness with it. To regard that as ever possible is ultimately to endow events in time with the capacity of apprehending objects in space. In dealing with causal connections in space and time we do not require to discuss the problem of knowledge proper, namely, how it is possible to have or acquire knowledge, whether of a motion in space or of a sensation in time. When we raise that further question we have to adopt a very different standpoint, and to take into account a much greater complexity of conditions.

Kant applies this point of view no less rigorously to feelings, emotions, and desires than to the sensations of the special senses. All of them, he teaches, are ‘animal’[942] in character. They are one and all conditioned by, and explicable only in terms of, the particular constitution of the animal organism. They one and all belong to the realm of appearance.[943]

The term ‘sensation’ may also, however, be applied in a wider sense to signify the material of knowledge in so far as it is noumenally conditioned. Thus viewed, sensations are due, not to the action of physical stimuli upon the bodily organs, but to the affection by things in themselves of those factors in the noumenal conditions of the self which correspond to “sensibility.” Kant is culpably careless in failing to distinguish those two very different meanings of the phrase ‘given manifold.’ The language which he employs is thoroughly ambiguous. Just as he frequently speaks as if the synthetic processes were conscious activities exerted by the self, so also he frequently uses language which implies that the manifold upon which these processes act is identical with the sensations of the special senses. But the sensations of the bodily senses, even if reducible to it, can at most form only part of it. The synthetic processes, interpreting the manifold in accordance with the fixed forms, space, time, and the categories, generate the spatial world within which objects are apprehended as causally interacting and as giving rise through their action upon the sense-organs to the various special sensations as events in time. Sensations, as mechanically caused, are thus on the same plane as other appearances. They depend upon the same generating conditions as the motions which produce them. As minor incidents within a more comprehensive totality they cannot possibly represent the material out of which the whole has been constructed. To explain the phenomenal world as constructed out of the sensations of the special senses is virtually to equate it with a small selection of its constituent parts. Such professed explanation also commits the further absurdity of attempting to account for the origin of the phenomenal world by means of events which can exist only under the conditions which it itself supplies. The manifold of the special senses and the primary manifold are radically distinct. The former is due to material bodies acting upon the material sense-organs. The latter is the product of noumenal agencies acting upon “outer sense,” _i.e._ upon those noumenal conditions of the self which constitute our “sensibility”; it is much more comprehensive than the former; it must contain the material for all modes of objective existence, including many that are usually regarded as purely mental.[944]

To turn, now, to the other aspect of experience. What are the factors which condition its form? What must we postulate in order to account for the existence of consciousness and for the unitary form in which alone it can appear? Kant’s answer is again ambiguous. He fails sufficiently to insist upon distinctions which yet are absolutely vital to any genuine understanding of the new and revolutionary positions towards which he is feeling his way. The synthetic processes which in the subjective and objective deductions are proved to condition all experience may be interpreted either as conscious or as non-conscious activities, and may be ascribed either to the agency of the individual self or to noumenal conditions which fall outside the realm of possible definition. Now, though Kant’s own expositions remain thoroughly ambiguous, the results of the Critical enquiry would seem--at least so long as the fundamental distinction between matter and form is held to and the temporally sequent aspect of experience is kept in view--to be decisive in favour of the latter alternative in each case. The synthetic processes must take place and complete themselves before any consciousness can exist at all. And as they thus precondition consciousness, they cannot themselves be known to be conscious; and not being known to be conscious, it is not even certain that they may legitimately be described as mental. We have, indeed, to conceive them on the analogy of our mental processes, but that may only be because of the limitation of our knowledge to the data of experience. Further, we have no right to conceive them as the activities of a noumenal self. We know the self only as conscious, and the synthetic processes, being the generating conditions of consciousness, are also the generating conditions of the only self for which our experience can vouch. Kant, viewing as he does the temporal aspect of human experience as fundamental, would seem to be justified in naming these processes “synthetic.” For consciousness in its very nature would seem to involve the carrying over of content from one time to other times, and the construction of a more comprehensive total consciousness from the elements thus combined. Kant is here analysing in its simplest and most fundamental form that aspect of consciousness which William James has described in the _Principles of Psychology_,[945] and which we may entitle the telescoping of earlier mental states into the successive experiences that include them. They telescope in a manner which can never befall the successive events in a causal series, and which is not explicable by any scheme of relations derivable from the physical sphere.

