A Philosophical Fragment on Kant: That Ideas Cannot Represent the Independently Real
There can be no doubt that Kant was well aware of the problems involved in the question of how ideas represent the independently real: one conclusion of his Inaugural Dissertation was that the categories of thought were applicable to the independently real. But, at the close of this work, Descartes' question remains unanswered. On 21 February 1772, Kant wrote to Hertz:
In the Dissertation I was content to explain the nature of these intellectual representations [concepts of the understanding] in a merely negative manner, viz. as not being modifications of the soul produced by the object. But I silently passed over the further question, how such representations, which refer to an object and yet are not the result of an affection due to that object, can be possible. [1]
Presumably, the Critique of Pure Reason was composed to answer this question.
For Kant, part of the solution to this problem lies in the interplay between sensibility and understanding. "Objects are given to us by means of sensibility," he writes, "and it alone yields intuitions; they are thought through the understanding and from the understanding arise concepts." [2] Since the purpose of my exposition here is to determine whether or not intuition can be the ground for an immediate relationship between the mind and the independently real, the relationship between sensibility and intuition, along with the relationship between intuition and understanding will be of prime concern.
In one sense, the entire First Critique can be read as an exposition of these relationships. Yet, to recount the entire Kantian epistemology far exceeds the scope of this work. I will, therefore, restrict my comments to the immediate problem at hand: whether Kantian ideas correspond to the independently real. How Kant envisions ideas as relating to the independently real, if they can be said to so relate, will not be a concern here.
Kant's argument for knowledge of the independently real breaks down in three places. (By knowledge here, I mean existential knowledge.) First, there is the observation made by Wolff that there is no argument in the "Transcendental Analytic" whereby concepts can be analyzed in a manner parallel to the synthesis of intuitions. Consequently, there is no reason to believe that judgments and sense perceptions correspond to each other, or that judgments even pertain to sense perceptions. [3] Secondly, there is the theory of "Double Affection" advanced by Adickes and based on Kant's Opus Postumum. Adickes argues that in order to make sense of the mental processes presented in the Critique, each mental process must be duplicated on both the transcendental and empirical levels. [4] Thirdly, there is Schopenhauer's objection that since the categories have no application to the independently real, it makes no sense to speak of things in themselves or a thing in itself. Since both unity and plurality are categories, they cannot be predicated to the independently real. [5]
Ultimately, Adickes's theory is reducible to Schopenhauer's critique: the "Double Affection" theory requires both transcendental affection and transcendental synthesis. [6] Since cause and effect are also listed in the "Table of Categories," it becomes difficult to determine what is meant by the suggestion that a transcendental object affects a transcendental ego thereby "causing" sensation which is then synthesized into a sensible intuition. [7] Furthermore, since there is "no argument, save analogy, to show that the operations of the transcendental self proceed similarly to those of the empirical self," we should want to question what it means to suggest that an "unknowable object" affects an "unknowable self" on these grounds as well. [8]
In light of the above, I will not present Adickes's theory in detail. I will, however, (at least briefly) need to present Wolff's observations, for they show that the categories are not applicable to the independently real. This, in turn, will ground Schopenhauer's observation that the Categories cannot be predicated to the independently real. Thus, reality, existence and cause and effect cannot be used to characterize an extra-mental world.
Before we can determine the relationship between the understanding and sensible intuition, following Wolff's guidelines, it is first necessary to give an adequate definition of sensible intuition. Following this, I will define "understanding" and explain the link between these two components. Wolff defines Kant's notion of "intuition" as follows:
If the object depends on the mind, then the mind is active with regard to it, and because of Kant's identification of the active or spontaneous with the intellectual, such relation is given the title `intellectual intuition.' Alternatively, the mind may wait passively upon the object, and establish relation to it only in so far as it affects the mind. This capacity for being affected by objects is entitled `sensibility,' and the product of such affection is `sensible intuition'. [9]
Initially, it may seem that Kant, by definition, has established a relationship between the object and the subject through the use of sensible intuition. However, careful attention to the quote above reveals that the capacity to be "affected by objects is entitled `sensibility,' and the product of such affection is `sensible intuition'." In turn, this means that the first appearance that the object makes to the subject is in sensible intuition, and not in sensibility. Consequently, when we note that Kant has established a relationship between the subject and the object, object must be construed here as appearance and not as an extra-mental object. The reasons why this is the case will be apparent in what follows.
