“Matter in Mind”
Preface
1. Reflexionen zur Metaphysik, 5927 (18.388-9). Cf. Reflexionen zur Anthropologie, 212 (15.81): “Sensibility is the affectibility of the capacity for representations. Understanding is the spontaneity of our capacity for representations. . . . Consciousness relates to [geht auf] both. Consciousness of the manifold in the former representations (coordination) or intuitions is aesthetic clarity, in concepts it is logical clarity. Both [modes of consciousness] are mere form.” A110: “This thoroughgoing synthetic unity of perceptions is indeed the form of experience; it is nothing else than the synthetic unity of appearances in accordance with concepts.” A129: . . this unity of possible consciousness also constitutes the form of all cognition of objects; through it the manifold is thought as belonging to a single object. Thus the mode in which the manifold of sensible representation (intuition) belongs to one consciousness precedes all cognition of the object as the intellectual form of such cognition. . . .” A346/B404: “. . . consciousness in itself is not a representation distinguishing a particular object, but a form of representation in general, so far as it is to be entitled cognition. . . .”
2. Wiener Logik (24.807):
Empfindungen, z.E. Reitz, Rührungen sind die Materie der Sinnlichkeit, die Anschauung ist ihre Form. Einbildungskraft gilt also nur von der Form der Sinnlichkeit, aber nicht von der Materie.
3. Cf. Logik, I, §2 (9.91): “Die Materie der Begriffe ist der Gegenstand, die Form derselben die Allgemeinheit.”
4. See my Representational Mind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).
Chapter One: The Framework
1. Cf. Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (New York: Humanities Press, 1962; reprint of 2nd edition of 1923), pp. 270ff. Kemp Smith takes Kant to waver between a subjectivistic reading, where the “appearances” given to sensible intuition are made out of sensory states of the individual, and a phenomenalistic position, where they are objective relative to the individual. However, even the latter approach seems to take appearances to be made out of some special sort of material—just not states of the individual subject (pp. 276-77). Cf. T. E. Wilkerson, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 190: “[W]e should not be confused by Kant’s distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘material’ idealism, for his own ‘formal’ idealism is indistinguishable from the ‘material’ idealism of Berkeley.”
2. This seems to apply, for example, to Arthur Melnick, Kant’s Analogies of Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 7-14, and to Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 94-98. Of course, the tendency to reduce the forms of intuition to irreducible limitations or presuppositions with respect to intuitable objects is still compatible with a number of positions on the role of sensation. But the claim that the latter is matter for “forming” in intuition gets downplayed.
3. I assume, for the purpose of our interest in this study, that ordinary perception involves sensations. It is, of course, arguable that “perception” through sense organs does not always do this.
4. See Representational Mind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), Chapter Two.
5. Cf. Ermanno Bencivenga, “Knowledge as a Relation and Knowledge as an Experience in the Critique of Pure Reason,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 15 (1985), p. 596n6; Rolf George, “Kant’s Sensationism,” Synthese, 47 (1981), 241-42. George suggests that, on many occasions, “reference” would be the most suitable term. In any case, Kant seems always to intend the conceptualization of intuitions.
6. A related stumbling block, or the same put differently, lies in Kant’s claim that “judgment” always combines at least two concepts. This seems to be the drift of the Metaphysical Deduction (A70/B95-A80/B106). Cf. also the early (1770-72?) Reflexionen zur Metaphysik, 4634 (17.616-7). In the latter, Kant argues that a concept is required, in order to constitute the cognition of a potential subject of judgment in the first place, out of the representations that provide the mere “material” for such cognition. Then a second concept will be able to predicate something of it. It is unclear why the first action does not already amount to a kind of judgment: at the very least to the problematic judgment that a certain sort of object might be present as subject for (further) judgment. I conclude that Kant’s insistence on the combining of concepts is a holdover from an approach that he is in the process of rejecting. Elsewhere, he cites the representation this black man as an example of a “problematic” representation that one ought to call a concept, in order to distinguish it from the judgment that the man is in fact black. Obviously, the representation is as fullblown a judgment, albeit problematic in form, as would be required by the Metaphysical Deduction. It involves two concepts. But Kant could as easily have illustrated his point with the simpler representation, this man, distinguishing the latter from the judgment that the object is indeed a man. See Letter to Beck, July 3, 1792, trans. Arnulf Zweig, in Kant: Philosophical Correspondence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 192-93. For the distinction between the two approaches to judgment in Kant, see Moltke S. Gram, Kant, Ontology, and the A Priori (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), esp. Chapter Two.
7. For an interpretation of the analytic/synthetic distinction in terms of the distinction between “referential” and non-“referential” judgments, see Gram, Chapter Three.
8. Strictly, the suggestion requires regarding intuitions, and their forms, as repeatables—as when we say that one is in “the same” intuitional state as previously, or as some other person is. Throughout, the point should be clear in context. The same ambiguity, of course, arises for the “material” of intuitions. But when regarded as material of concepts, as well as of intuitions, this must, of course, always be regarded as repeatable. As material of conceptual acts, they may be regarded either way, depending on how the latter are regarded.
9. Cf. Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science, tr. James Ellington (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), Preface, p. 12, note (4.474): . . categories, which are thought, are nothing but mere forms of judgments insofar as these forms are applied to intuitions.” B288: “. . . the categories are not in themselves cognitions, but are merely forms of thought for the making of cognitions out of given intuitions.” Cf. A147/B187, A239/B298, A248/B305. On the other hand, on the categories as forms of judgment somehow converted into concepts in their own right, see B143, A321/B378.
10. I do not want to suggest that the mere embodiment of sensations in intuitional states suffices for a truly cognitive apprehension of the corresponding correlate in appearances, for example, for apprehension of colors as “qualities” of possible objects. On the other hand, I do not hold that full-blown conceptualization is required for some reasonable level of consciousness of such qualities. The role of anticipations and retentions, as material for conceptualization, offers what seems to me a happy compromise: we may concede that a certain level of apprehension of sensory qualities involves more than bare “sensation,” but less than fully constituted concepts of such qualities. We might also note, as I emphasize in Chapter Three, that there are in any case important analogies between anticipations and retentions, as material for concepts, and mere sensations in the Kantian sense.
11. Throughout, I use the term conceptualize ambiguously: sometimes for predications with respect to objects or appearances, other times for the corresponding operations in cognitive states themselves, through which such predications are effected. Context should make the point clear. It should also be clear why it is not inappropriate to use a single term in these ways.
12. I have argued in more detail elsewhere for the general approach to intuition, and its forms and objects, with specific attention to the interpretation of the Aesthetic. In the present study, my case rests primarily on the utility of the approach with respect to the account of conceptualization that I base on it. In any event, I return to this issue in the next section. For now I would simply forestall an objection to the quoted passage, when it is read as making a point about “imagining.” The objection is that impenetrability, hardness, and color are no less imaginable than extension and figure. The reply is that, in Kantian terms, these would be mere abstractions of a certain sort. Extension and figure, by contrast, are presumably intended as (possible) particulars, namely, as possible regions of space. Given this distinction, it is not implausible to claim that one imagines colors, and the like, simply in that one imagines, of some extension or figure, that it is colored, etc.
13. This may seem to be contradicted at B276n. To the question “whether we have an inner sense only, and no outer sense, but merely an outer imagination,” Kant replies that the latter always presupposes the former. This may seem to imply that mere imagining possesses no intrinsic object-directedness, but merely derives that character from an external relation with sensory intuition. But we need to remember that the question here is that of the very possibility of outer sense in the first place. It is specifically this, Kant says, that amounts to the above question. His reply to the question (that “in order even to imagine something as outer, that is, to present it to sense in intuition, we must already have an outer sense”) does indeed grant that imagination already involves the “form of intuition.” In other words, the mere ability to imagine objects as realities in space, as opposed to merely imagining that there are such things, demonstrates the possibility in question. It does this, not because it presupposes the actual occurrence of corresponding sensory intuitions (which, as a purely empirical matter, Kant did assume: A715/B743), but because it already contains in itself whatever is required for that possibility (apart from mere “sensation,” the possibility of which all parties to the argument already concede). To some extent this construction seems contrary to Gendlin’s recent comment on the passage. See Eugene T. Gendlin, “Time’s Dependence on Space: Kant’s Statements and Their Misconstrual by Heidegger,” in Kant and Phenomenology: Current Continental Research, ed. Thomas M. Seebohm and Joseph J. Kockelmans (Washington: University Press of America, 1984), 147-60. Gendlin takes Kant to be holding that imagining always rests on the subject’s being “affected passively by something we can know only in its results” (p. 154). Since imagination does not involve actual sensations, this may seem to imply the merely external view, rejected above. However, imagining always involves some “taking” of what is imagined, even if it is not always full-blown conceptual taking. This can be accounted for in terms of the ingredience of anticipations and retentions that, contrary to some of Kant’s own claims, are not themselves intuitions, but a kind of quasi-sensory “material” in intuition. In any case, I am very much in agreement with Gendlin’s claims concerning the radical dependence of time on space, which constitute his main point of interpretation. Cf. Representational Mind, pp. 158-71.
14. This seems to be implied by the definition of sensation as “the effect of an object upon the faculty of representation, so far as we are affected by it,” i.e., by the object (A19/B34). Cf. also Bxln: “For outer sense is already in itself a relation of intuition to something actual outside me.” It may also lie behind Kant’s insistence that the mere apprehension of “appearances” implies the real existence of something thereby appearing (A252-3, B306), although Kant elsewhere includes mere hallucinations as instances of outer intuition (B278). At Anthropologie, §24 (7.161), he says that some people who suffer from delusions mistake the appearances of inner sense for genuine sensations. But in the same passage, he seems to characterize the former in terms of how der Mensch sich innerlich empfindet. His most official definition simply states that “sensation relates solely to the subject as the modification of its state” (A320/B376). Even more strongly against a relational approach, cf. Letter to Beck, January 20, 1792 (Zweig, p. 183):
Perhaps right at the outset you can avoid defining “sensibility” in terms of “receptivity,” that is, the manner of representations in the subject insofar as he is affected by objects; perhaps you can locate it in that which, in a cognition, concerns merely the relation of the representation to a subject, so that the form of sensibility, in this relation to the object of intuition, makes knowable no more than the appearance of this object. That this subjective thing constitutes only the manner in which the subject is affected by representations [emphasis added], and consequently nothing more than the receptivity of the subject, is already implied by its being merely the determination of the subject.
15. Cf. A19-20/B34: “so far as we are affected by it [the object].” Also Anthropologie, §§15ff(7.153ff).
16. I use the term reality, and cognates, not for Kant’s Realität (as a kind of intentional correlate of sensation in appearances: A166/B207ff), but for Wirklichkeit, Sein, or Dasein (A218/B266, A225/B272ff). However, the notions are connected: “Reality [Realitüt], in the pure concept of understanding, is that which corresponds to a sensation in general; it is that, therefore, the concept of which in itself points to being [ein Sein . . . arizeigt] (in time)” (A143/B182). Also A175/B217: “But the real, which corresponds to sensations in general . . . represents only that something the very concept of which includes a being. . . .”
17. There may seem to be an obvious alternative to supposing that the sensations involved in a sensory intuition are states out of which that intuition is at least in part formed. The alternative might suppose that the sensational aspect of an intuition is not a function of distinct “states” ingredient in it, but of special properties or features of it; or if a function of distinct states, then of states merely externally (e.g., causally) connected to an intuition. The latter suggestion could not explain how sensations could make a difference in how an object is intuitively apprehended. One would have to suppose that, considered in itself, the “apprehension” in question was not intuitive at all, but a purely conceptual affair. On the other hand, as properties or features of an intuition, sensations could make the difference in question only if they were determinate forms of the determinable quality of intuitional directedness. But in that case, purely imaginative intuition would be unintelligible. For we would have to say that the latter, apart from whatever conceptual elements it contains, is characterized by nothing but a purely determinable quality (intuitional “form”) that does not occur in any determinate mode. (Below, I extend this point to argue for intuitional material even beyond mere sensations.)
18. In Representational Mind (pp. 33-34), I defended the neutrality thesis against an objection based on the “Refutation of Idealism.” Kant’s claim, as I there formulated it, was that the very conception of oneself as a subject of intuitional states presupposes a conception of oneself as living in a world in which, at least in general, one’s intuitions are directed toward real things. One reviewer seems to have taken it from this that I hold Kant to be claiming that it is at most necessary to conceive of (i.e., not to take?) the objects of one’s intuitions as at least in general real. But I said that this was “at the very least” what Kant’s position amounts to. My argument, in that context, only concerned the conceptions as such. It was that the fact that (a) a conception of oneself as an experiencer of intuitions entails (b) the necessity of conceptualizing objects in a generally non-neutral way is perfectly compatible with (c) the claim that every intuition as such possesses a neutral object-directedness (in addition to whatever other kind of directedness it might possess). The entailment, that is, is compatible with the fact that every intuition presents an “object” that one is free to take or not to take as real.
19. For a similar approach to the concept of an object in Kant, and a defense of its ontological neutrality, though in terms different from my own, cf. Bencivenga, “Knowledge as a Relation . . ., as well as “Understanding and Reason in the First Critique,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 3 (1986), 195-205. In the latter, Bencivenga argues that it is ultimately Reason that provides the standard required for judgments of reality. See also Bencivenga’s Kant’s Copernican Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
20. Cf. Wilfrid Sellars, “Notes on Intentionality,” Journal of Philosophy, 61 (1964), 655-65, reprinted in Philosophical Perspectives (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1967).
21. A related objection is raised against Brentano’s (later) approach to the intentionality of consciousness in Roderick M. Chisholm, “Brentano on Descriptive Psychology and the Intentional,” in Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. Edward N. Lee and Maurice Mandelbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967).
22. For a criticism of this sort of approach, see Stephen Stich, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press/Bradford Books, 1983), Chapter Four. With particular reference to Kant, I return to the issue in the next chapter.
23. Cf. Eddy Zemach’s appeal to “display sentences” (e.g., “Unsafe,” posted on a bridge): “De Se and Descartes: A New Semantics for Indexicals,” Nous, XIX (1985), 195.
24. Though he does not do so in the particular case of imagination, Searle, for example, appeals to “feelings” as essential to certain states of consciousness, over and above whatever “intentional content” and “direction of fit” are in them: John Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 35.
25. The suggestion, however, has been defended by Moreland Perkins, in Sensing the World (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983). He suggests that the qualities in question get taken, not as objects, but as qualities of objects.
26. Christopher Peacocke, Sense and Content: Experience, Thought, and their Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), esp. pp. 113-116. In any case, Peacocke himself does not show how to apply his proposal to cases, as one might call them, of purely imagining that “this” is such-and-such (as opposed, for example, to thinking such thoughts in regard to some actually, past or present, existing thing or place).