Obviously, what Kant does is to apply to the interpretation of the noumenal conditions of our conscious experience a distinction derived by analogy from conscious experience itself--the distinction, namely, between our mental processes and the sensuous material with which they deal. The application of such a distinction may be inevitable in any attempt to explain human experience; but it can very easily, unless carefully guarded, prove a source of serious misunderstanding. Just as the synthetic processes which generate consciousness are not known to be themselves conscious, so also the manifold cannot be identified with the sensations of the bodily senses. These last are events in time, and are effects not of noumenal but of mechanical causes.

Kant’s conclusion when developed on consistent Critical lines, and therefore in phenomenalist terms, is twofold: positive, to the effect that consciousness, for all that our analysis can prove to the contrary, may be merely a resultant, derivative from and dependent upon a complexity of conditions; and negative, to the effect that though these conditions may by analogy be described as consisting of synthetic processes acting upon a given material, they are in their real nature unknowable by us. Even their bare possibility we cannot profess to comprehend. We postulate them only because given experience is demonstrably not self-explanatory and would seem to refer us for explanation to some such antecedent generative grounds.

Kant, as we have already emphasised, obscures his position by the way in which he frequently speaks of the transcendental unity of apperception as the supreme condition of our experience. At times he even speaks as if it were the source of the synthetic processes. That cannot, however, be regarded as his real teaching. Self-consciousness (and the unity of apperception, in so far as it finds expression through self-consciousness) rests upon the same complexity of conditions as does outer experience, and therefore may be merely a product or resultant. It is, as he insists in the _Paralogisms_, the emptiest of all our concepts, and can afford no sufficient ground for asserting the self to be an abiding personality. We cannot by theoretical analysis of the facts of experience or of the nature of self-consciousness prove anything whatsoever in regard to the ultimate nature of the self.

Now Kant is here giving a new, and quite revolutionary, interpretation of the distinction between the subjective and the objective. The objective is for the Cartesians the independently real;[946] the subjective is that which has an altogether different kind of existence in what is entitled the field of consciousness. Kant, on the other hand, from his phenomenalist standpoint, views existences as objective when they are determined by purely physical causes, and as subjective when they also depend upon physiological and psychological conditions. On this latter view the difference between the two is no longer a difference of kind; it becomes a difference merely of degree. Objective existences, owing to the simplicity and recurrent character of their conditions, are uniform. Subjective existences resting upon conditions which are too complex to be frequently recurrent, are by contrast extremely variable. But both types of existence are objective in the sense that they are objects, and immediate objects, for consciousness. Subjective states do not run parallel with the objective system of natural existences, nor are they additional to it. For they do not constitute our consciousness of nature; they are themselves part of the natural order which consciousness reveals. That they contrast with physical existences in being unextended and incapable of location in space is what Kant would seem by implication to assert, but he challenges Descartes’ right to infer from this particular difference a complete diversity in their whole nature. Sensations, feelings, emotions, and desires, so far as they are experienced by us, constitute the empirical self which is an objective existence, integrally connected with the material environment, in terms of which alone it can be understood. In other words, the distinction between the subjective and the objective is now made to fall within the system of natural law. The subjective is not opposite in nature to the objective, but is a subspecies within it.

The revolutionary character of this reformulation of Cartesian distinctions may perhaps be expressed by saying that what Kant is really doing is to substitute the distinction between appearance and reality for the Cartesian dualism of the mental and the material. The psychical is a title for a certain class of known existences, _i.e._ of appearances; and they form together with the physical a single system. But underlying this entire system, conditioning both physical and psychical phenomena, is the realm of noumenal existence; and when the question of the possibility of knowledge, that is, of the experiencing of such a comprehensive natural system, is raised, it is to this noumenal sphere that we are referred. Everything experienced, even a sensation or desire, is an event; but the experiencing of it is an act of awareness, and calls for an explanation of an altogether different kind.