Sensible intuition is resolvable into two components: one is the material element which is "purely subjective and cognitively valueless, and is sensation"; [10] the other is the formal element which gives knowledge and "is the spatio-temporal ordering of sensations." [11] Kant argues that we can strip away from a sensible intuition in general all that is present materially, and this will leave us with the pure forms of sensible intuition "in which all the manifold of intuition is intuited in certain relations [and] must be found in the mind a priori." [12] This division leaves us with two means of dealing with sensible intuition in general. As Wolff suggests:
[A]fter dividing representations into intuitions and concepts, and intuitions into the sensible and intellectual, we can finally distinguish pure sensible intuitions from empirical sensible intuitions, or perceptions. [13]
This division will be important because it indicates that sensible intuition in general is not a direct immediate relationship between the mind and the independently real; indeed, it is not even in a direct immediate relationship between the mind and sensation. This claim is grounded in the notion that sensible intuition is synthetic, that is, it is not functional until sensations are brought together and unified in a single manifold of consciousness by the a priori pure forms of sensible intuition, time and space, which condition the sensations and prepare them for use by the understanding. The point is clearly made by Wolff:
Before we can analyze the representations of Socrates and Plato in order to abstract from them the concept of "humanity," we must first have held together in one consciousness the manifold of perceptions which each representation contains. The representation of Socrates, for example, contains the perception of his wit, his snub nose, his arms and legs and organs, the sharpness of his tongue, and so forth. If it were not for the fact that we had already thought of these perceptions as a unity, there would be no representation of Socrates to analyze ... Consequently, the mind must create them by a spontaneous act of unifying, an act to which Kant gives the title synthesis. The synthetic unity of the manifold of perception is thus the necessary condition of the analytic unity of a concept, and indeed of all knowledge and experience." [14]
Inasmuch as sensible intuition is "synthesized" by the pure forms of sensible intuition a priori, the first appearance of the "object" to the understanding is extended in space and time, space and time being the pure forms of sensible intuition. Consequently, the object which is presented to the understanding is already conditioned, already unified in a manifold of sensible intuition -- and it can now only be given as an appearance. As Kant himself says:
Time and space, taken together, are the pure forms of all sensible intuition, and so are what make a priori synthetic propositions possible. But these a priori sources of knowledge, being merely conditions of our sensibility, just by this very fact determine their own limits, namely, that they apply to objects only in so far as objects are viewed as appearances, and do not present things as they are in themselves. [15]
We find, therefore, that sensible intuition is unable to account for an immediate relationship between the mind and the independently real. This relationship must, therefore, be accounted for as a relationship between sensation and sensible intuition. Though there can be no doubt that Kant thought that such a relationship existed, sensation now falls beyond the domain of experience as is clear from Kant's notion that experience is always of objects, and objects are already conditioned by the pure forms of space and time. This, in turn, means that all questions of sensation are subordinated to the domain of speculative metaphysics by Kant's own guidelines. Nevertheless, even if we allow Kant to make the metaphysical claim that sensations are related to sensible intuition, the issue remains problematic. This will become clear when we turn to the relationship between sensible intuition and the understanding.
