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St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe
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An introduction to Duns Scotus's modal argument for the existence of God
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Audio recording of a lecture given on November 13, 2015 by James Carey as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series.
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Duns Scotus, John, ca. 1266-1308.
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English
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Friday night lecture
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Duns Scotus’s Modal Argument for the Existence of God - An Introduction
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Audio recording of a lecture given by tutor James Carey on April 12, 2023 as part of the Dean's Lecture & Concert Series. The Dean's Office has provided this description of the event: "John Duns Scotus (c. 1266 –1308) was a Franciscan friar and theologian so renowned for his logical acumen and ingenuity that he early on acquired the appellation “the subtle doctor.” His argument for the existence of God is not nearly as well-known as are the arguments of Anselm (c. 1033–1109) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), though it is held by some to be the most powerful of them all. Scotus’s argument is “modal” in that it turns on the concepts of possibility, actuality, and necessity. It does not rely on the claims of revelation; and it does not rely on an Aristotelian theory of motion either. Scotus’ argument is complex. And it is long too, occupying in one version, On the First Principle (De Primo Principio), some 70 pages of tight reasoning and concentrated, technical prose. My lecture is only an introduction, and it presupposes no prior familiarity with Scotus. I presented an earlier version of this lecture here in 2015. Some faculty heard it, though few, if any, current students. Sophomores, in particular, might find it of interest."
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2023-04-12
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Duns Scotus, John, approximately 1266-1308
God
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SF_CareyJ_Duns_Scotus_Modal_Argument_for_the_Existence_of_God_2023-04-12
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Speeches, presentations, and other lectures given at St. John's College. These include convocation addresses delivered in both Annapolis, MD and Santa Fe, NM.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Speeches, presentations, and other lectures" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=15">Items in the Speeches, presentations, and other lectures Collection</a></strong> to <span>view and sort all items in the collection.</span>
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Freedom, letters, and leisure : west and east
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Transcript of the Graduate Institute commencement address given on August 15, 2008 by James Carey in Santa Fe, NM.
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2008-08-15
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English
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24003569
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Kant’s Grounding of a Dual Metaphysics1
James Carey – 03 07 2017
1. Metaphysics reinterpreted
Prior to Kant, metaphysics was understood as the enquiry into being, into the different
kinds of beings, and into how these beings are, as distinct from how they merely appear. Kant
redefines metaphysics as a priori synthetic knowledge of objects. It is characterized by
universality and necessity. Metaphysics is not derived from experience, which for him is always
bound up with sensation. And yet metaphysics consists of more than mere definitions and what
can be analytically or logically deduced from them. With this redefinition of metaphysics as a
priori synthetic knowledge of objects there comes a new division.
Metaphysics is divided into that of the speculative and that of the practical
employment of pure reason, and is therefore either metaphysics of nature or
metaphysics of morals.2
Kant grounds this dual metaphysics in the Critique of Pure Reason and in the Critique of
Practical Reason, which attempt to show that we have a priori synthetic knowledge pertaining to
both natural science and morality respectively. And Kant develops this dual metaphysics in the
1
A rewritten and expanded version of a lecture first given at St. John’s College, Santa Fe, in 1994, and again in
2017.
2
Critique of Pure Reason A 841, B 869 (emphasis in the original). Passages from this work are cited according to
the first (A) and second (B) edition, the pagination of which is included in the margins of English translations. When
A and B are both cited, the text appears in both editions, When A alone is cited, the text is found only in the first
edition; and when B alone is cited, the text is found only in the second edition. I have made ample of use of Norman
Kemp Smith’s translation of the Critique of Pure Reason, though altering it with some frequency in the interest of
greater literalness. Unless otherwise noted, translations of passages from other works are my own. Passages quoted
or translated directly from the German text are taken from Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, Hamburg: Felix Meiner
Verlag, 1956. Passages from other texts by Kant are taken from Werke in Zehn Banden (edited by Wilhelm
Weischedel, Darmstadt: Wissenchaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981 – Sonderausgabe), hereafter Werke.
1
�Metaphysical Foundation of Natural Science and the Metaphysics of Morals.3 In what follows I
shall attempt to identify the ultimate ground of Kant’s dual metaphysics.
Kant’s task is to give a solution to the problem of how man can have ends, or telē, while
nonetheless dwelling within nature, which according to modern natural science is devoid of ends.
It is by virtue of his reason that man is oriented toward theoretical and practical ends.