27. The same difficulty appears to apply to the alternative Peacocke offers in Thoughts: An Essay on Content (Aristotelian Society Series, 4 [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986]). Although, unlike the earlier book, it considers only perceptually demonstrative content, the view seems to be, in general, that the notion is to be explicated in terms of the pattern of “canonical grounds and commitments” of a content.
28. Cf. Norman Malcolm, “Thoughtless Brutes,” Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association, Boston, December 28, 1972; D. Davidson, “Thought and Talk,” in Mind and Language: Wolfson College Lectures 1974, ed. Samuel Guttenplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
29. Cf. Stich, pp. 104-6.
30. The threefold distinction between sensory, imaginative, and conceptual content might be useful in dealing with the sort of case considered by Peacocke, concerning the problem of “switches” in the perception of groups and aspects (Sense and Content, pp. 24-26). Peacocke operates with a twofold distinction between sensory and representational content.
31. I shall view concepts, apart from anticipations and retentions regarding the possible course of future and past experience, as mere “forms of judgment,” hence not really concepts at all. This may seem to rule out the thinkability of a reality other than appearances. Nevertheless, the forms of judgment, for Kant, do possess some representational function of their own. It might be argued that this provides the basis for abstract “thought” of a non-conceptual kind. Cf. Representational Mind, pp. 141-46.
32. Strictly speaking, of course, one does not “conceptualize” an appearance as objectively real in Kant’s view, in the sense that one conceptualizes an appearance as, say, roughly circular in shape. The latter involves application of a concept (circularity), in a way that the former does not. Instead, the former merely involves a special form of judgment, through which some concept (other than that of existence) is in its own turn applied to an object (cf. A226/B272-3). This, it should become clear, is still compatible with my contention that all “application” of concepts is in the end reducible to an operation of the pure forms of judgment on the material ingredient in intuition.
33. If the suggestion is correct, then despite the apparent reduction of objects to “possible appearances,” Kant’s phenomenalism at most concerns the sense in which objects might be supposed to exist, when they are objectively real. This does not contradict Kant’s claim, in the Prolegomena, that his “idealism concerns not the existence of things (the doubting of which, however, constitutes idealism in the ordinary sense). . .”: tr. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill), p. 41 (4.293). It is clear from the context that Kant’s point is that his view does not deny that material objects really exist. As for the objection that Kant could in any case not be concerned with the sense in which material objects exist, since that would make his project merely explicative of the meaning of certain sorts of statements: it should be clear that I take the point to concern what it is to judge appearances to be real objects.
34. I hope that this attempt to reconcile the fact (a) that the relevant “truth conditions” concern the satisfaction of anticipations regarding possible perceptions with the fact (b) that the judgment for which they are conditions is a judgment about something other than mere perceptions, namely, about material objects, may meet the objection raised against my approach by Ralf Meerbote, in a review of my earlier book (Kant-Studien, LXXVI [1985], 466). There, Meerbote also suggested the possibility of appealing to something like Carl Posy’s approach in terms of “assertability” conditions as conditions of truth, as opposed to “referential” ones, in order to avoid the apparent contradiction. (See, for example, Posy’s “Brittanic and Kantian Objects,” in New Essays on Kant, ed. Bernard den Ouden [New York: Peter Lang, 1987], pp. 29-46.) Posy’s own emphasis (p. 35) is on conditions that are sufficient to justify (an assertion), as opposed to eventual satisfaction (of certain anticipations). As he points out (p. 40), the demand for bivalence in truth conditions might be met, in that case, by appealing to a Peircian notion of eventual assertability. In any case, the same advantage that Posy seeks for his approach ought presumably to come to mine:
The assertabilist can be quite receptive to our natural inclination to anchor what we say and think in a non-linguistic (indeed non-epistemic) world. And he can perfectly well speak of the anchoring relation as “referential.” But, in that case he simply will not use that notion of reference to found his semantics, his conception of truth. (P. 37)
Apart from this, I don’t know whether either Meerbote or Posy would regard the present account as a useful counterpart in the philosophy of mind of what would otherwise be purely semantical distinctions.
Chapter Two: Extending the Framework
1. Cf. Patricia Kitcher, “Kant on Self-Identity,” Philosophical Review, 91 (1982), esp. pp. 65ff.
2. A similar objection is raised by Daniel Dennett against the attempt to account for psychological states by appeal to the tokening of “mental sentences”: Brainstorms (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT/Bradford Books, 1979), p. 49.
3. For a cogent discussion, see also Robert B. Pippin, “Kant on the Spontaneity of Mind,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 17 (1987), 449-76.
4. Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, tr. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), pp. 70-71 (4.452), translation slightly modified. Cf. Reflexionen zur Logik, 2476 (16.386):
Verstand und Vernunft sind frey: subiective Ursachen afficiren zwar, aber determinieren nicht den Verstand.
For a detailed and convincing argument for subsuming the two instances of freedom under the common heading of “autonomy,” see Gerold Prauss, Kant Über Freiheit als Autonomie (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983).
5. Reflexionen zur Metaphysik, 5611 (18.252).
6. Stephen Stich, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press/Bradford Books, 1983), pp. 55-56.
7. John R. Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Generally, Searle himself speaks of the Background as co-determining, along with intentional content—and possibly also along with a Network of other intentional states—a state’s “conditions of satisfaction.” But as should become clear, it seems equally legitimate to say, in Searle’s view, that the Background helps to determine intentional content itself. In any case, Searle also speaks (p. 54) of the Network and Background as “affecting” a state’s content. (Unless I note otherwise, the following points are all to be found in Chapter One of this work. The point about irreducibility is also confirmed in Chapter Ten.)
8. In Searle’s view, a part of any such description will always be a “clause” to the effect that a certain sort of object is causally responsible for the production of that very experience (pp. 47ff).
9. It may seem obvious that there is non-intuitional intentional content. One may consider, for example, the content of a mere belief. As suggested in Chapter One, Kant’s own “judgments” and “cognitions” are at least very different from what one often calls “beliefs,” precisely by virtue of being essentially intuitional (though also, of course, conceptual) in form. As for those beliefs that are non-intuitional, my inclination is to hold that these could be regarded as contentful only in a sense of no concern to Kant. In light of my treatment of consciousness in Chapter Six, the same will go for any type of “mental” state, insofar as its possession of content is supposed to be independent of its status as occurrent consciousness. The latter might be regarded as essentially conceptual in form. In any case, it is essentially intuitional.
10. “[I]n general the Intentionality of a perceptual experience is realized in quite specific phenomenal properties of conscious mental events” (p. 45).
11. “Perhaps there might be more biologically primitive Intentional states [i.e., more primitive than the human—at least in any real life situation: p. 140] which do not require a Network, or perhaps not even a Background” (p. 140n). It is also important to remember that, for Searle, it is always intentional content that determines conditions of satisfaction; they are not, as it were, “directly” determined by material in the Network or Background. The latter may at most determine certain aspects of the conditions of satisfaction (cf. p. 66). Or, as Searle seems to prefer to say, intentional content determines a state’s conditions of satisfaction, given its position “in” a Network and “against” a certain Background (p. 19). Perhaps the strongest formulation is this: “It would, therefore, be incorrect to think of the Background as forming a bridge between Intentional content and the determination of conditions of satisfaction, as if the Intentional content itself could not reach up to the conditions of satisfaction” (p. 158). (On at least one other occasion, Searle uses “Intentional content” so as precisely to include elements of the Network and Background: p. 232.)
12. Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Dasein’s Revenge: Methodological Solipsism as an Unsuccessful Escape Strategy in Psychology” (A Comment on Fodor’s Methodological Solipsism), Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3 (1980), 79; see also p. 79n1.
13. Searle does argue, convincingly I think, against any a priori rejection of the claim that intentional content—despite its irreducible status—is both caused by, and also “realized in,” neurophysiological structures. His argument appeals to the plausibility of saying such things as, for example, that the liquidity of water is both caused by the molecular behavior of molecules and realized in the very collection of molecules that is in question (p. 265). The general solution, in other words, “is that there can be causal relations between phenomena at different levels in the very same underlying stuff’ (p. 266). Since this solution is meant to concern causally determining conditions, not merely enabling ones, it is not meant to bear on the question of causal relations between Background material and the instantiation of intentional content by mental states, and of course it could not do so, since the latter is not realized in the former. So despite the enabling/determining distinction, the relation in question remains at least as problematic as Descartes’ postulation of causal relations between material and mental properties.
14. For a thorough study of Husserl’s own understanding of his relationship to Kant, see Iso Kern, Husserl und Kant, Phaenomenologica 16 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964).
15. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book, tr. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), §35, p. 72; cf. §§36-37. (Husserl, at this point, has already made clear that the “something” need not be taken as anything real. In the same section, he also distinguishes the “consciousness” in question from full-blown attention to some object.)
16. Ibid., §84, p. 200.
17. Ibid., §§35-37, §84: Husserl’s term for the “actional” or “wakeful” is aktuell. The suggestion of “wakeful” is that of the W. R. Boyce Gibson translation (New York: Collier Books, 1962). Incidentally, the actional/non-actional distinction is particularly difficult, or perhaps ambiguous. In any case, it does not, or at least not always, mean directedness that is specifically attentive vs. inattentive directedness. The latter distinction involves, or at least can involve, a distinction between attention and inattention to features or aspects of objects in the foreground.
18. This suggestion will be especially relevant to my discussion of affinity in Chapter Four and of self-consciousness in Chapter Six. (On the relationship between awareness of regions of space and of space as a “whole,” see my Representational Mind [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983], Chapter Three.) As to possible comparison with Searle, it is also worth noting that, while Searle insists upon the influence of Background on intentional content, not only does he not try to explain this by reference to what is in the background of consciousness, he also does not appear to regard the Background as in fact in the background of consciousness in Husserl’s sense. In any case, it can be in the background of consciousness for Searle only in the sense that it has an influence on intentional content.
19. Husserl, Ideas: First Book, §§88ff.
20. The main proponents of this approach are Dagfinn Føllesdal (“Husserl’s Notion of Noema,” Journal of Philosophy, 66 [1969], 680-87) and Hubert Dreyfus (“The Perceptual Noema: Gurwitsch’s Crucial Contribution,” in Life-World and Consciousness: Essays for Aron Gurwitsch, ed. Lester Embree [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972], pp. 135-70]). Both of these essays have been reprinted in Husserl, Intentionality, and Cognitive Science, ed. Hubert Dreyfus (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press/Bradford Books, 1982).
21. Perhaps the most recent critique of this approach (with which I am familiar) may serve as a guide to some of the recent literature: Mary Jeanne Larrabee, “The Noema in Husserl’s Phenomenology,” Husserl Studies, 3 (1986), 209-30. Cf. Robert Sokolowski, “Intentional Analysis and the Noema” (esp. sec. 6), Dialectica, 38 (1984), 113-29; Lenore Langsdorf, “The Noema as Intentional Entity: A Critique of Føllesdal,” Review of Metaphysics, 37 (1984), 757-84. An attempt to steer what appears to me to be something of a middle course may also be seen in J. N. Mohanty, Husserl and Frege (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); cf. my review of it in Husserl Studies, 1 (1984), 320-30. In an earlier study, I also criticized the Føllesdal/Dreyfus approach (although, in a still earlier study, I had defended it), in terms that still appear to me to be sound: “On Intensionalizing Husserl’s Intentions,” Noûs, XVI [1982], 209-26). However, my own positive suggestion was there at best misleading, and even certainly wrong in Husserl’s own terms. I suggested that the noema, in relation to ordinary “objects,” is a total intended (but not ipso facto attended-to) complex of “possible states of affairs” involving the latter, precisely as the latter is intended by consciousness. This is un-Husserlian in that, for Husserl, the apprehension of “states of affairs” involves a level of categorial form that is not essential to object-directedness as such. What I meant to suggest is rather that the noema is what consciousness is always free to take as a complex of states of affairs in regard to some object, given both appropriately focused attention and appropriately categorialized apprehension. (As an additional argument against the Dreyfus/Føllesdal approach, incidentally, I would mention that it does not sit well with the fact that, while Husserl assigns “meaning -bestowing” to the noetic act, he regards the concrete [noematic] meaning in question as a correlate, not simply of that act, but of that act’s “apprehension” of the noema through a body of hyletic Data. It is difficult, given that, to regard the original “apprehension” of such meanings as at all analogous to the apprehension of Fregean Sinne. Why should the latter ever need to be apprehended through any particular body of “material”?)
22. Husserl, Ideas: First Book, §§130-131, pp. 312-13.
23. Kern points out that, on Husserl’s reading of Kant, the latter in general (though not exclusively) considered Anschauung in the “objective” sense and for the most part neglected the structure of intuitional consciousness as such—or even tended to confuse the one with the other (Husserl und Kant, pp. 65-67). As I suggested in Chapter One, this impression of Kant may be more an artifact of the obscurity of Kant’s terminology.
24. The apparent incompatibility of taking Husserl’s suggestion in perfectly general terms, on the one hand, and as concerned with “definite intentions directed toward individuals,” on the other, is offered by David Woodruff Smith and Ronald Mclntyre as a serious deficiency in Husserl’s own presentation of the notion in question: Husserl and Intentionality (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1982), p. 203.
25. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Zweites Buch, ed. Marly Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), esp. §10 and §§15-18.
26. This point ought to make it clear why it would be wrong to regard the X-structure in a Husserlian noema as the correlate of what has recently been called “rigid designation” or “reference”—the latter notion being understood in terms of reference to re-identifiable objects in the more familiar sense. For a similar point delivered against an attempt to extend the Føllesdal/Dreyfus to the special case of temporal awareness, see William McKenna’s review (Husserl Studies, 2 [1985], 291-99) of Izchak Miller’s Husserl, Perception, and Temporal Awareness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press/Bradford Books, 1984). See also Smith and Mclntyre, pp. 203ff, for an attempt to compare the two notions.
27. However, I shall be arguing in Chapters Four and Six that Kant’s own doctrines of affinity and self-consciousness involve a broadening of his view precisely with regard to this point. Throughout, it should also be clear, I have abstracted from the question of “intuition” of essences in Husserl. As Kern points out (pp. 54ff), Husserl regarded Kant’s neglect of this notion as a serious weakness, but at the same time regarded his own understanding of it as a “phenomenologically clarified” version of Kant’s notion of pure intuition (p. 59).
28. “[W]e find those sensuous moments overlaid by a stratum which, as it were,”
“animates,” which bestows sense (or essentially involves a bestowing of sense)—a stratum by which precisely the concrete intentive mental process arises from the sensuous, which has in itself nothing pertaining to intentionality) Ideas: First Book,§85, p. 203).