Kant employs the term "understanding" in two ways. First, there is the negative employment that Kant defines as "a non-sensible faculty of knowledge." [16] Secondly, there is the positive employment of the term, which, unfortunately, Kant does not lay out in definitional form: "The knowledge yielded by understanding, or at least by human understanding, must ... be by use of concepts." [17] Concepts are then further understood to be "based on the spontaneity of thought" and are never "related to an object immediately." [18] Presumably, then, the understanding is a faculty of knowledge that makes use of concepts and is always at least one step removed from its object. Kant goes on to note that "the only use which the understanding can make of these concepts is to judge by means of them," [19] and "judgment" is defined as:
the mediate knowledge of an object, that is, 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. [20]
The last representation that is "immediately related to an object" is so related in an intuition. We find then that the key to human knowledge must lie in an interplay between sensibility and the understanding as interpreted in a judgment. Again, this interplay must be between a sensible intuition, which gives an appearance, and the understanding, which gives to the object a concept under the rubric of analysis:
Understanding and sensibility, with us, can only determine objects only when they are employed in conjunction. When we separate them, we have intuitions without concepts, or concepts without intuitions -- in both cases representations which we are not in a position to apply to any determinate object. [21]
This in turn requires that the understanding must hold its objects in a single manifold of experience. Indeed, judgment is the act whereby concepts of the understanding are applied to the objects of sensible intuition. But, these concepts are themselves formed in the understanding and "they rest on functions, and a function is the unity of the act bringing various representations under one common representation." [22] Kant calls this unification of concepts "analysis" which "unites many different representations by bringing them under one concept (Socrates, Plato, etc. under the concept, man)." [23] If judgments are to be possible, it is necessary that the process of unification of the intuitions under the rubric of synthesis and the process of the unification of representations under the rubric of analysis 1) must in some way be analogous to each other, and 2) must occur in the same manifold of consciousness. Regarding the first requirement, the two processes must be analogous because the relationship between the "Table of Judgments" and the "Table of Categories" are based in these processes. If we are unable to link the two tables, then there is no way to relate judgments to the objects of sensible intuition through the a priori concepts of the understanding. [24] The second requirement is equally necessary for if the objects of appearance and the concepts of the understanding do not appear in the same manifold, then any applicability of the concepts to the appearances will be impossible.
To satisfy the first requirement, Kant maintains that "the same function which gives unity to the various representations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of representations in an intuition." [25] Wolff goes on to note that if this is true, then "to each function of unity in judgment, there will correspond a function of synthesis, or category." [26] If Kant can argue his point, then the link between the understanding and the appearance of an object will be complete. But,
Kant gives no proof at all for the assertion that analytic and synthetic unity arise from the same operations, and that the first can therefore be used as a key to the second. The argument, as Kant states it, depends on the claim that both kinds of unity are attributable to the same faculty, namely understanding, but Kant himself assigns synthesis to the imagination. [27]
Wolff says that the argument is "arbitrary in the extreme" and that it is the "weakest link in the entire argument of the Analytic." [28] It is difficult to understand what Kant is doing here and it is equally difficult to find the argument to which Wolff is referring. (I can only find the single assertion presented above). But, there is no doubt that the issue is critical. Without a satisfactory link between sensible intuition and the understanding, it is impossible to determine what sensible intuition gives to the understanding. [29]
Thus we see that even if sensible intuition arises from sensation immediately (a metaphysical claim) there is a problem with the relationship between sensible intuition and the understanding. Much of this difficulty stems from Kant's continual insistence that human understanding is already conditioned not only by the a priori forms of space and time, but also by the a priori concepts found in the "Table of Categories." As Wolff suggests:
So long as [Kant] identifies the formal (space, time, categories) with the a priori, and the material (sensations, empirical concepts) with the a posteriori, he will be irresistibly drawn to assimilating all knowledge to a priori knowledge. [30]
We now see that inasmuch as the categories are a priori rules for synthesis of appearances (which are themselves already conditioned by the pure forms of space and time), their employment beyond mere appearances is impossible. [31] This, in turn, grounds Schopenhauer's claim that
we cannot properly speak of things in themselves or the thing in itself, since in doing so we seem to apply the Category of plurality or of unity to that which ex hypothesi cannot come under any category. [32]