Everything in nature works according to laws. Only a rational being has the
ability to act according to the notion of laws, i.e., according to principles, or a
will.4
Man is not just pushed and pulled through life by irresistible forces, or even instincts. He has
immediate and incontestable awareness of himself as an agent. The evidence we have that we
act, that we do things for the sake of ends, that is, with purposes in mind, and that we are not just
acted upon by other things, is immediate, incontestable, and irrefutable by any theory, scientific
or otherwise. No theory of natural science, however much it may contribute to our understanding
of non-human nature, carries, or could carry, as much evidence in its favor as does our
immediate awareness of acting for the sake of ends. We even think—as distinct from freely
associating—for the sake of an end, minimally for subjective clarity and consistency, maximally
for objective knowledge. And we are aware that we have to make some effort to achieve clarity,
consistency, and knowledge. This effort, which we all experience, is immediate evidence of our
teleological constitution. We can speculate or refrain from speculating about the origin of our
3
The Metaphysics of Morals should not be confused with the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.
Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. Section 2, 412: “Ein jedes Ding der Natur wirkt nach Gesetzen. Nur ein
vernünftiges Wesen hat das Vermögen, nach der Vorstellung der Gesetze d.i. nach Prinzipien zu handeln, oder einen
Willen.” (Emphasis in the original.) Werke, Band 6, 41.
4
2
�teleological constitution, as we wish. But we cannot explain it away.5 Our orientation toward
ends is the genuine “first for us.”
According to Aristotle and his followers, man is at home within a world, within a cosmos
that is itself teleological. Not only plants and animals, but simple bodies at one extreme and stars
at the other, all seem to exhibit teleology, as does the very topology of the cosmos: things have
their proper places, and when displaced from them by force, they return to them by nature.
Enforced motion is virtually defined by Aristotle as motion contrary to nature.6
With the scientific revolution of early modernity, the Aristotelian perspective got
seriously called into question. The distinction between celestial and terrestrial bodies collapsed,
as did the distinction between natural and enforced motion. Modern natural science attempted to
demonstrate that, in the case of inanimate beings, motion can be explained by mechanical or
push-pull, causality alone. And the hope was held open that the motion of animate beings, man
included, could be explained the same way. Natural ends came to be regarded as superfluous
principles. Kant is in general agreement with modern science in its non-teleological account of
non-human human nature. But Kant is in general agreement with Aristotle in his teleological
account of human nature, though the specifics of his account of human nature differ in important
ways from Aristotle’s.
Kant’s metaphysics of nature consists of a body of interrelated a priori synthetic
propositions or judgments. The architectonic propositions pertaining to the metaphysics of nature
are the concern of roughly the first half of the Critique of Pure Reason. I shall focus on only one
5
It is as self-evident as any law of logic that we act for the sake of ends, for pleasure and knowledge among other
things. If modern science cannot make sense of this fact, then modern science needs to restrict the scope of its
claims or revisit its presuppositions, or both.
6
Physics 215a1-4.
3
�of these: “Every event has a cause,” or as Kant also puts it, “All alterations take place in
conformity with the law of the connection of cause and effect.” Kant agrees with Hume that the
proposition, “Every event has a cause,” cannot be strictly inferred from experience. We see an
event, A, followed by another event, B. But we do not see A cause B. We see one event happen
after another, to be sure. We see temporal consecution all the time and in recurring patterns. But
we never see temporal connection, no matter how many times we see B followed by A. The
regularity with which B follows A does not permit us to infer, by any known rule of logic, that A
causes B. (And it is for that reason that we sometimes make mistakes in predicting that B will
follow A.) Moreover, even if we could see in a given case that A causes B, we would not be able
to logically infer, given our spatially and temporally limited experience, that whenever A occurs
again it will cause B again, or even be followed by B. We cannot logically infer even that every
time B occurs it must have a cause, much less that everything that has ever happened, is
happening now, or ever will happen, must have a cause. Such a so-called inference is only an
empirical generalization. It lacks any claim to apodicticity inasmuch as it is always colored by
some tincture, however slight, of dubitability.
Because I can think of an event without having to think of its having a cause, I can think
without logical contradiction of its not having a cause at all. And the same is true of an act,
whether construed as event within time or as an act of some other kind.7 I can think, without
logical contradiction, of an act’s not having any cause at all. And so I can also think, without
contradiction, of an event or an act’s being its own cause. There is nothing logically
contradictory about a free act. The stakes, it should be obvious, are rather high regarding what
we can and cannot know about causality.