[W]ith respect to intentionality we immediately confront a wholly fundamental distinction, namely the distinction between the components proper of intentive mental processes and their intentional correlates and their components. . . . On the one side, therefore, we have to discriminate the parts and moments which we find by an analysis of the really inherent pertaining to mental processes . . . on the other side, the intentive mental process is consciousness of something . . . and we can therefore inquire into what is to be declared as a matter of essential necessity about the side of this “of something”. . . . Corresponding in every case to the multiplicity of Data pertaining to the really inherent noetic content, there is a multiplicity of Data, demonstrable in actual pure intuition, in a correlative “noematic content” or, in short, in the “noema.” . . . (Ibid., §88, pp. 213-14; cf. §97)
On the other hand, Kern points out that Eugen Fink, for example, objects to regarding Kantian sensations as an instance of Husserlian “matter.” The objection is on the ground that, for Husserl, even the apprehension of “sense data” is eventually regarded as constituted via some kind of “intentionality.” Kern’s response (p. 274) is that the comparison is legitimate, since on any such deeper level of constitution, the very notions of constitution and of intentionality take on a new meaning. (We might also note that, at least on occasion, Husserl himself speaks of the material in question as having a kind of “intentionality “—but in scare-quotes: see note 30, below.)
29. Ibid., §85, p. 203.
30. Cf. ibid., §47, pp. 106-7:
Experienceableness never means a mere logical possibility, but rather a possibility motivated in the concatenation of [rationally motivated] experience. This concatenation itself is, through and through, one of [purely immanental] “motivation.” . . . (The bracketed phrases are Husserl’s marginal notes. See Kersten’s footnotes to the passage and Karl Schuhmann’s volume of supplementary materials: Husserliana, III.2 [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976], p. 497)
In a footnote to this passage, Husserl then adds: “It should be noted that this fundamental phenomenological concept of motivation . . . is a universalization of that concept of motivation in accordance with which we can say, e.g., that the willing of the end motivates the willing of the means.” See also Ideen: Zweites Buch, Beilage XII, p. 337. There Husserl speaks of “sensations” and “reproductions” as:
. . . behaftet mit Tendenzen, “Intentionen auf,” die sich erfüllen im Kommen der “intendierten” Impressionen oder Reproduktionen. Diese Triebe [n.b.] oder Tendenzen sind zum Sinnlichen selbst gehorig. . . . [In these sensory tendencies, the] “intentionale Objekt,” das worauf die reproduktive Tendenz gerichtet ist, fungiert “motivierend,” wirkt als Reiz.
On the relevant concept of motivation, see also Ideas: First Book, §52, §§136ff (esp. p. 337), §140.
31. Edmund Husserl, Analysen zur passiven Synthesis (1918-26), ed. Margot Fleischer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 14.
32. Ibid., p. 13.
33. Ibid., Beilage XXV, p. 428. Regarding kinaesthetic “motivation,” see also Ideen: Zweites Buch, §9, §10, pp. 21-22, and §18, pp. 57-58.
34. Shaun Gallagher (“Hyletic Experience and the Lived Body,” Husserl Studies, 3 [1986], 131-66) argues that, because the material in question is already “object”-directed (it is “already ensouled or animated” [p. 148; cf. pp. 152-53]), Husserl himself ought not to have seen it as mere material for intentional forming. But there is no inconsistency, so long as we are prepared to distinguish kinds of directedness. In fact, Husserl took Kant’s notion of imagination in the Deduction to have, at least implicitly, embodied the recognition of a pre-conceptual judgment. Cf. Kern:
Husserl war sich wohl bewusst, dass in Kants Begriff der Einbildungskraft, die sowohl sinnlich als auch verstandesmässig (spontan) ist, und deren Synthesis die phänomenale Welt anschaulich bildet, die schroffe Scheidung von Sinnlichkeit und Verstand überwunden ist. (P. 64)
Kern himself concludes that Husserl is too generous on the point. However, his argument presupposes that Kant’s distinction between sensibility and understanding ultimately rests on that between the “sensible and intelligible worlds.” Kern is similarly ungenerous in commenting on Husserl’s concession that, despite the apparently contrary stance of the Aesthetic, Kant recognized the need for a special sort of “aesthetic synthesis”; Kern’s reasoning is the same here too (p. 252).
35. Croce himself says that, while “Kant and Hegel say the same thing . . . the latter does so with greater awareness and clarity, that is, much better”: Logica come scienza del concetto puro, 9th ed. (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1964), p. 349. Italian scholars do not, at least, unanimously succumb to the apparent slighting of Kant. Precisely with respect to the question of a theory of consciousness, Francesco Valentini insists that Croce’s thought must indeed be regarded as “a form of Kantianism”) La controriforma della dialettica [Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1966], p. 17); Eugenio Garin insists on the appreciation of its significance as a “return to Kant”) Cronache di filosofia italiana [Bari: Editori Laterza, 1975], p. 265). With particular attention to the question of matter and form, but with less inclination toward phenomenological and more toward Hegelian formulations, Gennaro Sasso devotes considerable attention to the Kantian background in Benedetto Croce: La ricerca della dialettica (Napoli: Casa Editrice A. Morano, 1975), pp. 237-76. I would note that my acquaintance with Croce’s thought, and the happy discovery of his “Kantianism,” was made possible by a Professional Leave Award from the University of Tennessee for the academic year 1982-83, permitting independent study at the University of Rome and the National Library of Rome.
36. Croce makes it clear that this was Hegel’s primary shortcoming: Logica, pp. 350-51, and “Cio che e vivo e cio che e morto della filosofia di Hegel,” in Saggio sullo Hegel seguito da altri scritti di storia della filosofia, 5th ed. (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1967), p. 65.
37. “[T]he distinction between reality and non-reality is extraneous to the inner character of intuition”: Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale, 11th ed. (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1965), p. 5. Regarding understanding, Croce concedes that “reality” is always presupposed by thought—but the reality in question is not, in this, “realistically” conceived:
[E]very individual judgment presupposes the existence of that of which one speaks . . . even when this thing consists in an act of imagination, so long as this act is recognized as such and as such existentialized. And therefore judgments of that sort are subject to the concept of a reality that bifurcates into actual reality and possible reality, into existence and non-existence or mere representability. (Logica, p. 109)
Cf. Estetica, p. 32, distinguishing the “real imaginary” [la fantastica reale] from the “purely imaginary”] dalla fantastica pura].
38. Rejecting mere sensation: “II mito della sensazione,” in Discorsi di Varia Filosofia, II, 2nd ed. (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1959), p. 4. On material other than mere sensations, Croce includes feelings, impulses, emotions, states of passion, desire, suffering, problems and questions, habits and capacities, practical intentions, appetites, tendencies, volitions, even “actions”; in short, the whole “personality” of the subject: cf. Estetica, pp. 14, 105, 111-12; Logica, pp. 133-34, 141, 189; “L’intuizione pura e il carattere lirico dell’arte,” in Problemi di estetica, 6th ed. (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1966), p. 23.
39. These are, beyond the intuitional and conceptual, the “practical,” “economical,” or “volitional” as such and, finally, the distinctively moral: cf. Filosofia della practica, 8th ed. (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1963), p. 226; “Cio che e vivo . . . ,” pp. 86-88; Logica, pp. 54, 65-66. For a thorough study of Croce on this point, see Sasso, especially Part II.
40. “. . . I have still not managed to find in that school anything that enriches or so much as stimulates my mind . . . seems superfluous and sterile and vain . . . and therefore to treat as if it did not exist”: Discorsi di Varia Filosofia, II, p. 33. However, the specific object of Croce’s scorn was Husserl’s ambition that philosophy be “scientific.”
41. Cf. Logica, pp. 133, 140-43, 236. So far as I can tell, Croce’s denial of purely “analytic” judgments does not, strictly speaking, apply to (what he regards as) mere pseudojudgments, that is, to judgments involving empirical (pseudo-)concepts; see note 42, below. As for Kant himself, we already noted in Chapter One that genuine “cognitions” always appear to involve the conceptualization of intuitions. But, of course, well-known aspects of his thought require that Kant leave room for “thoughts” that are not cognitions at all (Bxxvff). These presumably involve a “use” of the mere forms of judgment, apart from corresponding material. However we deal with this, the question in any case remains of allegedly nonintuitional “judgments” in which ordinary empirical concepts are employed. According to my own approach, this would most naturally be understood in terms of some notion of identity with respect to manifolds of anticipations and retentions, potentially ingredient in intuitions, but also in principle capable of ingredience in non-intuitional representational states. If we can make sense of that notion, then I presume we ought to be able to make some sense of the notion of a purely analytic judgment. However, it would be misleading to say, as Kant does, that such “judgments” express relations among “concepts” (A6/B10ff). Strictly, they would seem at most to express relations of potential inclusion/exclusion among various sets of anticipations and retentions, of the sort that in turn provide material for formation into genuine concepts. Naturally, one is free to speak of such sets of anticipations and retentions as themselves “concepts.” But to do so would involve a sense of the term different from what Kant himself is centrally concerned with in the Critique. On the analytic/synthetic in Croce, more immediately below.
42. Ibid., pp. 15, 24.
43. Ibid., pp. 121, 221, 225-26.
44. The point must lie behind Croce’s insistence, for example, that all intuition is a form of “expression”: cf. Estetica, pp. 11ff, 153ff. It must also lie behind Croce’s insistence that all (genuinely) historical study is the study of something “contemporary”—indeed, that all true understanding is a form of self-understanding: cf. Teoria e storia della storiografia, 11th ed. (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1976), pp. 4ff, 46, 123-24. But perhaps the most forceful expression of the point is to be found in the statement of Croce’s closest follower:
Indeed those affects or feelings that ignite and spread into passions, and, reawakening and stimulating the will, translate it into action, are identified with the corresponding objects; for a love is not other than the woman loved, and the pleasure of travel, as one can read somewhere in Croce, is not such as follows upon the travel as its result but is inseparable from the travel, and one could say indeed that it is the travel itself. And such-and-such object (such-and-such a woman), such-and-such love (or hate). (Alfredo Parente, Croce per lumi sparsi [Firenze: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1975], p. 6.)
Similarly, “. . . on the epistemological level the contemporaneity of the past means . . . the very sameness [medesimezza] of past and present”—sameness, that is, precisely in the sense that “the image of a flower is nothing other than the flower itself” (Alfredo Parente, “Sul concetto di ‘contemporaneitä’ della storia. L’aspetto pratico e il teoretico del problema,” Rivista di studi crociani, XVIII [Oct.-Dec., 1981], 364).
Chapter Three: Synthesis
1. In anticipation of what follows, we may presume at least three factors to be sources of Kant’s own unclarity: (1) the radical character of the view in question; (2) a felt tension with the Aesthetic, in that the latter identifies only sensation as material of intuition; (3) the possible fear that if (empirical) concepts are “made out of’ something comparable to the material of intuitions, then concepts would become a kind of particular. As suggested already, ad (2), the proposed view is still compatible with holding that sensation alone (in a suitably narrow sense) is the material of intuition qua intuition. It is simply that conceptualization of the latter requires the ingredience of specifically imaginative material. Ad (3): while the proposed extension of the matter/form distinction may raise the fear in question, it is resistible by focusing on the proposal’s own harmlessly reductive character. The suggestion that concepts are “made” out of this or that material is to be analyzed merely in terms of claims about what conceptual acts or processes are made out of. It is unsurprising that Kant was not always clear in this regard.
2. Jonathan Bennett, Kant’s Analytic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 138.
3. See Raymund Schmidt’s note to the passage in his edition in the Philosophische Bibliothek series (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1956; reprint of edition of 1930).
4. There is occasion for unclarity here. For example, at some points Paton says (a) that the concepts employed in ordinary judgments must actually guide the imaginative syntheses at work in those judgments; elsewhere, (b) he describes understanding’s role merely in terms of its ability “to conceive the various principles upon which imagination synthetizes [sic] the given manifold.” In the latter case, concepts are merely concepts of imaginative syntheses. See H. J. Paton, Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1936), I, p. 264, for (a); p. 487 (cf. pp. 273ff), for (b).
5. Most famously, at least with regard to the first edition, cf. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, tr. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962): “[E]verything in the essence of pure knowledge that has a synthetic structure is brought about by the imagination” (p. 66); “This means nothing less than reducing pure intuition and pure thought to the transcendental imagination” (p. 145). Cf. George Schrader, “Kant’s Theory of Concepts,” in Kant: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Paul Wolff (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1967), p. 148: “In fact, understanding itself may be viewed as a function of imagination operative at the conscious level and in accordance with explicitly formulated rules and laws.” The issue, of course, turns on the crucial transformation to the conscious level. Heidegger and Schrader aside, this must be accomplished, so far as I can see, precisely via an operation of “pure understanding.” In any case, any so-called application of empirical concepts would merely be what emerges out of such pure operations. (Schrader is not perfectly clear, immediately adding that imagination also needs to “follow the laws of understanding” [p. 148].)
6. Logik Dohna-Wundlacken (24.710).
7. For brevity, I speak of empirical concepts throughout, whenever I mean non-categorial concepts. In other words, the general approach is also intended to apply to mathematical concepts.
8. Though short on details, Gilles Deleuze has perhaps been most insistent on the two factors to which I try to do justice in this chapter, namely, the original and autonomous contribution of the faculties and also, under the determination of one of them, elevation of the “lower” to a special higher status: Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), esp. pp. 22-23, 34.
9. Heidegger, pp. 167, 169, respectively.
10. Cf. Logik, I, §2 (9.91): “Die Materie der Begriffe ist der Gegenstand, die Form derselben die Allgemeinheit.”
11. It is sometimes suggested that empirical concepts are themselves the intellectual “forms” that come to be embedded in the fabric of intuitions. Cf. Schrader, p. 150. However, Schrader leans toward a kind of “imposition” model as well (pp. 138, 149). By contrast, he regards the a priori forms of understanding merely as forms for the ordering of empirical concepts (p. 138), or for their formation (p. 140); they do not themselves seem to undergo a process of embedding in intuition.
12. Wiener Logik (24.907). Cf. Anthropologie, §3 (7.131): “. . . von etwas, d.i. einer Bestimmung des Gegenstandes meiner Vorstellung, abstrahiren, wodurch diese die Allgemeinheit eines Begriffs erhalt und so in den Verstand aufgenommen wird.” Reflexionen zur Anthropologic, 207 (15.79-80): “Verstand macht aus Erscheinungen Anschauungen der Gegenstande und aus diesen Begriffe.” Also, Logik Politz (24.566), Logik Busolt (24.654), Reflexionen zur Logik, 2839, 2942, 2947, 3057, Logik, §5 (9.93-4). In related but somewhat different terms: “Anschauungen . . . zuvor zu Begriffen erhoben werden, um zum Er-kenntnisse des Objects zu dienen”) Erste Einleitung in die Kritik der Urteilskraft, XI [20.247]); “[T]he categories are not in themselves cognitions, but are merely forms of thought for the making of cognitions out of given intuitions” (B288); “[T]he categories, which are thought, are nothing but mere forms of judgments insofar as these forms are applied to intuitions . . . by such application our intuitions first of all obtain objects and become cognitions” (Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science, tr. James Ellington [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970], Preface, p. 12 [4.474]).