Thus Kant completely restates the problem of knowledge. The problem is not how, starting from the subjective, the individual can come to knowledge of the independently real; but how, if a common world is alone immediately apprehended, the inner private life of the self-conscious being can be possible, and how such inner experience is to be interpreted. How does it come about that though sensations, feelings, etc., are events no less mechanically conditioned than motions in space, and constitute with the latter a single system conformed to natural law, they yet differ from all other classes of natural events in that they can be experienced only by a single consciousness. To this question Kant replies in terms of his fundamental distinction between appearance and reality. Though everything of which we are conscious may legitimately be studied in terms of the natural system to which it belongs, consciousness itself cannot be so regarded. In attempting to define it we are carried beyond the phenomenal to its noumenal conditions. In other words, it constitutes a problem, the complete data of which are not at our disposal. This is by itself a sufficient reason for our incapacity to explain why the states of each empirical self can never be apprehended save by a single consciousness, or otherwise stated, why each consciousness is limited, as regards sensations and feelings, exclusively to those which arise in connection with some one animal organism. It at least precludes us from dogmatically asserting that this is due to their being subjective in the dualistic and Cartesian sense of that term--namely, as constituting, or being states of, the knowing self.

A diagram may serve, though very crudely, to illustrate Kant’s phenomenalist interpretation of the cognitive situation.

NC^EW
|
\
/ \
/------------------/------\---------------------\
/ The empirical world of our human consciousness \
/ +------+------+ +---+ +--------------+ \
| | | | l | | | |
| | ES^A | +---+ | ES^B | |
| | | +---+ | | |
| |x^1 y^1 z^1 | | m | | x^2 y^2 z^2 | |
| | | +---+ | | |
| +-------------+ +---+ +--------------+ |
| | n | |
\ +---+ /
\--------------------------------------------------/
\ / \ /
\ / \ /
\ / \ /
V V
NC^A NC^B

ES^A = Empirical self of the conscious Being A.

ES^B = Empirical self of the conscious Being B.

NC^A = Noumenal conditions of the conscious Being A.

NC^B = Noumenal conditions of the conscious Being B.

l, m, n = Objects in space.

x^1, y^1, z^1 = Sensations caused by objects l, m, n
acting on the sense-organs of the empirical self A.

x^2, y^2, z^2= Sensations caused by 1, m, n acting
on the sense-organs of the empirical self B.

NC^EW = Noumenal conditions of the empirical world.

Everything in this empirical world is equally open to the consciousness of both A and B, save only certain psychical events that are conditioned by physiological and psychological factors. x^1, y^1, z^1 can be apprehended only by A; x^2, y^2, z^2 can be apprehended only by B. Otherwise A and B experience one and the same world; the body of B is perceived by A in the same manner in which he perceives his own body. This is true _a fortiori_ of all other material existences. Further, these material existences are known with the same immediacy as the subjective states. As regards the relation in which NC^A, NC^B, and NC^EW stand to one another, no assertions can be made, save, as above indicated,[947] such conjectural statements as may precariously be derived through argument by analogy from distinctions that fall within our human experience.[948]

Kant’s phenomenalism thus involves an objectivist view of individual selves and of their interrelations. They fall within the single common world of space. Within this phenomenal world they stand in external, mechanical relations to one another. They are apprehended as embodied, with known contents, sensations, feelings, and desires, composing their inner experience. There is, from this point of view, no problem of knowledge. On this plane we have to deal only with events known, not with any process of apprehension. Even the components of the empirical self, the subject-matter of empirical psychology, are not processes of apprehension, but apprehended existences. It is only when we make a regress beyond the phenomenal as such to the conditions which render it possible, that the problem of knowledge arises at all. And with this regress we are brought to the real crux of the whole question--the reconciliation of this phenomenalism with the conditions of our self-consciousness. For we have then to take into account the fundamental fact that each self is not only an animal existence within the phenomenal world, but also in its powers of apprehension coequal with it. The self known is external to the objects known; the self that knows is conscious of itself as comprehending within the field of its consciousness the wider universe in infinite space.

Such considerations would, at first sight, seem to force us to modify our phenomenalist standpoint in the direction of subjectivism. For in what other manner can we hope to unite the two aspects of the self, the known conditions of its finite existence and the consciousness through which it correlates with the universe as a whole? In the one aspect it is a part of appearance; in the other it connects with that which makes appearance possible at all.