7
The possibility of an act that does not occur within time, and hence is not an event in the ordinary sense of the
word, will be considered in Section 8, below.
4
�The judgment, “Every event must have a cause,” cannot then be known from experience,
or as Kant says, a posteriori. If it can be known at all, it can be known only a priori, that is,
without relying on experience. But if the judgment, “Every event must have a cause,” is an a
priori judgment, it is not an analytic judgment. There is nothing in the mere concept of an event,
of something that happens, that enables me to logically infer that it must, or even does, have a
cause. (And if I say that to be an event means to have cause, then I am simply begging the
question.) The judgment, “Every event must have cause,” if it is to be a knowable truth, must be
both a priori and synthetic. It can be validated only by a new kind of argument, one that is
neither empirical nor analytic-semantic. Kant calls this new kind of argument “transcendental,”
because it transcends, or prescinds from, all particular content of experience—of sense
experience—relying on none of it, and attempts to exhibit what makes experience possible in the
first place.8
Kant’s well known formulation of the question—“How are a priori synthetic judgments
possible?”—is somewhat misleading. For it could seem to suggest that Kant first assumes the
existence of a priori synthetic judgments, and then tries to show how the mind would have to be
constituted for there to be such judgments.9 But, as the best readers of Kant have pointed out, this
style of argument cannot lead to the conclusion that every event must have a cause, but only to
the conclusion that, if every event must have a cause, and if this proposition is knowable, then the
mind must possess certain cognitive faculties (or cognitive abilities—Erkenntnisvermögen)
8
A 11, B 25; Cf. A 295-296, B 351-353.
In the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues that there are a priori synthetic judgments in
mathematics. His argument there serves chiefly as an incentive for seeking such judgments elsewhere. Even if, as
many twentieth century logicians have argued, all judgments of mathematics are analytic and not synthetic, that fact,
by itself, would not undermine Kant’s argument for a priori synthetic judgments functioning as architectonic
propositions for knowledge of nature.
9
5
�whereby it is able to know this.10 Such a procedure would prove neither that every event must
have a cause nor that the mind really does possess faculties enabling it to know this.11 Such a
way of arguing is not fruitless, however. It is in fact the sole procedure of Kant’s Prolegomena.
In that comparatively short and introductory book, Kant says that he “proceeds from that which
is sought, as if it were given, and ascends to the conditions under which alone it is possible.”12
Kant calls this way of proceeding, “analytic” or “regressive.” The way of proceeding in the
Critique of Pure Reason, however, he calls “synthetic or progressive.” Rather than assuming
that every event must have a cause, Kant establishes, or attempts to establish, solely by
considering how the human mind operates, that it really does possess faculties whereby it can
know, indeed constitute, objects and events. He attempts to show that that one of the ways in
which the mind constitutes objects and events is in accordance with the category of cause and
effect—with the result that every event must have a cause. There is a problem, however. In the
Critique of Pure Reason, Kant employs both analytic and synthetic procedures.13 And that leads
some to say, understandably but falsely, that the Critique of Pure Reason presupposes modern
mathematical physics as a body of truth, in order to validate modern mathematical physics as a
body of truth—which is, of course, a fallacy. The deepest stratum of Kant’s argument in the
Critique of Pure Reason does not commit this fallacy. The difficulty is in identifying the deepest
stratum of his argument.
10
In Beyond Good and Evil, § 11 “On the Prejudices of the Philosophers,” Nietzsche has a merry time making fun
of Kant’s use of the word “faculty” (Vermögen).” But Nietzsche’s criticism, such as it is, is not particularly
penetrating. According to Kant, the human mind has the ability (another, less technical sounding, translation of
Vermögen) to be affected; and it also has a quite different ability, namely the ability to think, in particular to judge.
If Kant is right about this, then nothing of importance turns on his naming the former the “faculty of sensibility and
the latter the “faculty of understanding.”
11
See Robert Paul Wolf, Kant's Theory of Mental Activity (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973), pp. 44-56.
12
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Preamble § 5 fn.
13
Kant employs both ways of arguing in the Critique of Pure Reason for the sake of thoroughness. The synthetic
procedure only heuristically presupposes the analytic procedure. It does not logically presuppose the analytic
procedure. That is to say, the synthetic procedure does not employ its hypothetically-conditioned result of the
analytic procedure as an actual premise.