13. The second edition devotes minimal attention to what Kant had earlier described (Axvi-xvii) as the “subjective” side of the Deduction, the side that “seeks to investigate the pure understanding itself, its possibility and the cognitive faculties upon which it rests,” but is not essential to the Critique’s aim of establishing that experience is necessarily subject to understanding in the first place. My primary concern is precisely with the “subjective” question. As Kant himself makes a point to say, it is in any case not a question of mere causal origins for the understanding and its operations (Axvii). He also says, in both editions, that Transcendental Logic would “treat of the origin of our cognitions of objects [auf den Ursprung unserer Erkenntnisse von Gegenständen gehen], so far as it cannot be attributed to the objects” (A55-6/B80). (One might note the presence of both notions of the Ursprung of concepts—the causal and, as we might put it, the “constitutive” notions—in the last of the passages quoted at the end of the present paragraph.) As to questions concerning the “mere” how of concept application, Kant also says that this “can be solved almost by a single conclusion from the precisely determined definition of a judgment in general (an act by which given representations first become cognitions of an object)” (Metaphysical First Principles, p. 13 [4.475]; my emphasis).
14. Reflexionen zur Metaphysik, 5932 (18.391).
15. Reflexionen zur Logik, 2839 (16.540).
16. Paton, pp. 201-3. Cf. Henry E. Allison, “Analytic and Synthetic Judgments,” in The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, ed. Richard Kennington (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1985), p. 18:
By the content of an empirical concept, Kant means the sensible features that are thought in it as marks. . . . The main point is that simply having a set of sensible impressions that are associated with one another is not the same as having a concept. The latter requires the thought of the applicability of this set of sensible impressions to a plurality of possible objects. With this thought these impressions become transformed into “marks,” i.e., partial conceptions. (Emphasis added)
Cf. Manfred Baum, Deduktion und Beweis in Kants Transzendentalphilosophie (Konigstein/Ts.: Athenaum Verlag, 1986), pp. 100-101, 106, 119.
17. Cf. Logik, Introduction, VIII (9.58):
Ein Merkmal ist dasjenige an einem Dinge, was einen Theil der Erkenntniss desselben ausmacht. . . . Alle unsre Begriffe sind demnach Merkmale und alles Denken ist nichts anders als ein Vorstellen durch Merkmale. Ein jedes Merkmal lasst sich von zwei Zeiten betrachten: Erstlich, als Vorstellung an sich selbst; Zweitens, als gehorig wie ein Theilbegriff zu der ganzen Vorstellung eines Dinges und dadurch als Erkenntnissgrund dieses Dinges selbst.
Reflexionen zur Logik, 3057 (16.634):
Eine Vorstellung, die durch das Bewusstsein als Merkmals allgemein wird, heisst (klarer) Begriff.
18. Logik, §6, Anm. 2 (9.95):
Abstracte Begriffe sollte man daher eigentlich abstrahierende (conceptus abstrahentes) nennen, d.h. solche, in denen mehrere Abstractionen vorkommen. So ist z.b. der Begriff Korper eigentlich kein abstracter Begriff, denn vom Korper selbst kann ich ja nicht abstrahiren, ich würde sonst nicht den Begriff von ihm haben.
This might be taken to say, in effect, that (except insofar as they are mere dispositions to form them) concepts are indeed nothing other than the “acts” of conception themselves. But without Merkmale as literal components of such acts, any specificity in them must then be provided precisely by whatever material is independently incorporable within intuitions to which they are “applied.” In themselves, they would be mere forms of conception. Cf. Anthropologie, §3 (7.131): by abstracting from certain features, an intuition “receives” the Allgemeinheit of a concept, und so in den Verstand aufgenommen wird.
19. See Representational Mind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), Chapter One.
20. On at least pure concepts as Handlungen of the understanding, cf. A57/B81. Also Reflexionen zur Logik, 2856 (16.548) and Logik, §5 (9.93), on actions of the understanding that einen Begriff ausmachen.
21. Cf. Reflexionen zur Metaphysik, 5927 (18.388-9):
Category is the representation of the relation of the manifold of intuition to a universal consciousness (to the universality of consciousness, which is properly objective). The relation of representations to the universality of consciousness, consequently the transformation [Verwandlung] of the empirical and particular unity of consciousness, which is only subjective, into a consciousness that is universal and objective, belongs to Logic. . . . Two components of cognition take place a priori. 1. Intuitions, 2. Unity of consciousness of the manifold of intuitions (even of empirical intuitions). This unity of consciousness constitutes the form of experience as objective empirical cognition.
Cf. Reflexionen zur Anthropologie, 212 (15.81): “Sensibility is the affectibility of our representational power. Understanding is the spontaneity of our representational power. . . . Both [consciousness] are mere form.” Also B305-6: Categories “are nothing but forms of thought, which contain the merely logical faculty of uniting a priori in one consciousness the manifold given in intuition.” Cf. B148-9.
22. Regarding the flexibility of the term sensation, though without any commitment to the present account, cf. Paton, p. 487: “the synthesis of imagination is always sensuous, even when it is a pure synthesis as in the construction of a mathematical figure.” Paton simply elaborates by observing that by itself imagination “could give us only pictures or images.” I might also remind the reader of Husserl’s extension of the term Empflndung, discussed in Chapter Two.
23. Similar points are made, for example, by Robert B. Pippin: Kant’s Theory of Form (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), esp. Chapters 2-5, 8. Pippin concludes that Kant sees the need for a gap-bridging “schematism,” to mediate between the demands for imposition of concepts on indeterminate manifolds and some reasonable sense in which the “given” provides a degree of determinate guidance; see esp. pp. 112-23, 1143-50, 222-28. But this way out is closed to Kant, short of breaking down his own rigid distinction between sensibility and understanding (pp. 227-28). Cf. Malte Hossenfelder, Kants Konstitutionstheorie und die Transzendentale Deduktion (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1978), pp. 107-8: If a concept’s job is to serve as a “rule” for the reproduction and anticipation of representations, then something else must be assigned the task of accounting for our ability to recognize the latter as in fact falling under any given concept. It is tempting to suppose it to be Kant’s futile endeavor precisely to account for the second of these tasks in terms of the first. I am suggesting that it is rather a question of focus on two distinct aspects of concepts: on their conceptual form as such and on the imaginative material that is animated by but no less ingredient in them.
24. Cf. Paton, pp. 264ff. Also Robert Paul Wolff, Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 133-34. Bennett suggests something analogous, at least with respect to one’s grasp of the “synthesis” required for self-knowledge (pp. 111ff). He also makes it clear that the synthesis in question is of an intellectual sort. It is simply whatever is involved in one’s grasp of the “criteria” for application of the relevant concepts (pp. 108ff).
25. Paton, pp. 487-88.
26. Ibid., pp. 264ff.
27. Wolff identifies concepts with rules (pp. 130-34). But he continues to speak of the rules as rules for imaginative synthesis. It is unclear why he regards the synthesis in the case as imaginative rather than intellectual. In addition, Wolff speaks of concepts themselves as “forms of mental activity” (p. 70). It is unclear what sort of activity is supposed to be in question. Bennett (p. 54) also identifies concepts with rules, but apparently not in Wolff s sense. At least in Kant’s more considered moments, a concept is merely an ability or skill (i.e., to have a concept is simply to have certain instances of the latter). What it is an ability to do appears to be something primarily linguistic.
28. P. F. Strawson, “Imagination and Perception,” in Experience and Theory, ed. Lawrence Foster and J. W. Swanson (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), p. 41.
29. Henry Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 161-64. Allison has maintained in discussion that his aim is definitely to preserve a notion of imaginative synthesis on a pre-intellectual level. The reference to “inner sense,” apparently meant to accomplish this, seems to me too vague for the purpose. As stated, it remains compatible with regarding the need to anticipate and retain in regard to possible future and past moments as nothing more than a necessary limitation on human conceptualization, as opposed to an actual function that is pre-conceptual in nature.
30. With emphasis on the history of Kant’s usage, Oswaldo Market argues that Kant in general regards the manifold in terms of his own notion of sensation as the material of intuitions: “Das Mannigfaltige und die Einbildungskraft,” in Akten des 5. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, ed. Gerhard Funke et al. (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1981), 1.1, pp. 255-67. However, Market formulates the primary problem in terms of the “noe-matic” question as to how that material is to be formed into a distinctly apprehensible image (cf. pp. 264-67), as opposed to a “noetic” question concerning the original formation of cognitive states through which an image is to be apprehensible in the first place. In this respect, Market’s approach resembles that of Hoke Robinson, who also emphasizes that the Kantian manifold is in the first instance a manifold in any given intuition: “Anschauung und Mannigfaltiges in der Transzendentalen Deduktion,” Kant-Studien, 72 (1981), 140-48.
31. Apart from the duality of intentionally correlative manifolds, Kant may, of course, also seem to embrace another duality, namely, between a manifold of empirical and a manifold of a priori or pure intuition (A76-7/B102-3, A99-102). But it is not impossible that these are really the same distinction. We need to remember that it is precisely the a priori forms of intuition that, in a sense, provide the relevant manifold of anticipations and retentions. They provide it, at least, in the sense of needing to incorporate that material in empirical intuitions in the first place, in order for it to be relevant to conceptualization. To some extent, this may suggest Kemp Smith’s distinction between an empirical manifold, synthesized by the understanding, and a pre-conscious manifold out of which (productive) imagination synthetically generates material for the understanding in the first place. This is on what Kemp Smith calls the “phenomenalist” reading of Kant. On the “subjectivist” reading, by contrast, imagination simply is understanding at work, either transcendentally or empirically, upon a manifold of material provided by states of the individual subject. Cf. Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (New York: Humanities Press, 1962; reprint of 2nd edition of 1923), pp. 224-27, 264ff. However, the material that Kemp Smith seems to have in mind is more like a manifold of mere sensations than a set of imaginative anticipations and retentions.
32. Cf. Anthropologie, §1 (7.127-8), Letter to Herz, 26 May, 1789 (11.520). Also Reflexionen zur Anthropologie, 212 (15.81):
Die Sinnlichkeit ist die affectibilitaet der Vorstellungskraft. Verstand ist die spontaneitaet der Vorstellungskraft. . . . Das Bewusstseyn geht auf beyde. Das Bewusstseyn des Mannigfaltigen in den ersten Vorstellungen oder Anschauungen ist aesthetische Deutlichkeit, in Begriffen logische Deutlichkeit.
See also Paton, pp. 332-34, for a criticism of the claim that Kant regarded the conceptualization of experience as necessary for “consciousness” simpliciter. One might note that, in the Critique itself, even mere sensation is regarded as a species of “representation with consciousness” (A320/B376). I shall have more to say in Chapter Six about the problem of consciousness.
33. Note the departure from Kemp Smith’s translation: “in the manifold of these representations.” My own reading emphasizes a distinction that Kemp Smith consistently blurs, namely, between appearances, and whatever manifold they contain, and our representations of appearances, and their own internal manifolds (of anticipations, retentions, or what have you).
34. Erste Einleitung in die Kritik der Urteilskraft, V (20.211). I have added the emphasis to suggest the affinity between animal “inclinations” and animal “anticipations.”
35. In general, “Imagination is the faculty of representing in intuition an object that is not itself present” (B151). Cf. B278-9, on dreams and illusions as imaginative intuitions. Also A713/B741, Anthropologie, §28 (7.167), and Critique of Judgment, Introduction, VII (5.190), on imagination as faculty of intuitions a priori. In fact, Kant seems to regard imagination in general as a kind of pure intuition:
Empfindungen, z.E. Reitz, Riihrungen sind die Materie der Sinnlichkeit, die Anschauung ist ihre Form. Einbildungskraft gilt also nur von der Form der Sinnlichkeit, aber nicht von der Materie. (Wiener Logik [24.807])
It should be clear from Chapter One why even empirical imagination may be said to involve mere intuitional form. It is empirical on account of the concepts that are in it; sensations (at least in the normal sense) are absent.
36. Just the opposite reaction seems to be Kemp Smith’s. After commenting on the problem of retention in “serial consciousness” at A102, he notes that “Kant renders his argument needlessly complex and dimishes its force” precisely by considering in the same context the case of anticipable orderliness in nature (p. 247). One should in any case note that orientation toward the immediately forthcoming or receding, insofar as it is part of the ingredient “material” of any given act of consciousness, is just the case of what Husserl has called protention and retention. Though it may be a bit misleading to Husserlians, I retain the latter of these terms to designate the other case as well, because the only natural alternative would be Kant’s own choice, Reproduktion, and that is still more misleading.
37. Heidegger, p. 94.
38. Cf. G. J. Warnock, “Concepts and Schematism “Analysis, 9 (1949), 77-82. See also Bennett, p. 46, though Bennett takes Kant to do better, in more considered moments, by at least inclining to identify concepts with rules of some sort. For a defense of Kant against the charge, though in very different terms from my own, see Lauchlan Chipman, “Kant’s Categories and Their Schematism,” Kant-Studien, 63 (1972), 36-50; Ralph C. S. Walker, Kant (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 90; Graham Bird, Kant’s Theory of Knowledge (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 63. Hubert Schwyzer (“How Are Concepts of Objects Possible?” Kant-Studien, 74 [1983], 22-44) recognizes the application problem as a genuine one, but solvable only once Kant’s purely logical conception of the forms of judgment is replaced by something more like Wittgenstein’s conception of “forms of life” (pp. 40ff). Daniel O. Dahlstrohm (“‘Knowing How’ and Kant’s Theory of Schematism,” in Kennington, pp. 71-85) concedes that possession of a concept and the ability to apply a concept may be distinguishable for empirical concepts, but that their indistinguishability for a priori concepts poses a problem that Kant could solve, if at all, only by appeal to a special philosophical hermeneutic. In my own view, the distinction ought to be equally problematic for empirical concepts, given Kant’s understanding of their nature. Apparent counter-examples, drawn from intuitions concerning concept identity under various circumstances of their “possession,” may simply rest on a different notion of a concept. Kant himself generally thinks of concepts, not as possessions, but as (aspects of) cognitive activities. The solution to the difficulty, for both pure and empirical concepts, ought to rest squarely on a distinction between aspects of those activities themselves.