Quite frequently it is the subjectivist solution which Kant seems to adopt. Objects known are “mere representations,” “states of the identical self.” Everything outside the individual mind is real; appearances are purely individual in origin. But such a position is inconsistent with the deeper implications of Kant’s Critical teaching, and would involve the entire ignoring of the many suggestions which point to a fundamentally different and much more adequate standpoint. The individual is himself known only as appearance, and cannot, therefore, be the medium in and through which appearances exist. Though appearances exist only in and through consciousness, they are not due to any causes which can legitimately be described as individual. From this standpoint Kant would seem to distinguish between the grounds and conditions of phenomenal existence and the special determining causes of individual consciousness. Transcendental conditions generate consciousness of the relatively permanent and objective world in space and time; empirical conditions within this space and time world determine the sensuous modes through which special portions of this infinite and uniform world appear diversely to different minds.

This, however, is a point of view which is only suggested, and, as we have already observed,[949] the form in which it is outlined suggests many objections and difficulties. Consciousness of the objective world in space and time does not exist complete with one portion of it more specifically determined in terms of actual sense-perceptions. Rather the consciousness of the single world in space and time is gradually developed through and out of sense experience of limited portions of it. We have still to consider the various sections in the _Analytic of Principles_ (especially the section added in the second edition on the _Refutation of Idealism_) and in the _Dialectic_, in which Kant further develops this standpoint. But even after doing so, we shall be forced to recognise that Kant leaves undiscussed many of the most obvious objections to which his phenomenalism lies open. To the very last he fails to state in any really adequate manner how from the phenomenalist standpoint he would regard the world described in mechanical terms by science as being related to the world of ordinary sense-experience,[950] or how different individual consciousnesses are related to one another. The new form, however, in which these old-time problems here emerge is the best possible proof of the revolutionary character of Kant’s Critical enquiries. For these problems are no longer formulated in terms of the individualistic presuppositions which govern the thinking of all Kant’s predecessors, even that of Hume. The concealed presuppositions are now called in question, and are made the subject of explicit discussion. But further comment must meantime be deferred.[951]

TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION OF THE CATEGORIES, IN THE SECOND EDITION

The argument of the second edition transcendental deduction can be reduced to the following eight points:

(1)[952] It opens with the statement of a fundamental assumption which Kant does not dream of questioning and of which he nowhere attempts to offer proof. The representation of combination is the one kind of representation which can never be given through sense. It is not so given even in the pure forms of space and time yielded by outer and inner sense.[953] It is due to an act of spontaneity, which as such must be performed by the understanding. As it is one and the same for every kind of combination, it may be called by the general name of synthesis. And as all combination, without exception, is due to this source, its dissolution, that is, analysis, which seems to be its opposite, always presupposes it.

(2)[954] Besides the manifold and its synthesis a further factor is involved in the conception of combination, namely, _the representation of the unity_ of the manifold. The combination which is necessary to and constitutes knowledge is _representation_ of the synthetical unity of the manifold. This is a factor additional to synthesis and to the manifold synthesised. For such representation cannot arise out of any antecedent consciousness of synthesis. On the contrary, it is only through supervention upon the unitary synthesis that the conception of the combination becomes possible. In other words, the representation of unity conditions _consciousness_ of synthesis, and therefore cannot be the outcome or product of it. This is an application, or rather generalisation, of a position which in the first edition is developed only in reference to the empirical process of recognition. Recognition preconditions consciousness, and therefore cannot be subsequent upon it.

(3)[955] The unity thus represented is not, however, that which is expressed through the category of unity. The consciousness of unity which is involved in the conception of synthesis is that of apperception or transcendental self-consciousness. This is the highest and most universal form of unity, for it is a presupposition of the unity of all possible concepts, whether analytic or synthetic, in the various forms of judgment.

(4)[956] A manifold though given is not for that reason also represented. It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany it and all my other representations:

“...for otherwise something would be represented in me which could
not be thought at all; and that is equivalent to saying that the
representation would be impossible or at least would be nothing to
me.”[957]

But to ascribe a manifold as my representations to the identical self is to comprehend them, as synthetically connected, in one apperception.[958] Only what can be combined in one consciousness can be related to the ‘I think.’ The analytic unity of self-consciousness presupposes the synthetic unity of the manifold.