6
�This difficulty is greatly augmented by the rugged contours of Kant’s text. The first
edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781, was put together in a relatively short
period of time. But Kant developed his main theses over the course of the preceding twelve years
or so. According the prevailing though not universally accepted hypothesis, which has both soft
and hard versions, the Critique of Pure Reason is something of a “patchwork,” including
sentences and paragraphs written at different times during the decade prior to its publication. It is
not hard to find inconsistencies and obscurities in his presentation.14 Moreover, Kant can be
imprecise in his terminology. The word “knowledge” (or “cognition”—Erkenntnis) usually
means the conceptual grasping of a synthesized intuition in a judgment proper, but it sometimes
means only the synthesized intuition itself. In spite of making a rather sharp distinction between
“transcendent” and “transcendental,” Kant occasionally uses the latter when he means the
former. He makes a major distinction between a mere “form of intuition” and a “formal
intuition,” but often uses the one word “intuition” for both. He distinguishes between two kinds
of “synthesis,” but one has to determine from the context which synthesis he has in mind when
he uses this word. Kant also uses the important word “unity” in more than one way. Most
problematically, as we shall see, he sometimes speaks of “the understanding” in distinction from
“the imagination,” but sometimes as including it. The reader who does want to dismiss Kant is
inclined to blame himself for his confusion. But Kant is largely responsible for the confusion. If
he were not saying something of immense significance, the reader would be justified in refusing
to follow him through the “thorny paths of the Critique of Pure Reason.”15
And there is a further problem. Kant made major revisions for the second edition,
published in 1787; and up until his death he continued to refine his thoughts on questions and
14
15
Kant himself acknowledges this. See the Preface to the second edition, B xxxvii-xliv,
B xliii.
7
�problems dealt with Critique of Pure Reason in notes and in other publications, culminating in
the unfinished but rich and wide-ranging Opus Postumum. One cannot call the Critique of Pure
Reason a “snapshot” of Kant’s thinking. It is more like a scrapbook containing photographs
taken over a period of about fifteen years, and not always arranged in chronological order.
But what Kant is getting at has to be considered, if only because of his influence, which
is greater than that of any philosopher since Aristotle. If Kant’s general argument of the Critique
of Pure Reason is sound, he has answered Hume, validating the conception of science as a truly
objective enterprise, while at the same exploding its pretentions to disclose the deepest
foundation of things; and he has destroyed metaphysics as classically conceived. His
speculations stimulated the work of his greatest successors, both when they attempt to develop
his thoughts further and when they react against him.16 Kant is the central figure in modern
philosophy. The contemporary distinction between “analytic philosophy” and “continental
philosophy” can be understood as a distinction between two ways of philosophizing, both
motored in almost opposite directions, by Kantian discoveries or, as the case may be, inventions.
Whether and to what extent Kant is breaking new ground or making things up in the Critique of
Pure Reason can be determined only by attempting to enter into his way of thinking and
suspending judgment on the value of his project until the whole of it is brought as clearly into
16
See Eckart Förster, The Twenty Five Years of Philosophy (translated by Brady Bowman, Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2012). Förster treats the revolution in metaphysical thinking that Kant effected in the Critique of
Pure Reason, and the remarkable developments in philosophy that occurred in the aftermath of its publication. In the
opening pages of his book, Förster makes amply clear what Kant meant in his startling claim that “prior to the
development of critical philosophy there had been no philosophy at all.” Förster’s book can be understood as a kind
of justification of the word “The” in its title. One does not have to agree with Kant’s opinion of the prior history of
metaphysical speculation to recognize the massive import of the Critique of Pure Reason and the necessity of
coming to terms with this work for those who take a serious interest in philosophy.
8
�view as possible. Needless to say, what follows is only introductory exposition of the basic
principles of his critical philosophy. 17
2. The two sources of human knowledge
Kant’s distinctive interpretation of the human mind turns on his account of, and his sharp
distinction between, intuitions and judgments. Kant tells us that it is by means intuition that the
mind is in an immediate relation to objects (Gegenstande).18 He thinks that there are only two
ways a mind could be in immediate relation to objects: it could immediately create them or it
could be immediately affected by them. The former is how an infinite, or divine, mind (if there is
such a thing), immediately relates itself to objects. The latter is how our finite, human mind is
immediately related to objects. We are affected by them; and all we know of them immediately is
that we are affected them. A divine mind (should one exist) would have an intellectual intuition,
such that in actively creating things it would know them fully for what they are, not just as they
17
I have reservations of my own about various aspects of Kant’s project. Because it is not possible to take issue with
Kant intelligently without understanding him first, I refrain from expressing my reservations in this introductory
exposition.