39. Cf. Paton, pp. 35-37 (though Paton himself suggests, not that concepts are rules, but rather concepts of rules). Kemp Smith (pp. 334ff) sees the “rule” approach as embodying a vaccilation between the third-thing approach and a straightforward identification of concepts with their schemata. The latter in any case at least leans toward a more adequate form/matter conception of concepts, as opposed to a “predicative” or “class-theory” approach (p. 338). Gram argues that, beneath the two approaches, a third is hidden (apparently also, at least partly, from Kant himself), identifying schemata with intuitions, but he considers only the problem of pure concepts in this context: Moltke S. Gram, Kant, Ontology, And the A Priori (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 91ff. Bennett (p. 144) observes that, ironically, Kant himself presents a perfectly convincing refutation of the third-thing approach at A133/B172, in arguing that there can be no general solution to the problem of concept-application, i.e., of “judgment.” Swing argues that Kant simply shifted back and forth between the two approaches: Thomas Kaehao Swing, Kant’s Transcendental Logic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 57. Cf. Pippin, pp. 145-48.
40. Pippin, pp. 146-47. Pippin sees the only hope to lie in a breakdown of the very distinction between sensibility and understanding (pp. 227-28). For a similar objection, cf. Hossenfelder, pp. 107-8: if a concept’s (or a schema’s) job is simply to serve as a “rule” for the reproduction and anticipation of particular representations, then something else (presumably already conceptual) must account for our ability to recognize the latter as sub-sumable under that rule, in any relevant sense, in the first place.
41. Pippin, pp. 112-23, 143-50, 222-28.
42. Dahlstrom suggests that the remark is meant to apply only to empirical concepts (p. 75). Cf. “Transzendentale Schemata, Kategorien und Erkenntnisarten,” Kant-Studien, 75 (1984), 40.
43. Commentators also find some difficulty in the way Kant distinguishes schemata from images. He attributes the latter to the “empirical faculty of productive imagination”:
This much only we can assert: the image is a product of the empirical faculty of productive imagination; the schema of sensible concepts, such as of figures in space, is a product . . . of pure a priori imagination. (A141-2/B181)
Kemp Smith, following Vaihinger, takes this to be a slip: Kant means to attribute images to reproductive imagination. But the first-edition Deduction also appears to attribute the apprehension of “images” to productive imagination (A 120-1). Though Kant does not explicitly call it productive at that point, he says that “active” imagination is responsible for the apprehension of images. It is said to rest upon reproductive imagination as upon a subjective “ground.” I discuss these issues in the next chapter.
44. By contrast, Patricia Kitcher (“Kant on Self-Identity,” Philosophical Review, 91 [1982], 41-72), takes Kant to be talking here, not about relations by virtue of which intuitions are “generable,” and to which some mode of conceptualization would then be applicable, but about (causal) relations by virtue of which a mode of conceptualization is itself “generable” (pp. 65ft).
45. Ibid., p. 106; emphasis added.
46. Gram, pp. 100ff.
47. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, pp. 181ff.
48. Ibid., p. 184.
49. It is important to bear in mind that, in doing this, we need to be talking about intuitions as multiply instantiable types of representational states, rather than as particulars: as when we say that the “same intuition” is determined in this or that manner on two different occasions.
50. Allison himself is skeptical about the attempt to distinguish schematized from unschematized categories, as two distinct sets of concepts (Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, p. 188, and note 36 to that page).
51. Ibid., p. 188. Sometimes by a schema Kant no doubt means some particular element or aspect of pure intuition, regarded noematically. That is, he means some aspect of spatiotemporal form itself. Although one could never refer to such elements in pre-categorial terms, they must, of course, be distinct from the corresponding category: a necessary aspect of spatiotemporal reality is obviously not the same thing as a necessary aspect of our representation of spatiotemporal reality. But in other cases, transcendental schemata are regarded by Kant as representations themselves. It is, of course, only in the latter sense that I identify them with the schematized categories. As for the “unschematized” categories, these could only be the pure forms of judgment, regarded as the functions required (a) in application to pure intuition, for the constitution of categories/schemata, as modes of representation, and (b) in application to manifolds of anticipation and retention, for the production of all other concepts. Naturally, to the extent that the relevant anticipations and retentions are themselves spatiotemporal in “form,” the categories, hence the transcendental schemata, may be said to be “included” in all other concepts, hence in all other schemata.
52. Cf. Heidegger, p. 114: “The use of pure concepts as [emphasis added] transcendental determinations of time a priori, i.e., the achievement of pure knowledge, is what takes place in schematism.”
Chapter Four: Production, Reproduction, and Affinity
1. Even so charitable a commentator as Paton, and despite his own rejection of the “patchwork thesis” (cf. “Is the Transcendental Deduction a Patchwork?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society [1929-30], reprinted in Disputed Questions, ed. M. S. Gram, [Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview, 1984], pp. 64-93), comments: “It is this striking fact [of Kant’s inconsistency regarding productive and reproductive imagination] which (along with some others of less importance) inclines me to the belief that the provisional exposition may represent an earlier level of reflexion . . .” (Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience [London: George Allen and Unwin, 1936), I, p. 364).
2. Cf. Robert Paul Wolff, Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 141: The cause of Kant’s indecision as to whether there is a single capacity for reproduction, exhibiting both a transcendental and an empirical dimension, or whether rather only productive imagination is transcendental, “is Kant’s desire to do justice to the scientific world of real empirical objects, while yet preserving his belief that those objects are products of the activity of the mind.” The most extreme attribution of the doctrine of such transcendental manufacture is Kemp Smith’s; see Chapter Three, note 31. A somewhat more sympathetic approach is Henry Allison’s, “Transcendental Affinity—Kant’s Answer to Hume,” in Kant’s Theory of Knowledge, ed. L. W. Beck (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974), pp. 119-27. Allison distinguishes two lines of argument in Kant, both attempting to move from our capacity for merely empirical association to the awareness of an objective order internal to the world of appearances. The cruder of these arguments rests on a viewpoint “close in spirit to Berkeley” and according to which appearances are “nothing apart from consciousness.” However, even from that viewpoint, it is fallacious. By contrast, the more sophisticated argument translates claims about appearances into claims about our possible experiences (of public objects), and then inquires concerning necessary conditions of these.
3. Cf. Paton, Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience, I, p. 481: the weaker conclusion is “obvious enough” from the start. Cf. also Paul Guyer, “Kant’s Tactics in the Transcendental Deduction,” Philosophical Topics, 12 (1981), 173: The argument here is “ . . . clearly fallacious. For, even if we concede that to be able to reproduce representations requires being aware of a regularity among these representations, Kant’s argument still requires . . . [not just necessity of awareness of regularity, but awareness of a necessary regularity].”
4. By contrast with this reading, Kemp Smith takes Kant’s point in the argument precisely to be that “all apprehension is an act of judgment”(A Commentary to Kant’s’Critique of Pure Reason [New York: Humanities Press, 1962; reprint of 2nd edition of 1923], P. 257.)
5. Wolff suggests that Kant has shifted from progressive to regressive argument, that is, to “assuming what he hopes to prove” (p. 153). Cf. Kemp Smith (p. 255) on the corresponding passage at A121-2.
6. One might take Kant to be arguing that an anticipable order among objects is a necessary condition of association simply because the latter is a form of consciousness, consciousness presupposes self-consciousness, and the latter presupposes that order. Thus Kemp Smith, commenting on the passage at A121-2: Kant may seem to be arguing that worldy regularity is necessary for full-blown “experience,” and then begging the question as to whether associations need to be full-blown experiences in the first place; but in fact he needed no such assumption regarding association, since it would have worked equally well to have begun with an arbitarily subjective notion of the latter (so long as we presume it to involve consciousness of any sort: pp. 255-56). Cf. Wolff, p. 156: “Kant claims to prove that the validity of the categories is a necessary condition of consciousness itself.” Of course, if this were Kant’s point, then there would have been no reason in the first place to consider association. Any form of consciousness would be equally relevant to the argument.
7. This formulation of the second line of reasoning has the advantage of showing how it essentially refers to, while remaining distinct from, the first. The dual aspect may thus help explain Kant’s apparent self-contradiction at A122-4.
8. Cf. Erste Einleitung in die Kritik der Urteilskraft, VII (20.220). Here Kant attributes the capacity for Auffassung, or for apprehensio, of the manifold of (the) appearance to the faculty of imagination. This distinguishes such apprehension from the understanding’s Zusammenfassung of the manifold in the concept of an object. It also seems clear from the context that the manifold is indeed a manifold that is contained within the very intuition to which the concept in question is thereby applied.
9. Paton, Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience, I, pp. 445ff.
10. Ibid., p. 450.
11. The passage is worth some discussion. In it, Kant distinguishes between a “principle of affinity, which has its seat in the understanding and expresses necessary connection,” and a mere “rule of association.” The latter is always empirical and to be found only in reproductive imagination. This may seem to run counter to my own apparent interposition of a third term between the two, that is, of an objective yet productively imaginative affinity between the levels of mere reproduction and understanding. But we need to remember, first of all, that in the view that I am proposing there is an important sense in which the particular, and conceptually representable, lawfulness of nature is one and the same as the affinity that I am ascribing to imagination. It simply is the latter, regarded no longer as a necessary condition of conceptual representation, but insofar as it has itself become conceptual representation. Second, while what Kant is here calling a “principle of affinity” is indeed something transcendental, it is nonetheless not what Paton (see above) regards as “transcendental affinity.” It is not the mere transcendental requirement of some order of nature or other. It rather already involves a representation, at least on some level, of some particular order or other. It involves whatever kind of representation of such an “order of nature” needs to be ingredient in concepts of objects, in order to constitute their very possibility as concepts in the first place. As Kant puts it, it involves the Herausgehen aus dem Begriffe eines Dinges auf mögliche Erfahrung, welches a priori geschieht und die objektive Realität desselben ausmacht. Insofar as the Herausgehen in question is a presupposition of the conceptual representation of a nature that is so much as possible in the first place, it of course cannot itself rest on already established empirical concepts. But insofar as it nonetheless involves representation of a particular order of things, neither can it be a product of the mere operation of understanding in general—that is, a product of what the categories alone require. (On the connection between the representation of “possibile” objects and the “objective reality” of concepts, see A22o/B268ff.) Finally, that Kant is indeed concerned with a kind of representation, not merely with a transcendental requirement, is evident from his specific criticism of Hume. Hume is said to have confused a transcendental Herausgehen with a merely empirical and associational “synthesis of objects.” But Hume could hardly have been guilty of confusing anything so abstract as the mere requirement of particular “syntheses of objects,” or of particular instances of Herausgehen, with particular syntheses themselves.
12. It is at least evident that, however related, the usage is not quite the same. At A572/B600 Kant’s point is simply that, if all possible predicates were contained in a single Inbegriff— as a kind of supreme being—then we could conclude that all possible things have a real “affinity” among themselves. Though the suggestion involved in the supposition is, of course, an extraordinary one, the notion of affinity in the consequent is simply our everyday notion, not any of the philosophical ones so far in question. The consequent itself is, of course, in a way extraordinary. But this is only because of the extraordinary character of the reason offered on behalf of a possible “affinity” among things in the first place. There seems to be nothing special in the latter notion as such. The passage at A657/B685 is rather different. This is not only because it attaches a special meaning to the term in question (namely, to designate a certain sort of continuity among possible species), but more importantly because it regards affinity as the counterpart of a perfectly legitimate, and even in some sense necessary, demand of transcendental reason. In this respect, it relates more closely to Kant’s concerns in the Critique of Judgment.
13. Günter Wohlfart, “Zum Problem der transcendentalen Affinitat in der Philosophic Kants,” in Akten des 5. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1981), 1.1, p. 314. Though he regards both of the passages discussed in the preceding note as relevant, Wohlfart regards only the second as decisive with respect to his identification of the problems of affinity in the first and in the third Critique (p. 316).
14. Wohlfart observes (and cites other authorities: p. 318, n. 30) that the treatment of affinity in Section IV of the “First Introduction” “is as it were the link between the treatment of affinity and the Deduction of the Ideas in the Dialectic of Pure Reason and the Deduction of Purposiveness” in Section V of the (“second”) Introduction to the third Critique. In a sense, I do not disagree. But Kant points out in the following section that he has so far only been considering a conceived) gedachte) harmony or purposiveness in nature. Then he turns, in Section VI, to what seems to me more centrally at issue in this context, namely, to the case of our actual ability to perceive any kind of purposiveness in nature. (Cf. the transition from Section VI to Section VII in the “First Introduction.”) Wohlfart himself considers aesthetic judgment as central to any discussion of affinity in Kant (pp. 321-22). I presume that our difference on this must stem from a difference regarding the nature of aesthetic “judgments” in the first place.
15. Critique of Judgment, §5 (5.209); cf. Introduction, Section VII, passim. (The provision of references to Kant’s relatively brief sections should be sufficient to facilitate consultation of the available translations.)
16. “First Introduction,” Sections VII-VIII (20.221, 224); CJ, Introduction, Section VII (5.190) and §39 (5.292).
17. Cf. CJ, Introduction, Sections VII-VIII (5.189, 192).
18. “First Introduction,” Section VIII (20.224); CJ, Introduction, Section VII (5.190), §9 (5.217).
19. Cf. CJ, Introduction, Section VII (5.189): “Hence the object is called purposive only in virtue of the fact that its representation is immediately connected with the feeling of pleasure; and this representation itself is [emphasis added] a representation of the purposiveness.”
20. “A New Look at Kant’s Aesthetic Judgments,” in Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics, ed. Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 87-114.
21. Cf. the passage quoted, in note 19, from CJ, Introduction, Section VII (5.189). In that same section, Kant also speaks of judging durch the feeling of pleasure (5.190), and of the latter gleich als oh it was a predicate combined with the object itself (5.191). And he plainly speaks of the pleasure itself as the very aesthetic judgment (dieses Urteil: 5.191). Cf. “First Introduction,” Section VIII, 20.228 (the representation of subjective purposiveness in an object is, in aesthetic apprehension, so gar einerley with the feeling of pleasure it contains) and 20.230 (the concept of formal but subjective purposiveness is mit dem Gefuhle der Lust im Grunde einerley); cf. also Section XII (20.249). At 20.224, Section VIII, Kant speaks of the pleasurable sensation as the Bestimmungsgrund in the judgment. In CJ, §1, he speaks of being conscious of a representation mit the sensation of satisfaction (5.204). This Bernard translates merely as “as connected with the sensation of satisfaction”: Critique of Judgment, tr. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner 1968), p. 38. In §9, Kant says that a contradiction is involved in supposing that the pleasure in question might precede the corresponding judgment (5.216-7). On pleasure as a “predicate,” see also §§36-37 (5.287-8, 289).