(5)[959] The unity of apperception is analytic or self-identical. It expresses itself through the proposition, _I am I._ But being thus pure identity without content of its own, it cannot be conscious of itself in and by itself. Its unity and constancy can have meaning only through contrast to the variety and changeableness of its specific experiences; and yet, at the same time, it is also true that such manifoldness will destroy all possibility of unity unless it be reconcileable with it. The variety can contribute to the conditioning of apperception only in so far as it is capable of being combined into a single consciousness. Through synthetic unifying of the manifold the self comes to consciousness both of itself and of the manifold.

(6)[960] The transcendental original unity of apperception is an objective, not a merely subjective, unity. Its conditions are also the conditions in and through which we acquire consciousness of objects. An object is that in the conception of which the manifold of given intuitions is combined. (This point, though central to the argument, is more adequately developed in the first than in the second edition.) Such combination requires unity of consciousness. Thus the same unity which conditions apperception likewise conditions the relation of representations to an object. The unity of pure apperception may therefore be described as an _objective_ unity for two reasons: first, because it can apprehend its own analytical unity only through discovery of unity in the given, and secondly, for the reason that such synthetical unifying of the manifold is also the process whereby representations acquire reference to objects.

(7)[961] Kant reinforces this conclusion, and shows its further significance, by analysis of the act of judgment. The logical definition of judgment, as the representation of a relation between two concepts, has many defects. These, however, are all traceable to its initial failure to explain, or even to recognise, the nature of the assertion which judgment as such claims to make. Judgment asserts relations of a quite unique kind, altogether different from those which exist between ideas connected through association. If, for instance, on seeing a body the sensations of weight due to the attempt to raise it are suggested by association, there is nothing but subjective sequence; but if we form the judgment that the body is heavy, the two representations are then connected together _in the object_. This is what is intended by the copula ‘is.’ It is a relational term through which the objective unity of given representations is distinguished from the subjective. It indicates that the representations stand in objective relation under the pure unity of apperception, and not merely in subjective relation owing to the play of association in the individual mind. “Judgment is nothing but the mode of bringing cognitions to the objective unity of apperception,” _i.e._ of giving to them a validity which holds independently of the subjective processes through which it is apprehended. Objective relations are not, of course, all necessary or universal; and a judgment may, therefore, assert a relation which is empirical and contingent. None the less the fundamental distinction between it and any mere relation of association still persists. The empirical relation is still in the judgment asserted to be objective. The subject and the predicate are asserted, in the particular case or cases to which the judgment refers, to be connected in the object and not merely in the mind of the subject. Or otherwise stated, though subject and predicate are not themselves declared to be necessarily and universally related to one another, their contingent relation has to be viewed as objectively, and therefore necessarily, grounded. Judgment always presupposes the existence of necessary relations even when it is not concerned to assert them. Judgment is the organ of objective knowledge, and is therefore bound up, indirectly when not directly, with the universality and necessity which are the sole criteria of knowledge. The judgment expressive of contingency is still judgment, and is therefore no less necessary in its conditions, and no less objective in its validity, than is a universal judgment of the scientific type. To use Kant’s own terminology, judgment acquires objective validity through participation in the necessary unity of apperception. In so doing it is made to embody those principles of the objective determination of all representations through which alone cognition is possible.

(8)[962] As judgment is nothing but the mode of bringing cognitions to the objective unity of apperception, it follows that the categories, which in the metaphysical deduction have been proved to be the possible functions in judging, are the conditions in and through which such pure apperception becomes possible. Apperception conditions experience, and the unity which both demand for their possibility is that of the categories.

* * * * *

Before passing to the remaining sections of the deduction,[963] which are supplementary rather than essential, I may add comment upon the above points. Only (7) and (8) call for special consideration. They represent a form of argument which has no counterpart in the first edition. As we noted,[964] the first edition argument is defective owing to its failure to demonstrate that the categories constitute the unity which is necessary to knowledge. By introducing in the second edition this analysis of judgment, and by showing the inseparable connection between pure apperception, objective consciousness and judgment, this defect is in some degree removed. As the categories correspond to the possible functions of judgment, their objective validity is thereby established. By this means also the connection which in Kant’s view exists between the metaphysical and the transcendental deductions receives for the first time proper recognition. The categories which in the former deduction are discovered and systematised through _logical_ analysis of the _form_ of judgment, are in the latter deduction, through _transcendental_ analysis of the _function_ of judgment, shown to be just those forms of relation which are necessary to the possibility of knowledge. It must, however, be noted that the transcendental argument is brought to completion only through assumption of the adequacy of the metaphysical deduction. No independent attempt is made to show that the particular categories obtained in the metaphysical deduction are those which are required, that there are no others, or that all the twelve are indispensable.