18
When Kant speaks of being affected by objects (Gegenstande), at A 19, B34, he is not yet distinguishing between
things-in-themselves and appearances. Sometimes Kant uses “object” (Gegenstand) as equivalent to “thing” (Ding).
And in this sense he will speak both of “things-in-themselves” (e.g., A 26, B 42) and of “objects-in-themselves”
(e.g., A 36, B 52). Kant also uses the word Objekt, which, like Gegenstand, is naturally translated into English as
“object.” For a brief but clear summary of how Kant uses the words Gegenstand and Objekt, see the entry, “object,”
in A Kant Dictionary. Caygill, Howard (ed). Blackwell Publishing, 1995 ( Blackwell Reference Online. 21 July
2007). Compare Kant’s use of Gegenstand and Objekt in the sentence at A 89, B 121 beginning, “Denn da nur
vermittlest….,” with the use of Gegenstand in the sentence that immediately follows and with the definition of
Objekt at B 137. On the basis of these two passages, we can say that when Kant is speaking carefully he uses the
word Gegenstand broadly to name what (unlike a thing-in-itself) is within and present to the mind, though exclusive
of the mind’s own acts (cf. infra, fn. 28.); and that he uses Objekt narrowly to name a Gegenstand that is
conceptually unified. Objekt and Gegenstand are not exactly opposed. For every Objekt is a Gegenstand, though the
reverse is not the case. Kemp Smith translates Gegenstand and Objekt both as “object,” which is an infelicitous
solution to be sure, but one that is not so easy to improve on in an extended translation. In what follows I shall
frequently place an “(o)” or a “(g)” after “object” and its derivatives, when I think something important turns, or
could be thought to turn, on the distinction between Objekt and Gegenstand.
9
�appear but as they are “in themselves.”19 Our intuition, however, is not intellectual but sensible
only. It gives us no access to things as they are “in themselves,” but only to things as they appear
to us.
Early in the Critique of Pure Reason, in the section titled the Transcendental Aesthetic,
Kant argues that space and time are merely subjective conditions of receptivity. They are two
indefinitely extended intra-mental vestibules in which we receive sense data entering from
without. In space, the data are simultaneously given; in time, they are successively given. These
data are not things. In fact, considered by themselves, they are not even appearances. They are
only the matter of appearances. Appearances owe their unity and interconnection to something
other than bare given-ness.
If we abstract from the sensible filling, from the empirical data received within space and
time, two forms of intuition remain; and they are precisely space and time. As forms of our
sensible intuition, they do not pertain to things as they are in themselves. The human mind does
not get space and time from experience because, Kant argues, we would have to receive them as
empirical data—our intuition being, again, only sensible and not intellectual. But if the human
mind received space and time from experience, it would need mental receptacles into which
space and time could be received. Space and time, however, are themselves these very mental
receptacles. And they are nothing more than this—or so Kant argues. Though we can imagine
away all the empirical filling of space and time, such as shapes, colors, and events, we cannot
imagine away space and time themselves. Kant regards this fact as evidence that space and time
belong intrinsically to the human mind, that they are part of its a priori endowment. They are no
19
B 72. Kant speaks both of God’s possessing an intellectual intuition and of his possessing an intuitive
understanding. B 145; cf. B 135. Eckart Förster makes a strong case that, contrary to the common assumption, Kant
did not understand these two to be simply identical. The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, 144-152.
10
�more properties of things-in-themselves than the act of judging is. Perhaps things-in-themselves
do exist in some kind spatio-temporal order “in-itself.” Since we cannot know exactly what
things-in- themselves are, we cannot definitively rule this possibility out. But there is no reason,
according to Kant, to think of things-in-themselves as spatially and temporally ordered in any
sense.