22. In “First Introduction,” Section VIII, Kant speaks of the predicate of the judgment both as a sensation and yet also as containing “the subjective conditions of a cognition in general” (20.224). Cf. CJ, §9 (5.219): “The excitement of both faculties (imagination and understanding) is [emphasis added] the sensation whose universal communicability is postulated by the judgment of taste. “
23. “First Introduction,” Section VIII (20.230-1). In the case of distinctively “ethical” feeling, for example, Kant says that the cognitive faculty is not connected with the faculty of desire (to do one’s duty) by means of) vermittelst: Kant’s emphasis) that feeling, since the latter itself would seem to be, as the sensation “of’ the rational determinability of the will, gar kein besonderes Gefühl, over and above the very determination of that faculty. By analogy, one might presume that distinctively aesthetic feeling would be equally one with the corresponding determination of the cognitive faculties in question. Cf. Lewis W. Beck’s discussion of Kant’s notion of pleasure in A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 93. Some kind of identification of pleasure taken in an activity with that activity itself is, of course, a familiar Aristotelian notion. Without explicitly conceding that Kant identifies the two as well, in the particular case of “acts” of apprehension and pleasure in them, Beck himself is uncomfortable with Kant’s own way of putting things. He makes a point of adding, to his formulation of Kant’s claim that pleasure is the “idea” of the self-supporting aspect of certain activities, hence of their “agreement” with the subject’s internal condition, that “it would perhaps be clearer to say that pleasure is the feeling produced by such agreement.”
24. CJ, Introduction, Sections IV-V.
25. “First Introduction,” Section IV (20.209-10).
26. In whatever respect we judge it to be new, we need not in any case accept Buchdal’s claim that it is only with the systematic demands of reflective judgment that we first encounter the demand that particular events in fact be subject to laws. So far as I can see, the textual evidence that Buchdal cites is perfectly compatible with the following reading instead: The first Critique has established that the conceptualization of any intuition necessarily involves the representation of certain courses of experience as necessary, under certain anticipable and retainable conditions, in relation to that intuition. But this still leaves open the question as to what the particular laws are, with respect to which the necessities in question obtain. The latter problem is the one that requires a transcendental principle that had not been enunciated in the earlier work. What is new is not the principle that nature is subject to causal necessities. That was already established by reflection on the problem of conceptualizing particular intuitions. It was established through an analysis of that special mode of consciousness by which an intuition’s imaginatively anticipated and retained content actually comes to serve as material in the conceptualization of that intuition. That is something we have not yet considered. It may, of course, be described, though Kant does not do so, as itself a kind of principle of “reflective judgment,” not merely as a principle of “understanding.” It in any case bears on a different problem from what Kant himself calls the problem of reflective judgment in the third Critique. The latter does not concern the constitution of a particular concept, out of the material possibly available within any particular intuition. Rather, it concerns the constitution of concepts (in the plural) out of the material (actually) available among numerous intuitions. (In this respect, we may then say, only the former is indeed a “constitutive” principle of experience.) Cf. Gerd Buchdal, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1969), esp. pp. 500-505. 516-19, 641-45.
27. To make this point, it might help to distinguish, with a consistency not found in Kant himself, between knowledge in the sense of Erkenntnis, which is Kant’s main concern in the Transcendental Deduction (and which I have tended to translate as “cognition”), and knowledge in the sense of Wissen. It seems clear, though, that Kant himself often uses the former term for both purposes. Cf. Chapter One, note 5.
28. Cf. CJ, Introduction, Section V (5.183):
We find in the grounds of the possibility of an experience in the very first place something necessary, viz. the universal laws without which nature in general (as an object of sense) cannot be thought; and these rest upon the categories, applied to the formal conditions of all intuition possible for us, so far as it is also given a priori . . . . But now the objects of empirical cognition are determined in many other ways than by that formal time condition. . . . We must therefore think in nature, in respect of its merely empirical laws, a possibility of infinitely various empirical laws which are, as far as our insight [Einsicht: emphasis added] goes, contingent. . . . (Bernard translation, pp. 19-20)
It is precisely the problem of dealing with the latter, in turn, that requires postulation of the transcendental principle of judgment. Cf., similarly, “First Introduction,” Section V (20.212, note):
To be sure pure understanding (and indeed through synthetic principles) teaches us to think [denken: emphasis added] of all things of nature as contained in a transcendental system according to concepts a priori (the categories); but the faculty of (reflective) judgment, that also [emphasis added] seeks concepts for empirical representations as such, must assume beyond this for its own purpose that nature, in its boundless manifold, has hit upon such a division of the latter into genera and species that it makes it possible for our judgment to achieve insight [Einhelligkeit: emphasis added] in the comparison of natural forms and to arrive at empirical concepts and their mutual interconnection, by means of rising to ever more universal, though still empirical concepts; that is, judgment also [emphasis added] presupposes a system in accordance with empirical laws, and this a priori, consequently through a transcendental principle.
Chapter Five: The Second-Edition Deduction
1. Obviously, categorial synthesis provides the general form of one’s “consciousness” of appearances, in the sense that it provides the general form of any (non-categorial) conceptualization of appearances. Nobody denies that. To anticipate, the point is simply to argue that noncategorial concepts, hence the conceptualization of appearances, are themselves constituted by an irreducible consciousness of synthesis in the first place. So the latter, in its role as what constitutes concepts, cannot itself be understood in terms of application of concepts to appearances.
2. Cf. Hans Wagner, “Der Argumentationsgang in Kants Deduktion der Kategorien,” Kant-Studien, 71 (1980), 361; Viktor Nowotny, “Die Struktur der Deduktion bei Kant,” Kant-Studien, 72 (1981), 275-76; Bernhard Thole, “Die Beweisstruktur der transzendentalen Deduktion in der zweiten Auflage der ‘Kritik der reinen Vernunft’,” Akten des 5. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, ed. Gerhard Funke et al. (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1981), pp. 309-11; Henry Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 161ff.
3. Nowotny (p. 278) holds that the issue could not possibly be resolved apart from the schematism chapter; cf. Thole (p. 310). Pippin emphasizes the connection with the problem of schematism as well: Robert B. Pippin, Kant’s Theory of Form (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 182. He eventually concludes (pp. 226-28) that the problem is insoluble apart from an undermining of Kant’s own rigid distinction between sensibility and understanding. Allison (pp. 167ff) also judges the second stage a failure, on account of Kant’s inability to make the transition from a mere synthesis in our apprehension of things to conditions that are applicable to objects themselves.
4. Thöle (p. 309) emphasizes Kant’s claim, at B147, that the objects we are given in space and time are themselves perceptions. Allison (p. 167) only concedes as a premise that objects in the order of spatiotemporal apprehension are “modifications of inner sense.” That premise, in his view, is simply insufficient to carry Kant’s conclusions into the order of ordinary objects of experience. Wagner’s formulations seem to remain neutral as between the two orders. He speaks alternately of the need for a unity in space and time themselves and in our perceptions of space (p. 361). He does not indicate what sort of manifold, in either case, that unity is to be presumed relative to.
5. Cf. Gerold Prauss, Erscheinung bei Kant (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971) and Kant und das Problem der Dinge an sich (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann). In the latter (p. 100), Prauss postulates a conceptual Vorleistung responsible for the promotion of Anschauung to the level of truly “judgmental” Deutbarkeit. But he seems to equate Anschauung with Empfindung (cf. pp. 63ff, 210). My own account is otherwise similar to Prauss’s, insofar as the relevant Vorleistung is non-judgmental. But I would not want to call it “conceptual” either. Hoke Robinson, in “Anschauung und Mannigfaltiges in der Transzendentalen Deduktion,” Kant-Studien, 72 (1981), 140-48, speaks instead of the transformation of Proto-Anschauung into Anschauung, by means of the forms of judgment (p. 146), but it is unclear how the transformandum relates to Kantian Empfindung. In any case, his demand for something sub-intuitional rests on the fact that intuition is already—because essentially einzeln—“unified.” In my own view, the intrinsic Einzelnheit of intuitions is simply that aspect by virtue of which the “application” of concepts to them gives those concepts “directedness” in the sense explicated in Chapter One. Whatever sort of “unity” this requires is not what concerns us now. What concerns us now is a unity involved in the constitution of concepts themselves.
6. It should be clear that the manifold in question could be regarded as “unorganized” only with respect to the sort of unity that intellect provides. As a set of imaginative associations on the part of a normally functioning being, the manifold may be presumed organized at least according to whatever structures are in fact operative among anticipations and retentions as such (that is, on a level below the sort of conceptualization that Kant himself regards as distinctively human).
7. Allison, p. 165.
8. For this way of formulating the issue in Leibniz, see Representational Mind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), pp. 18ff.
9. Kemp Smith attributes much of the confusion to Kant’s tendency to waver between conceptualization as predication, or concept-“application,” or “subsumption” under concepts, and conceptualization as involving a more literal imposition of some kind of form. Kant regards the categories in the latter way, but only occasionally does he seem so to regard concepts in general—for example, when he identifies them with what would otherwise be their mere schemata: Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (New York: Humanities Press, 1962; reprint of 2nd edition of 1923), pp. 335-38. As I see it, the source of confusion is more often Kant’s tendency to equate the “noetic” and “noematic” perspectives. Kemp Smith simply leaves all questions in terms of the ambiguous imposition of form on “intuitions.” Perhaps much of the unclarity in his own approach stems from a consequent failure to distinguish between views of concepts that do away with their predicative status altogether and those that attempt to account for that status in terms of the internal structure of cognitive states. In contrast to both approaches, Paton regards all talk about the imposition of form, outside of the Aesthetic itself, as out of order from the start: “Nor is the problem solved by saying that the category is the form and the intuition the matter, and that these have no existence apart from one another. The forms of intuition are space and time, and the categories are forms, not of intuition, but of thought” (H. J. Paton, Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience [London: George Allen and Unwin, 1936], II, p. 27). In any event, for Paton all concepts including the categories are “predicable” (p. 25).
10. Paton insists that, despite apparent assertions to the contrary, imagination consistently functions as an essential “element in” every empirical synthesis (II, pp. 397, 403nl, 413-14). But what that appears to come to is simply that a concept is always “a concept both of the object and of [emphasis added] the particular synthesis through which ideas successively given are combined in the object” (p. 402). Kemp Smith attributes the ambiguity to yet another tension in Kant, namely, to that between two forms of idealism. On the “subjectivisitic” variant, imagination is understanding operating as a faculty of individual subjects, upon those subjects’ mental states (p. 227); on the “phenomenalistic” variant, it is—or at least “productive” imagination is—responsible for the working up of noumenal sensations, on a preconscious, hence pre-individual, level, into the appearances upon which an individual’s faculties will then first be able to operate (pp. 264-70, 274).
11. Kant adds the following note:
Whether the representations are in themselves identical, and whether, therefore, one can be analytically thought through the other, is not a question that here arises. The consciousness of the one, when the manifold is under consideration, has always to be distinguished from the consciousness of the other. . . . (B131n)
Kant should not be taken as suggesting that the concepts of synthesis and of unity of synthesis might after all be a single concept. Given his approach to the identity of concepts, in terms of identity of “consciousness” (A7/B11), that would of course be impossible. What Kant is suggesting is possible, despite the non-identity of the concepts of synthesis and of unity of synthesis, must rather be that the concepts may be correlative in a certain way: just as one considers the relevant “unity” only in relation to a certain kind of synthesis, one considers a synthesis qua synthesis only in relation to a corresponding unity of it. This may imply, but only in an uninteresting sense, that the synthesis is itself intellectual.
12. “[W]ir erkennen den Gegenstand, wenn wir in dem Mannigfaltigen der Anschauung synthethische Einheit bewirkt [n.b.] haben” (A105).
13. In Reflexionenen zur Logik, 1790 (16.116), Kant even refers to Erscheinung as “eine wirkliche Handlung der Erkenntniskraft . . . die auf das obiect geht”; sensation, by contrast, is a mere “theil vom eignen Zustande des Subiekts.”
14. Cf. A79/B104: “The concepts which give unity [Kant’s emphasis] to this pure synthesis”; A94: “. . . (2) the synthesis of this manifold through imagination; finally (3) the unity of this synthesis through original apperception [Kant’s emphases]”; A118: “This synthetic unity presupposes or includes [schliesst sie ein] a synthesis”; A130: “The synthesis of the manifold through pure imagination, the unity of all representations in relation to original apperception, precede [n.b. : Kant’s plural] all empirical cognition”; A155/B194: “The synthesis of representations rests on imagination; and their synthetic unity, which is required for judgment, on the unity of apperception”; A158/B197: “. . . the formal conditions of a priori intuition, the synthesis of imagination, and the necessary unity of the latter in a transcendental apperception”; cf. also A115-6.
15. Obviously, I take “analytic unity of consciousness,” in this passage, to be the sort of unity that a concept, as a Merkmal or as representative of one, confers upon a manifold of intuitions of which it is predicable. The passage may be read differently. For example, Allison (pp. 143-44) takes analytic unity to be the unity of Merkmale within concepts themselves (or in judgments). Manfred Baum rejects this reading and adopts one similar to my own: Deduktion und Beweis in Kants Transzendentalphilosophie (Königstein/Ts.: Athenöum Verlag, 1986), pp. 22-23, 99-100. On the other hand, as I observed in a note to Chapter Three, Baum and Allison agree that the formation of any empirical concept involves the conversion of intuitional representations into the very Merkmale that are contained in it.
16. The general point applies whether Merkmale are regarded as (possible) “marks” of objects or as representations of possible marks. Kant himself is often ambiguous as between the two: “Every concept, as a partial concept, is contained in the representation of things as the ground of their cognition, that is, these things are contained under it as a Merkmal”) Logik, I, §7 [9-95]).
17. This notion of “expression” must of course be a special one. As suggested in Chapter Two, we may relate it to Croce’s claim that all intuitions are expressive acts, hence in their own nature “linguistic.”
18. Parenthetical references to the Prolegomena are to the fourth volume of the Akademie-Ausgabe. I utilize, with modification, Lewis White Beck’s revision of the Carus translation (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950). Beck’s pages also carry the Akademie pagination.
19. Beck points out that while the Prolegomena (p. 299n) says that “The room is warm” could never become a judgment of experience, the Logik (§40) classifies “The stone is warm” as just such a judgment: “Did the Sage of Konigsberg Have No Dreams?” in Essays on Kant and Hume (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 52n. For a recent discussion of Kant on primary and secondary qualities, see Margaret D. Wilson, “The ‘Phenomenalisms’ of Berkeley and Kant,” and (in reply to Wilson) Elizabeth Potter, “Kant’s Scientific Rationalism,” in Allen W. Wood, ed., Self and Nature in Kant’s Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 157-73 and 174-84, respectively.