Inasmuch as "existence" is also in the "Table of Categories," it makes no sense to predicate existence to a realm of the independently real. Thus, it becomes problematic, at best, to claim that sensations emerging from the independently real have an affect on the mind and as such are responsible for the material content of sensible intuitions. Indeed, it is difficult to see what the "passive receptivity" by which Kant characterizes sensible intuition offers to the understanding. The initial down-playing of passive receptivity is at the heart of Kant's "Copernican Revolution," which has the net result of "making the realm of existing objects dependent upon the subjective conditions of knowledge." [33] Wolff goes on to remark that the "a priori representations determine what can and cannot be known as an object, and hence what can and cannot be determined to exist." [34]
It is clear from the early part of the First Critique that Kant did not wish to deny the existence of the independently real. In fact, "the theory of the first half of the Critique cannot even be stated without presupposing the existence of the independently real." [35] Nevertheless, the existence of the independently real is called into question in the later part of the Critique by the way in which Kant characterizes the concept of a "noumenon" (thing in itself):
What our understanding acquires through this concept of a noumenon itself, is a negative extension: that is to say, understanding is not limited through sensibility: on the contrary, it itself limits sensibility by applying the term noumena to things in themselves (things not regarded as appearances). But in so doing it at the same time sets limits to itself, recognizing that it cannot know these noumena through any of the categories, and that it must therefore think them only under the title of an unknown something. [36]
The Critique is marked with a central incompatibility regarding this notion of the noumenal. On the one hand, Kant wishes to posit a positive existence to the noumena whereby there can be an interaction between the noumenal self and the noumenal world. On the other hand, the noumenal can function only as a concept with no positive existence of its own. This points out a serious contradiction in the Critique. As Körner indicates:
If we ... conceive, with Kant, a noumenon or thing in itself as being not only a non-phenomenon but something which affects our senses, then our concept is no longer merely negative. Kant's assertion that in the Critique of Pure Reason he uses the concept of a noumenon only as a negative and limiting concept is thus incompatible with its actual use. [37]
The result would seem to be that Kant is an idealist (if we can take his claim that the "noumenal" is only a "limiting concept" seriously). There is no doubt that Kant was aware of this implication. In the "Antinomy of Pure Reason" he openly accepts the title of "transcendental idealism" which he distinguishes from "empirical idealism":
[E]mpirical idealism finds no difficulty in regarding [appearances of inner sense in time] as real things ... Our transcendental idealism, on the contrary, admits the reality of the objects of outer intuition, as intuited in space, and of all changes in time, as represented by inner sense. [38]
Given the continual claims that "space itself, with all its appearances, is ... only in me," [39] found in the "Paralogisms of Pure Reason" and the subsequent claim in the "Antinomies" that "the objects of experience ... are never given in themselves, but only in experience, and have no existence outside it," [40] it is difficult to find any substantial difference between this "transcendental idealism" and other varieties of idealism.
If we can accept the conclusion that Kant is forced into idealism, which precludes positing the existence of the independently real, (regardless of Kant's intentions to posit the existence of such a realm), then the question of whether or not sensible intuition allows an immediate relationship between the mind and the independently real is moot. If, on the other hand, we grant to Kant the existence of the independently real as something that is ultimately given in sensible intuition, then sensible intuition, nevertheless, will be unable to satisfy our need to find a means to tie representations to extra-mental realities. The reason for this is that there can be no doubt that sensible intuition is representational.
Inasmuch as the objects of sensible intuition are conditioned by the a priori forms of space and time and available to consciousness only as representations, the mind has no recourse to something over and above a representation whereby it can claim that ideas, are, in fact, representations of objects in the extra-mental world. If we can maintain that sensible intuitions represent sensations, then we might be home free. But I have argued that, under the logic of the First Critique, this claim falls into the domain of speculative metaphysics. Even if we allow Kant to make this metaphysical claim, the issue remains problematic. According to Weldon, Kant holds to a doctrine which states that "sense qua cognitive is representative." [41] Characterizing sense as representative leads to the further question: what does sense represent? If it represents the extra-mental world, then we have merely asserted that ideas are ultimately representations of the extra-mental world, and in so doing, we have merely asserted the existence of the independent world. It still falls outside the domain of the knowable.