These and other arguments go to make up the Metaphysical Exposition of the concepts of
space and time. In the Transcendental Exposition of these concepts he attempts to show that only
as he has interprets them in the Metaphysical Exposition is it possible to have an a priori science
of space and time.20 We understand geometry to be an a priori science of space, inasmuch as it
does not rely on the particular content of experience—we do not need a laboratory and special
equipment, nor do we need to engage in field research, to prove geometrical propositions.21 To
be sure, we do proofs at a blackboard. But these proofs are not experiments. We all “see,”
somehow, that takes it only one proof, illustrated with any isosceles triangle you like, to
establishes that the base angles are equal in all isosceles triangles.22 We “see,” so to speak, that
we do not have to repeat the proof with n number of isosceles triangles, breaking off arbitrarily
when we are more or less satisfied that the evidence thus far is in favor isosceles triangles’
having their base angles equals. This “seeing” on the basis of one example is possible, Kant
argues, because we recognize that space is homogenous in its character, that we shall never find
out anything about any part of space, no matter how far away, no matter how small or large, that
20
Kant does not, as some have thought, infer the a priori character of space from the a priori character of geometry.
Rather, it is only because space is an a priori endowment of the mind that there can be a priori science of it, i.e.,
geometry. See Rolf Peter Horstmann, “Transcendental Idealism and Space,” in Reading Kant—New Perspectives on
Transcendental Arguments and Critical Philosophy, edited by Eva Schaper and Wilhelm Vossenkuhl, Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1989.
21
The possibility of an a priori science of time is more complicated. What Kant says in the Transcendental
Exposition of Time (B 48-49) is developed at much greater length in the chapter entitled “Analogies of Experience.”
22
Euclid, Elements Bk. 1 Prop..5.
11
�is different from the space that is close by.23 If geometry is an a priori science, then space “as a
whole” is present to, by virtue of being an intrinsic feature of, the human mind. So Kant argues;
and he would challenge anyone who disagrees to show how we can be more confident about the
findings of geometry than about the findings of a manifestly empirical science, such as physics
which, unlike geometry, relies on repeated observations and experiments, arbitrarily broken off
at some point and their findings empirically generalized into putatively necessary and universal
laws of nature.
The innate cognitive faculty that we have been considering Kant calls “sensibility.” It
yields intuitions. The other innate cognitive faculty, which Kant calls the “understanding,” yields
concepts (Begriffe) and judgments (which employ concepts). Sensibility puts us in an immediate
but passive relation to objects (g); the understanding puts us in a mediate but active relation to
objects.24 We have a faculty of understanding because, and only because, our intuition is sensible
and affected by its object. If our intuition were intellectual and creative of its object (as God’s
intellect is, if he exists), we would not need concepts. By means of sensibility, the human mind is
23
It is frequently said that non-Euclidean geometry poses a problem for Kant’s understanding of space, which is
surely Euclidean. Lobachevsky and Riemann develop alternate geometries by denying, in opposite ways, Playfair’s
axiom, which can be construed as a restatement of Euclid’s Fifth Postulate. If Kant had known of Lobachevsky and
Riemann, he would likely have argued that these new geometries, like Euclid’s, also contain a priori synthetic
propositions. For this is all Kant needs to support his claim, in the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason (and
well in advance of the chapter titled “System of All Principles of Pure Understanding”) that a priori synthetic
judgments are possible, more precisely, that they are actual, in the case of geometrical constructions most obviously.
If certain appearances, met with in the empirical investigation of nature, turn out to be better accounted for by
Lobachevskian or Riemannian geometry than by Euclidean geometry, that would be of very great interest to Kant, to
be sure. And, in that he case, he would definitely have to modify some of his statements about the relation of
geometry to experience. (Consider B 206- 207.) But he would likely deny that such findings require him to abandon
his brief argument, in the Transcendental Aesthetic, that geometry per se consists of a priori synthetic (and
demonstrable) propositions, whatever (non-refutable) postulates it may adopt, or that such findings require him to
abandon his extended argument, in the Second Analogy, that all alterations take place in the conformity with the law
of the connection of cause and effect. The burden would be on Kant’s critics to show otherwise.
24
See Gerhardt Krüger, Philosophie und Moral in der Kantischen Kritik (Tübingen: J.C.B Mohr, 1931), 16-21, on
the “pre-critical” limitation of discursive thinking, or judgment, as such.
12
�affected; by means of the understanding, the human mind acts.25 Sensibility is merely open to
what is given to it; it is the business of the understanding to connect and grasp (or comprehend—
begreifen) what is given to sensibility. 26 And as the counterpart of the passivity of sensibility is
the activity of the understanding, so the counterpart of the receptivity of sensibility is the
spontaneity of the understanding—about which, more later.