(7) is a development of an argument which first appears in the _Prolegomena_. The statement of it there given is, however, extremely confused, owing to the distinction which Kant most unfortunately introduces[965] between judgments of experience and judgments of perception. That distinction is entirely worthless and can only serve to mislead the reader. It cuts at the very root of Kant’s Critical teaching. Judgments of perception involve, Kant says, no category of the understanding, but only what he is pleased to call the “logical connection of perceptions in a thinking subject.” What that may be he nowhere explains, save by adding[966] that in it perceptions are “compared and conjoined in a consciousness of my state” (also spoken of by Kant as “empirical consciousness”), and not “in consciousness in general.”

“All our judgments are at first mere judgments of perception; they
hold good merely for us (that is, for the individual subject), and
we do not till afterwards give them a new reference, namely, to an
object.... To illustrate the matter: that the room is warm, sugar
sweet, and wormwood bitter--these are merely subjectively valid
judgments. I do not at all demand that I myself should at all
times, or that every other person should, find the facts to be what
I now assert; they only express a reference of two sensations to
the same subject, to myself, and that only in my present state of
perception. Consequently they are not intended to be valid of the
object. Such judgments I have named those of perception. Judgments
of experience are of quite a different nature. What experience
teaches me under certain circumstances, it must teach me always and
teach everybody, and its validity is not limited to the subject or
to its state at a particular time.”[967]

The illegitimacy and the thoroughly misleading character of this distinction hardly require to be pointed out. Obviously Kant is here confusing assertion of contingency and contingency of assertion.[968] A judgment of contingency, in order to be valid, must itself be necessary. Even a momentary state of the self is referable to an object in judgment only if that object is causally, and therefore necessarily, concerned in its production.[969]

The distinction is repeated in § 22 as follows:

“Thinking is the combining of representations in one consciousness.
This combination is either merely relative to the subject, and is
contingent and subjective, or is absolute, and is necessary or
objective. The combination of representations in one consciousness
is judgment. Thinking, therefore, is the same as judging, or the
relating of representations to judgments in general. Judgments,
therefore, are either merely subjective, or they are objective.
They are subjective when representations are related to a
consciousness in one subject only, and are combined in it alone.
They are objective when they are united in a consciousness in
general, that is, necessarily.”[970]

To accept this distinction is to throw the entire argument into confusion. This Kant seems to have himself recognised in the interval between the _Prolegomena_ and the second edition of the _Critique_. For in the section before us there is no trace of it. The opposition is no longer between subjective and objective judgment, but only between association of ideas and judgment which as such is always objective. The distinction drawn in the _Prolegomena_ is only, indeed, a more definite formulation of the distinction which runs through the first edition of the _Critique_ between the indeterminate and the determinate object of consciousness. The more definite formulation of it seems, however, to have had the happy effect of enabling Kant to realise the illegitimacy of any such distinction.

* * * * *

We may now proceed to consider the remaining sections.[971] In section 21[972] Kant makes a very surprising statement. The above argument, which he summarises in a sentence, yields, he declares, “the _beginning_ of a deduction of the pure concepts of understanding.” This can hardly be taken as representing Kant’s real estimate of the significance of the preceding argument, and would seem to be due to a temporary preoccupation with the problems that centre in the doctrine of schematism. So far, Kant adds in explanation, no account has been taken of the particular manner in which the manifold of empirical intuition is supplied to us.[973] The necessary supplement, consisting of a very brief outline statement of the doctrine of schematism, is given in section 26.[974] It differs from the teaching of the special chapter devoted to schematism in emphasising space equally with time. The doctrine of pure _a priori_ manifolds is incidentally asserted.[975]