20. Allison suggests (p. 152) one possible reading of this: “By such a judgment, Kant means perceptual awareness itself, not a reflective judgment about this awareness” (as Allison takes it to be: p. 150). On such a reading, Allison holds, the perceptions in question would be “modes of consciousness with their own peculiar ‘subjective objects’ (appearances).” Depending on how this was taken, it might or might not accord with my own approach. As he indicates (p. 152n47), such a view is defended by Prauss, with the exception that Prauss regards such judgments as judgments of “inner sense”: Gerold Prauss, Erscheinung bei Kant (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971), pp. 150ff. Both Prauss and Allison object, against Kant, that judgments of perception must in any case contain categories.
21. According to Beck (p. 53), judgments of perception are judgments about either associations of ideas or particular subjective episodes. He also cites Prauss, pp. 120, 215-16, 137, 145. (As I indicated in the preceding note, Allison shares the view.)
22. Allison considers this suggestion in regard to Kant’s distinction between subjective and objective unity in §§18-19 of the Critique, a distinction that can in fact “be seen as a reversion to the standpoint of the Prolegomena” (p. 156). His objection (pp. 157-58) is twofold: Kant’s suggestion that such associations might then become objective judgments in their own right is confused; equally confused is his illustration (B142) of a would-be subjective unity by reference to what is already an objective judgment, namely, a judgment about some particular association (“If I support a body, I feel an impression of weight”). I return to the Critique itself shortly.
23. Cf. A765/B793: Regarding a priori principles, Hume “concluded that they are [emphasis added] nothing but a custom-bred habit.” The imaginative faculty that generates such habits is merely “imitative” (A766-7/B794-5).
24. Beck, p. 58.
25. Ibid., p. 60.
26. Dieter Henrich, “The Proof-Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction,” Review of Metaphysics, 22 (1969), pp. 647-48.
27. Wagner, p. 358: Kant’s use of insofern in §20 is not restrictive at all, but merely indicates the respect in which the categories are necessary for sensible intuitions generally. Cf. Robinson, p. 142; Nowotny, p. 272; Thole, p. 306. Eckart Forster makes the same point, in his review of Allison’s book (Journal of Philosophy, 82 [1985], 734-38). As Forster points out (a) B144n (to §21) says that the ground of the first stage of proof consists in “the represented unity of intuition [my emphasis] by which an object [ein Gegenstönd] is given”; (b) in addition to several passages that indicate that the unity in question in the first stage is necessary for “the relation of representations to an object [Gegenstand], and therefore their objective validity” (B137), Kant makes it clear that the object (at this point, the Objekt) to which reference is thereby constituted is already “a determinate space” (B138); (c) §26 says that the first stage already demonstrates the applicability of the categories “as cognitions a priori of objects [Gegenstande] of an intuition in general.” Regarding (c), one might, of course, try to enforce a distinction between a demonstration of applicaMifi/ (that is, of the mere possibility of application) and a demonstration that the categories actually do apply to objects.
28. Cf. Wagner, p. 356. As Wagner notes, the point is also made by Raymond Brouillet, “Dieter Henrich et ‘The Proof-Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction’” Dialogue, 14 (1975), 639-48.
29. Henrich, p. 653.
30. Ibid., p. 649.
31. Cf. Robinson, pp. 144-46; Nowotny, p. 275.
32. It is a difference with respect to the question of the unity of space and time that may constitute the main difference between my own approach and Baum’s. For Baum, the Deduction’s second stage is defined by the need for a synthesis, below the level of judgmental forming but necessarily in conformity with it, that is constitutive of the unity of space and time as such, not simply of appearances as objects of possible intuition (pp. 12ff, 80-81, 109ff, 153ff). Regarding the first stage, if I understand him, I agree with Baum that the point is to prove the applicability of the categories to appearances, in abstraction from the question of the latter’s ingredience in a real world of nature. Where I differ is over his view that, only with removal of that abstraction, do we see the need for a synthesis applicable to space and time themselves. Removing the abstraction in the second stage, we will simply have moved from space and time, and any appearances in them, as correlates of sensible apprehension as such, to the actual space and time of the natural world, and the objects in it. Both stages require a synthesis generative of spatiotemporal unity.
33. Allison, though judging the second stage a failure, offers what is probably the most elaborate form of this reading. Thole’s approach is similar, in that he takes the distinction of stages to rest on the distinction between Denken and Erkennen (p. 307). He describes objects as the intuitive “correlates” of the otherwise purely logical forms of Verbindung (p. 309). On the other hand, he also criticizes the suggestion that the argument was not already concerned with spatiotemporal representation in its first stage. It might be that Thole’s is ambiguous as between a position like my own and one like Allison’s.
34. Cf. Nowotny, pp. 274-75—although he also describes the first stage as involving purely formale Denkeinheiten and a purely formal notion of synthesis (p. 276). In any case, he sees the needed completion, involving application to objects, as calling for a doctrine of “schematism” (p. 278). Wagner (p. 365n, in criticism of Brouillet) rejects the approach, on the ground that the need for unity in spatiotemporal representation had already been in question prior to §26. The objection, of course, applies against Allison’s approach as well. According to Wagner’s approach, the crucial move is from sensible intuition to Wahrnehmung in particular (pp. 360-61), but I have not been able to get clear what that move is supposed to involve. If I understand him, Robinson (p. 146) takes the transition from a general determination of conditions of experience to the specifically human case simply to rest on unseren tatsöchlichen Besitz von Erfahrungserkenntnis. On the other hand, his account is comparable to my own, insofar as it rests, even in its first stage, on the need for unification of a manifold within any single intuition, not simply of a manifold of distinct or distinguishable intuitions (p. 142). As for the question of the Deduction’s incompleteness, Kant himself seems to say that the second-edition Deduction provides a sufficient explanation as to “how” the categories apply to objects, in terms of the account of judgment offered in §19: Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science, tr. James Ellington (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), Preface, note, pp. 13-14n (4.475-6).
35. Cf. Thole (p. 307).
36. Cf. Chapter Three, note 16.
37. It may be useful to compare the analysis to follow with some aspects of Baum’s approach, in particular with his approach to the Deduction’s first two sections (§§15-16). Baum has argued, for example, that §15 already makes two things evident. First, it makes it evident that Kant’s overall argument is meant to consist in the uncovering of a single factor capable of resolving both of the questions that require the Deduction’s distinction into two stages in the first place. Second, it makes it evident that the role of this factor is prior to any problem concerning the “ascribability” of representations to subjects of consciousness. The latter problem does not arise until §16. The following analysis should show that I agree with Baum on both of these points and with his assessment of their importance, if not with the details of his account. See Baum, pp. 82ff. For my differences with Baum, see notes 15, 32, 37, above.
38. This formulation should indicate why, though I have continued to use the term, it may be misleading. What is represented, in regard to the past, is not intuitions formerly apprehended and now “retained.” It is rather intuitions that one might have apprehended, and out of which the present intuition might in turn have evolved. I shall have much more to say about this issue in the next chapter.
39. For a defense of taking Kant at his word, see Baum, p. 84. Kemp Smith follows Mellin’s substitution of “empirical or non-empirical’’ for Kant’s sinnlichen oder nicht sinnlichen.
40. As I have indicated (Chapter Three, note 16), both Baum and Allison take the notion seriously in their readings. But they take too seriously the suggestion that what this involves, in turn, is the conversion of sensible impressions into Merkmale.
41. Cf. Allison, p. 158.
42. Reflexionen zur Logik, 3145 (16.678-9). Cf. A95: Apart from “elements of a possible experience,” we are left merely with the “logical form for [zu] [my emphasis] a concept, not the concept itself through which something is thought.” See Chapter Three, Section II, for further references regarding the transformation of representations into concepts. Kant himself, I would note, applies the matter/form distinction ambiguously in relation to concepts. It is a notion entirely different from the one that concerns us here, when Kant says that “the matter of concepts is the object, their form universality”) Logik, I, §2 [9.92]).
43. Metaphysical First Principles, Preface, pp. 12-13, note (4.474-5). Cf. B288: “the categories are not in themselves cognitions, but are merely forms of thought for the making of cognitions out of given intuitions.” On the categories as forms “converted” into concepts in their own right, see also B143, A321/B378. On the categories as forms for (the formation of?) concepts, A147/B187: “The categories, therefore, without schemata, are merely functions of the understanding for concepts [zu Begriffen].” Also Reflexionen zur Metaphysik, 5932 (18.391): “This unity of consciousness (of the connection of our representations is as much in us a priori as the foundation of all concepts, as the form of appearance is as the foundation of intuitions.”
Chapter Six: Self-Consciousness
1. One might note that Kant speaks of operations in concepts, not merely of operations among or connecting them. (Cf. B143: “[T]hat act of understanding by which the manifold of given representations (be they intuitions or concepts) is brought under one apperception, is the logical function of judgment.”)
2. We need to recall that it is not a question of temporal priority; it is not that the material in question must actually be in an intuition before the act of conceptualizing it, although it might be, or a significant portion of it might be.
3. Reflexionen zur Metaphysik, 5932 (18.391).
4. Logik, I, §17 (9.101; emphasis added).
5. Cf. Logik, §§5-6 (9.93-4). If what is in question is, as Kant seems to claim, a matter of “abstracting” from certain Merkmale, so as to bring others more clearly to a unity of consciousness, then it is difficult to see how this could be done prior to an already operative work of conceptualization. But we may suppose that Kant has at least vaguely in mind a different process, whereby a subject “abstracts” from certain of its own anticipations and retentions, ingredient in intuition, so as to bring others to a special sort of unity of consciousness—thereby first constituting any apprehension of Merkmale. (Cf. Reflexionen zur Logik, 3057 [16.634]: “Eine Vorstellung, die durch das Bewusstsein als Merkmals allgemein wird, heisst (klarer) Begriff.” Adickes takes the emphasized portion to mean: “through the fact that one has become conscious of one’s own representation as of a Merkmal.” But we might simply take Kant to be saying that “A (clear) concept is a representation that, through consciousness, becomes general—as the consciousness of a Merkmal.”) We might in any case note that Kant emphasizes, as conditions of abstraction, both “comparison” of and “reflection” upon one’s own representations, and that at least the former he concedes to be within the capacity of animals: Logik, “Introduction,” VIII (9.64). We might also recall the connection between “comparison,” in Kant’s terminology, and Humean association.
6. Logik, Introduction, V (9.33). Jasche seems to have drawn the material for this passage from the Politz set of Kant’s lecture notes, dating possibly from 1789 or 1790 (24pt2.510). But the same point is to be found in the Dohna-Wundlacken (24pt2-701) and the Wiener versions.
7. Cf. Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science, tr. James Ellington (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), Chapter III, Proposition 2, “Observation,” p. 103 (4.543): “Das Bewusstsein, mithin die Klarheit der Vorstellungen meiner Seele. . . .” (However, Ellington’s translation somewhat obscures the equivalence in question.)
8. For a consideration of various attempts to read Kant along such lines, see Paul Guyer, “Kant’s Tactics in the Transcendental Deduction,” Philosophical Topics, 12 (1981), 157-99. See also “Kant on Apperception and A Priori Synthesis,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 17 (1980), 205-12, and “Kant’s Intentions in the Refutation of Idealism,” Philosophical Review, 92 (1983), 329-83.
9. C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), Chapter 8.
10. On Pope, see OED entry 6c under conscious: “Some o’er her lap their careful plumes display d/Trembling, and conscious of the rich brocade” (Rape of the Lock, 3.116). Earlier—and no less ambiguous—candidates seem to me to be Dryden’s reference to “hunted Castors, conscious of their store” in Annus Mirabilis, line 97 (1667), and the following from All For Love, IV, 1 (1677): “You are of Cleopatra’s private counsel,/Of her bed-counsel, her lascivious hours;/Are conscious of each nightly change she makes,/And watch her, as Chaldeans do the moon. . . .” Incidentally, Dryden also seems to be slighted with respect to entry 6d, regarding usage with a subordinate clause. The OED lists the phrase “conscious he did see it” from Burthogge (1694). But consider The Hind and the Panther, Part 2.1, line 1068 (1687): “But strive t’evade [promises], and fear to find ‘em true,/As conscious they were never meant to you.”
11. Nathan Bailey, Dictionarum Brittanicum (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1969; reprint of edition of 1730).
12. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (New York: AMS Press, 1967; reprint of edition of 1755).
13. Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), Essay I, Chapter 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1969), p. 10. (A passage added to the third [1734] edition of Berkeley’s Third Dialogue speaks, in order to deny it on philosophical—not linguistic—grounds, of the consciousness of the existence or essence of matter.)
14. Dictionnaire de l’Academie Française, 8th ed. (1932).
15. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett, “Notes” to Leibniz’s New Essays on Human Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. xxxvi.
16. Trésor de la Langue Française (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1977).
17. This very common approach to consciousness is espoused, for example, by D. M. Armstrong in A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), pp. 323ff.)
18. Gertrud Jung, “Suneidesis, Conscientia, Bewusstsein,” Archiv fur die gesamte Psychologie, 89 (1933), pp. 535ff. Cf. Hans Amrhein, “Kant’s Lehre vom ‘Bewusstsein überhaupt,’” Kantstudien Ergänzungshefte, 10 (Würzburg: jal-reprint, 1973; reprint of edition of 1909), p. 6.
19. A120: perception is appearances “combined with consciousness”; A190: insofar as, being mere representations, they are inseparable from the apprehension of them, appearances are Gegenstände des Bewusstseins ; A371: outer Gegenstände are “nothing but representations, the immediate perception (consciousness) of which is at the same time a sufficient proof of their reality”; A404: the Fourth Paralogism wrongly concludes that the soul’s consciousness “is not the consciousness of many things [mehrerer Dinge] outside of it, but of the existence of itself only, and of other things merely as its representations.”
20. Logik, Introduction, V (9.34); cf. Politz (24pt2-510), Dohna-Wundlacken (24pt2.702). Cf. also Blomberg’s reference to the consciousness of “objects” or “things” durch Bewusstsein (24pt1-410); Philippi speaks of becoming conscious of the material contained in an Objekt (24Pt1.341), and of such facts as that a perceived object is a group of stars (24pt 1.410).
21. Cf. Patricia Kitcher, “Kant’s Real Self,” in Self and Nature in Kant’s Philosophy, ed. Allen Wood (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 140: “ . . . to be self-conscious, for Kant, is to attribute mental states to one’s (thinking) self. . . . Thus, Kant would understand the doctrine that consciousness requires self-consciousness as maintaining that any being which makes judgments about its own mental states must be able to attribute those states to its own thinking self.” Cf. Patricia Kitcher, “Kant on Self-Identity,” Philosophical Review, XCI (1982), 41-72. Also, Graham Bird, Kant’s Theory of Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 137-38: “His argument is, then, that just as such categorial rules are required for objective discriminations in general, so this same condition holds for our discrimination of persons.” Cf. also Guyer, op. cit.; Jonathan Bennett, Kant’s Analytic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 113ff. For a criticism of Guyer’s general approach, with a focus on “Kant on Apperception . . . ,” see Karl Ameriks, “Kant and Guyer on Apperception,” Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie, 65 (1983), 175-86. Ameriks opposes Guyer’s view that the capacity for mere representation demands unity of apperception; what demands it is rather the capacity for a relatively low-level “awareness” of one’s representations. So far as I can tell, Ameriks does not say how the latter in turn relates to one’s capacity for the “self-ascription” of representations, though he does explicitly distinguish it from the “reflexive” ascription of representations that provide “objective knowledge” (pp. 183-84).