We judge by means of concepts. We predicate one concept of another in a categorical
judgment, and we connect two or more judgments, consisting of concepts, with each other in
hypothetical and disjunctive judgments. In the Metaphysical Deduction,27 Kant presents a table
of judgments, from which he derives a table of categories. Categories are concepts, but they are
not empirical concepts. The concept of a dog, for example, is empirical; it is gotten from
experience. Not so, as we have seen, with the concept of cause and effect. This is a nonempirical, or pure, concept. And since we cannot get this concept from experience, or a
posteriori, it is either a spurious concept, as Hume had suggested, or a concept that we possess a
priori, a concept intrinsic to the operation of the human mind necessarily functions. Kant argues
for the latter.
25
And so, according to Kant, though we do not know by creating things, as presumably God (if he exists) does, we
do know by constituting objects (via concepts). In both cases, different as they surely are, knowing is active. It is not
just passively “taking in.”
26
A concept (Begriff) is a kind of grasp (Griff—the English words, “conceive” and “comprehend,” have similar
etymologies.) Kant regards a concept as placing its own imprint on what it grasps, so that what one knows through
concepts is, in part, a product of the mind’s own operation. This is particularly true of pure concepts, i.e., categories.
Kant’s claim that we cannot have knowledge without concepts, and that a concept contributes to knowledge only by
unifying something that would otherwise lack unity, rules out metaphysics as classically conceived, that is, as
knowledge of what is, in itself and independently of the unifying operations of the human mind. Any attempt to
substantively rehabilitate classical metaphysics in the face of Kant’s critique requires developing a clear and
consistent alternative to his account of what a concept is.
27
In the second edition version of the Transcendental Deduction, at B 159, Kant refers to the “Metaphysical
Deduction,” in which he has attempted to prove the a priori origin of the categories. He does not use this expression
as the title of any section of the Critique of Pure Reason, but it is generally agreed that he is referring to Chapter 1 of
the Analytic of Concepts, especially to Sections 2 and 3 of that chapter.
13
�A judgment is not just a string of concepts. It has a coherence, actually a unity.
According to Kant, judgments can be brought under four “heads” (Titel): quantity, quality,
relation, and modality; and each of these is subdivided into three “moments.” There are then
twelve forms of judgment. Each has its own unique unifying function. This unifying function
Kant calls a category.28 Categories are concepts, but they are not empirical concepts. They are
pure concepts that “apply (or extend—gehen) a priori to objects (o).”29 The twelve forms of
judgment are not gotten from experience. They are, rather, intrinsic to the very way we think.
Since the categories are unifying functions in these forms of judgement, the twelve categories
are, like the forms of intuition—space and time—part of the original endowment of the human
mind.
A common criticism of Kant’s table of the categories—more precisely, of his table of
judgments, from which the table of categories is derived—is that he has not demonstrated the
table’s “completeness.” There are two different questions here that are not always kept distinct.
(1) Does the table include too many forms of judgment? And (2) does the table include too few
forms of judgment?
28
A 68, B 93: “By a ‘function’ I mean the unity of the act of ordering different representations under one common
representation.” The German word translated here and elsewhere as “representation” is Vorstellung, literally a
“placing-before.” A more accurate translation would be “presentation.” Kant uses Vorstellung broadly to name
something that is simply present to the mind, which may or may not “represent” something outside the mind. Kant
calls the apperceptive act, “I think,” a Vorstellung (e.g., at B 132; cf. B 157), and it certainly represents nothing
outside the mind. Consider also the distinctively Kantian claim at beginning of § 14 that a certain kind of
Vorstellung, namely a pure concept of the understanding, i.e., a category, is a priori determinate of its object (g) and
not vice versa—something that would be impossible if Vorstellung always meant “representation” in the ordinary
sense the word. (Kant could seem to confuse things at A 320, B 376. But the primary sense of the Latin
repraesentatio, just like praesentatio, is simply a “placing before”, i.e., a “presentation.”) The German word
Vorstellung does not carry with it the sense re-presenting, i.e., presenting again, a sense that in some contexts can be
squeezed out of the English word “representation.” I translate Vorstellung as “representation” with misgivings. But
this is how the word is typically rendered in English translations of Kant’s works (and also in English commentaries
on his works). I am following suit so that passages that I quote can be located without confusion in the text. But the
reader should keep in mind that the word “representation” here and in English translations of Kant’s works is a
broad term that can stand for anything that is present to the mind, however much certain kinds of representations
differ from each other.
29
A 79, B 105.