I began this section with the claim that if ideas are going to be characterized as representations, then we must have recourse to something over and above a representation whereby the claim can be made. Kant provided a partial response to this claim by allowing ideas to be representations of sensible intuitions, which are themselves representations. But ultimately Kant cannot claim that ideas are connected to an extra-mental world without making the assertion that the senses are representational, thereby merely asserting the existence of the independently real. Furthermore, the logic of the First Critique will not permit such an assertion because the concept of "existence" is a category and as such has no application to the independently real. (Neither does it make sense to claim that the existence of the extra-mental world is possible; "possibility" is likewise a category.) For these reasons, I conclude this section by noting that Kant's notion of sensible intuition is unable to ground a relationship between the subject and the independently real, and as such cannot satisfy the need for an immediate relationship between one subject and the independently other.
Anthony F. Beavers
The University of Evansville1. Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to the "Critique of Pure Reason", 2nd ed., revised and enlarged (London: Macmillan, 1923), 219-220.
2. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965), A19, B33:
3. Robert Paul Wolff, Kant's Theory of Mental Activity: A Commentary on the Transcendental Analytic of the "Critique of Pure Reason" (Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1973), 69.
4. See Wolff, Mental Activity, 169-170.
5. See Stephan Körner, Kant (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1955), 94.
6. See Wolff, Mental Activity, 170.
7. I am expanding a bit on Schopenhauer's position. In the text that I found, he mentions only unity and plurality. But, it would seem that what holds for these two categories ought to hold for the other ten. This is not too far from Wolff's observation that "when [Kant] separates the manifold produced in the interaction of the transcendental self and the thing-in-itself from the empirical manifold of perception arising from physiological causes, he seems to drift into the region of speculative metaphysics." Wolff, Mental Activity, 171-172.
8. See Wolff, Mental Activity, 172.
9. Wolff, Mental Activity, 73.
10. Wolff, Mental Activity, 73.
11. Wolff, Mental Activity, 73.
12. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A20-21, B35. He gives an example: "If I take away from the representation of a body that which the understanding thinks in regard to it, substance, force, divisibility, etc., and likewise what belongs to sensation, impenetrability, hardness, colour, etc., something still remains over from the empirical intuition, namely extension and figure. These belong to pure intuition, which, even without any actual object of the senses or sensation, exists [sic] in the mind a priori as a mere form of sensibility."
13. Wolff, Mental Activity, 73.
14. Wolff, Mental Activity, 68-69.
15. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A39, B56.
16. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A67, B92.
17. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A68, B93.
18. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A68, B93.
19. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A68, B93.
20. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A68, B93. Kant gives an example: "Thus in the judgment, `all bodies are divisible', 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 us. These objects, therefore, are mediately represented through the concept of divisibility."
21. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A258, B314.
22. Wolff, Mental Activity, 63.
23. Wolff, Mental Activity, 69. See also Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, A78, B104.
24. See Wolff, Mental Activity, 69.
25. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A79, B104.
26. Wolff, Mental Activity, 69.
27. Wolff, Mental Activity, 69.
28. See Wolff, Mental Activity, 77.
29. See Wolff, Mental Activity, 70.
30. Wolff, Mental Activity, 304.
31. See Wolff, Mental Activity, 316.
33. Wolff, Mental Activity, 97.
34. Wolff, Mental Activity, 97.
35. Wolff, Mental Activity, 312.
36. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B312. Emphasis is mine.
37. Körner, Kant, 95. Körner goes on to say that he believes it possible "to reconstruct the Critique in such a way that the concept of a noumenon is in fact used only as a negative concept." Given that the first half of the Critique cannot be formulated without positing a positive existence to the independently real, I cannot imagine how such a task might be undertaken. Körner does not say how it might be done.
38. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A491-492, B519-520.
39. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A375.