22. Cf. Jay F. Rosenberg, “‘I Think’: Some Reflections on Kant’s Paralogisms,” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, X (1986), p. 524-25: “[T]he logical function of ascribing many thoughts to one subject is distinct from the logical function of attributing many properties to one object. . . . The ‘I’ which is the subject of experiences (E-subject) is not, as such, a subject of predicates (P-subject). Despite the formal parallelism of the one-versus-many pattern, the way in which one ‘I’ “collects” many thoughts or experiences (“its” thoughts and experiences, those which it “has”) is nevertheless functionally, and thus logically, radically different from the way in which one object “collects” many properties. . . .” As should soon become clearer, I also share Rosenberg’s view concerning the comparison of Kant and Sartre. See p. 516, and also Rosenberg’s “Apperception and Sartre’s ‘Pre-Reflective Cogito,’” American Philosophical Quarterly, 18 (1981), 255-60. Rosenberg’s views have since been developed in detail in The Thinking Self (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986). The approach is “functionalistic” to an extent that I am not inclined to follow, although Rosenberg combines it with a version of (“logical”) phenomenology that allows him to elaborate the functionalist perspective in a manner that far surpasses the more usual nods in that direction.
23. Cf. Bennett, pp. 113ff.
24. Logik Dohna-Wundlacken) 24pt2.702).
25. In the Critique, see A320/B376. Cf. Letter to Herz, 26 May, 1789 (11.520): “[Apart from categories, representations] . . . would still (I imagine myself to be an animal) carry on their play in an orderly fashion . . . in me, though I am unconscious of my existence (granting that I would still be conscious of every single representation, but not of their relation to the unity of representation of their object, by means of the synthetic unity of apperception) . . . without in the least cognizing anything thereby, not even this condition of myself’; Reflexionen zur Anthropologic, 206 (15.79): “Consciousness makes nothing intellectual, rather it presents things [bietet es das Ding] to the understanding.” Cf. also Anthropologie, §1 (7.127-8), and Reflexionen zur Anthropologic, 212 (15.81). In the Logik (Introduction, VIII [9.64-5])—and the same point, or variation upon it, is to be found throughout Kant’s reflections and lectures on logic—Kant distinguishes a mere level (Grad) of representation mit Bewusstsein, available to mere animals, from the level of true cognition (Erkennen). In this context, Kant even grants animals the capacity to “compare” the representations of which they are conscious; what he denies them is the capacity to do so mit Bewusstsein.
26. An interesting article by Mark Kulstad (“Leibniz on Consciousness and Reflection,” Spindel Conference 1982, Southern Journal of Philosophy, XXI [1983], 39-66) makes it clear how unclear Leibniz had been, regarding the sense in which the transition from unconscious to conscious perception might involve a special mode of “apperception” of the objects of perception, or rather only of one’s own original perceptual state (or perhaps both in a sense, but with the former in effect reducible to the latter).
27. Reflexionen zur Metaphysik, 5654 (18.313).
28. Cf. Hector-Neri Castaneda, “He: A Study in the Logic of Self-Consciousness,” Ratio, 8 (1966), 130-57; “On the Phenomeno-Logic of the I,” Akten des XIV. Internationalen Kongresses fur Philosophie (1968), 260-66.
29. The term may, of course, be misleading; but cf. B426-7, B157, B157n, B277. Marta Ujvari (“Personal Identity Reconsidered,” Kant-Studien, 75 [1984], 328-39) argues, in criticism of an earlier paper of mine, that it makes no sense to identify the “self’ of “indeterminate” self-consciousness with any individual. It is merely a kind of function or form. The threefold distinction that I make below allows me to grant this, but only with respect to one of the two senses in which self-consciousness might be supposed to be “indeterminate.” I would also note how my own approach differs from Strawson’s, with which Ujvari associates mine in her article. Strawson’s attempt is to show that certain modes of awareness of objects are necessary for forming the concept of a subject of experience in general. My own is to show their necessity as a condition for something both more and less “determinate” than this: less, in that the self-consciousness of which such object-consciousness is to be a condition is not, as such, conceptual at all; more, in that it is a mode of self-consciousness that is nonetheless sufficiently rich to provide “material” for the formation of a determinate self-concept. Cf. P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen and Co., 1966), pp. 93ff. (Regrettably too late for more elaborate comment, I have now also noticed that a similar distinction between transcendental, indeterminate empirical, and determinate empirical self-consciousness is drawn by Wolfgang Becker in Selbstbewusstsein und Erfahrung [Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1984], pp. 184, 238ff.)
30. Cf. Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Humanities Press, 1962; reprint of edition of 1923), pp. 251-52; Robert Paul Wolff, Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 116, 119, 132, 161, 187. H. J. Paton (Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience [London: Allen and Unwin, 1936]) appears to interpret the argument this way at times (I, pp. 512-13); other times, to rest it more directly on the claim that self-consciousness requires distinguishing oneself from other things (pp. 398n6, 405, 464, 548).
31. Kant would presumably only be specifying the relations held necessarily to obtain among the objects of representations supposed ascribable to oneself. These, of course, at most correlate with the relevant relations among those representations themselves.
32. Reflexionen zur Metaphysik, 6315 (18.619-20); cf. 5461 and 6317. Kant also argues (5621, 6315) that while the soul is not in, or at least cannot perceive its location in, the body, it must nevertheless be where the body is.
33. Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science, Chapter Three, Proposition 2, “Observation” (4.542-3; tr. Ellington, pp. 103-4). this passage, Kant also says that, while the “I” expresses a “thought,” it does not express any concept. Cf. A108, B132, B137, B153.
34. Cf. Reflexionen zur Metaphysik, 6315.
35. Cf. ibid., 5654 (18.313): “One can indeed posit time in oneself, but not posit oneself in time and therein determine oneself, and yet it is in this that empirical self-consciousness consists. . . .”
36. Cf. B422n: While “I exist thinking” is grounded in the apprehension of appearances, the “I” in that proposition “is purely intellectual, because belonging to thought in general.”
37. Cf. Bennett, pp. 107ff.
38. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1943), Introduction, III, and Part Two, Chapter One, Section I.
39. “Concept” is, of course, a vague term. A dog, anticipating the upshot of certain actions of its own, perhaps possesses a “concept” of itself as acting. At least part of my point is simply that what Kant himself regards as “conceptualization” is supposed to be something beyond the capacity of dogs. Presumably, Kant does not deny the latter’s ability to anticipate possible upshots of their actions. The point is then that it is out of such merely “animal” material that Kant regards (empirical) concepts as constituted in the first place.
40. Anthropologic, §§15ff (7. 153ff).
41. Cf. Norton Nelkin, “Pains and Pain Sensations,” Journal of Philosophy, 83 (1986), 129-48; G. Lynn Stephens and George Graham, “Minding Your P’s and Q’s: Pain and Sensible Qualities,” Nous, XXI (1987), 395-405.
42. Through an interesting interplay between ontological and phenomenological reflection, but without the matter/form apparatus as I attempt to employ it, Laird Addis has also defended the idea of pains as intentional objects, namely, as objects of a mode of “direct awareness”: “Pains and Other Secondary Mental Entities,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, XLVII (1986), 59-73. As such, pains are—unless they happen to be, as is (onto-)logically possible, unreal objects (p. 68)—particulars that exemplify “the property that makes [them] a pain” (p. 69). This property is not (onto-)logically connected with one’s attitude of liking or disliking the object, or the feeling, in question (p. 65). However, since Addis apparently allows only one “mode” per instance of awareness (p. 60; but cf. p. 64), I take it that he would not be inclined to recognize a distinct property—exemplifiable by the same particulars that exemplify the property of “painfulness” in the first sense—that would make the objects in question also painful in a second sense, namely, as correlates of a certain mode of disliking.
43. See references included in the articles cited in note 41, above.
44. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, tr. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Noonday Press, 1936), p. 49.
45. I don’t mean to suggest that one is aware of oneself as pained only in such cases; cf. Sartre’s discussion of the consciousness of pain in one’s eyes, as constituted through certain modes of consciousness of a book that one happens to be reading: Being and Nothingness, pp. 436ff.
46. Despite my opposition to Kitcher’s functionalistic reconstruction, I am very much in sympathy with her view that the Deduction should be read, not so much as an argument to establish Kant’s positive position regarding self-consciousness, but as the presentation of a theory of the latter, meant to be more adequate than any other available, and sufficient in turn for a deduction of the categories from it. “Kant’s Real Self,” p. 116: “While Kant offers some explicit argumentation in favor of this claim, the crucial support for it does not come from arguments, but from his improved understanding of mental states.”
47. On oneself as “center of orientation,” cf. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenolgie und Phänomenologischen Philosophie: Zweites Buch, ed. Marley Biemel (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), §18, pp. 56-57, 65, and §41. Naturally, I am also very much insympathy with the following statement by Rosenberg, “‘I Think: Some Reflections . . . p. 528: “What is needed [for transcendental self-consciousness] is not some unique and mysterious form of nonempirical or nonintentional consciousness but a proper appreciation of the global structures of our ordinary empirical awareness and the diverse modes of our actual intentional representations, an appreciation of the sort of ‘unity of consciousness’ which is ours.”
48. Cf. Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 54ff.
49. This approach has some similarities to G. E. M. Anscombe’s in “The First Person,” in Mind and Language, ed. Samuel Guttenplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), but also an advantage over it. Anscombe gives as the sense of “I am this thing here”: “This thing here is the thing . . . of whose action this idea of action . . . of whose movements these ideas of movement . . . of whose posture this idea of posture . . . [a]nd also, of which these intended actions, if carried out, will be the actions” (p. 61). We agree on the centrality of “ideas” of such things as movements, posture, and actions in particular, as opposed to accounts that define the I, from occasion to occasion, as the subject of this or that experience (supposedly picked out on each occasion), regardless of its content. But Anscombe is subject to the objection that individuation of “ideas,” at least as mental occurrences, is parasitical upon individuating the subject: Anthony Kenny “The First Person,” in Intention and Intentionality: Essays in Honor of G. E. M. Anscombe, ed. Cora Diamond and Jenny Teichman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 3-13. On the suggested alternative, the “ideas” in question are simply one’s own (anticipated or retained) movements, postures, and actions themselves, insofar as these are reflected in the appearances that are the objects of the corresponding mental occurrences.
50. Reflexionen zur Metaphysik, 6354 (18.680).
51. I have a bit to say on the matter in Representational Mind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), pp. 180-81.
52. Cf. B151: “Imagination is the faculty of representing in intuition an object that is not itself present”; Logik Dohna-Wundlacken (24pt2.701-2):
Die Sinnlichkeit enthalt zwei Vermogen, den Sinn und die Einbildungskraft [dies ist die Zauberkraft des menschlichen Geistes] oder das Anschauungsvermogen eines Gegenstandes, sofern er nicht da ist, der Sinn aber das, sofern der Gegenstand da ist.
53. Cf. A123: “[Productive imagination] . . . aims at nothing but necessary unity in the synthesis . . .”; B151: “[Figurative synthesis] . . . directed merely to the original synthetic unity. . . .”
Chapter Seven: Toward the Categories
1. An interesting discussion of the categories of quantity and quality, that also seems to me to have some affinity with my own approach, is offered by Gordon Nagel in The Structure of Experience: Kant’s System of Principles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 84ff.
2. Paul Guyer, “Kant’s Tactics in the Transcendental Deduction,” Philosophical Topics, 12 (1981), 157-99.
3. What concerns me, in what follows, is the need to represent possible appearances, not simply “through” given sets of anticipations, but precisely as subsumable under the very concepts that are formed out of anticipations. This, I argue, requires the anticipation of possible appearances as the intentional correlates of (possible) apprehension through suitably modified sets of the original anticipations. It may be that the relevant notion of “suitability” is all that Kant himself intended by way of the essentially normative in conception. But the notion of normativity enters at another point as well. Beyond the requirement that appearances be apprehended through the anticipation of appearances that are in their own turn to be apprehended through suitable modifications of the original anticipations, we also require some sense of the relative) prima facie) reasonableness or unreasonableness of apprehending a given appearance through particular anticipations rather than others in the first place. In the first case, I presume, the criteria of “suitability” are simply part of the very conception of objectivity. No irreducibly “normative” element is really in question. But it may be in question in the second case. In any event, Kant offers no account of whatever sort of normative “consciousness” then needs to be in question.
4. See “Necessity and Irreversibility in the Second Analogy,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 2 (1983), 203-15.
5. Cf. Arthur Melnick, Kant’s Analogies of Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 94ff. Admittedly, Melnick’s reconstruction of the Third Analogy comes validly closer to Kant’s conclusion than I do. On the other hand, in application to the Second Analogy, that same general approach to Kant’s concern with the reversibility of perceptions leads Melnick nowhere close to Kant’s own conclusion that all events are causally determined.
6. Cf. Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (New York: Humanities Press, 1962; reprint of edition of 1923), pp. 387ff. The point, according to Kemp Smith, is simply that judgments of coexistence involve “reference of each existence to the totality of systematic relations within which it is found” (p. 389).
7. If the argument is in fact to be read, as I do not myself read it, with the emphasis on “determination” in the sense of knowing-that, in regard to the occurrence of certain sorts of changes, then I would agree with Henry Allison) Kant’s Transcendental Idealism[New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983], p. 206) that D. P. Dryer’s reconstruction is the most plausible one: Kant’s Solution for Verification in Metaphysics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966), pp. 353ff.
8. Allison (p. 201) calls this stage of the argument the “Backdrop Thesis.” However, while he concedes that it falls short of Kant’s conclusion that phenomenal change is change in the state of an underlying substratum, he seems too easily to grant that, because time is imperceptible, there must at least be something (or things) permanent in appearances, as a perceptible “model” of the imperceptible Backdrop (p. 203). So far as I can see, it is not so easy to get to this apparently weaker thesis without first establishing the stronger one.
9. For a more detailed discussion of temporal stretches, as an object of spatial, not merely of temporal, intuition, see Representational Mind, Chapter Six.
10. It should be clear that a double notion of “determination” must be in question, namely, one that includes both (a) conceptualization of appearances as concrete objects and (b) empirical “determination” (in the sense of knowing-that) of the grounds for actually doing so.
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