14
�To show that the table of judgments does not contain too many forms of judgment one
need point to only a single judgment that expresses a quantity, a quality, and relation, and a
modality. Take the judgment, “All dogs are animals.” This judgment has a quantity: universal
(and not, say, particular). It has a quality: affirmative (and not, say, negative). It has a relation:
categorical (and not, say, hypothetical). And it has a modality: necessary. Unlike the quantity,
quality, and relation expressed in the judgment, “All dogs are animals,” the modality is
unexpressed. But it is easy to add it in: “All dogs are necessarily animals.” This is an analytic
judgment. Even though the concepts, dog and animal, derive from experience, they are so closely
connected that being an animal pertains to the very meaning of being a dog: if it is not an animal,
then it is not a dog. This particular judgment and countless others like it contain a quantity, a
quality, a relation, and a modality (even if unexpressed). All four of these characteristics are
embedded in these judgments. Hence the table does not contain too many forms of judgment. No
less than four distinct forms of judgment are identifiable in judgments of the type that we have
just considered.30 Kant’s table of judgments is not excessive.31
Is it, however, deficient? Does it contain too few forms of judgment? This is quite a
different question: and it concerns the “completeness” of the table in the precise sense of the
30
That each of the four general characteristics of judgment exhibits three subtypes (amounting to a total of twelve
forms of judgment) is, I think, easy to see. The only ambiguous case is quality. Kant thinks that the infinite
judgment “A is non-B” is distinct from the negative judgment, “A is not B.” The infinite judgment (unlike the
negative judgment) says that “A” is something, but (unlike the affirmative judgment) it names this “something” only
negatively. And yet, “only negatively,” is somewhat misleading, inasmuch as the whole indefinitely extended class
of “non-B” is predicated of “A.” So the form of “A is non-B” is distinguishable, in transcendental (vs. general)
logic), from both of the other two forms, “A is B” and “A is not B.” Cf. A 71-73, B 97-98.
31
A judgment that might appear to lack one of these characteristics can easily be shown, on reformulation, to
possess it implicitly. The judgment, “John drinks beer,” can be reformulated, somewhat awkwardly but without
essential modification of its sense, as “John is a beer drinker.” This judgment is singular in quantity, negative in
quality, and categorical in relation. Its unexpressed modality is likely assertoric. The one making this judgment
likely intends it neither as apodictic (“John must be a beer drinker”) nor as problematic (“John may be a beer
drinker”). I say “likely” here because, if the modality of a judgment is unexpressed, we can determine what it is with
confidence only by asking the speaker what he intends. But whatever uncertainty we might have regarding what the
modality of a given judgment is does not mean that it lacks a modality. A judgment essentially lacking modality is
not a judgment at all.
15
�word. Does this individual judgment, “All dogs are (necessarily) animals,” according to its form,
exhibit a fifth general characteristic, like quantity, quality, relation, and modality, distinct from
but on a level with these. It is hard, to say the least, to see how it does. What could it be? Still,
one might ask, is there not perhaps some other individual judgment that exhibits a fifth general
characteristic in addition to quantity, quality, relation, and modality? This question obviously
cannot be answered by taking every possible individual judgment and examining it to see if it
happens to exhibit a fifth general characteristic on a level with quantity, quality, relation, and
modality, for there is no limit to the number of possible individual judgments. Kant can
challenge his critic to find a single individual judgment that does exhibit this (ostensibly) fifth
general characteristic. And, in the absence of such a finding, Kant can plausibly argue that his
table is complete: there are only four general characteristics of judgment. Rather than advance
either a definitive argument for his table’s not containing too many forms of judgment (as I have
tried to do in the preceding paragraph) or a plausible argument for his table’s not containing too
few forms of judgment (as I have tried to do in this paragraph) Kant advanced no argument in the
Critique of Pure Reason at all.32 It should be noted, however, that if his table in fact contains too
few forms of judgment, then the derived table of categories contains too few categories as well.
And, in that case nature, as the complex of phenomena governed by a priori laws prescribed to it
by the human understanding,33 would be more, not less, architectonically determined than Kant
thought it was. If that were so, it should go without saying, Kant’s response to Hume would not
be compromised in the least.
32
Kant says that we cannot know exactly why we have twelve and only twelve forms of judgment, and hence twelve
and only twelve categories. See the last sentence of § 21, B 146. He may at some point have entertained the
possibility of deriving these forms from the primordial judgment “I think.” But, as far as I know, he never carried
out such a derivation. In Notes and Fragments (a volume in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel
Kant, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, edited by Paul Guyer), Note 5854 (p. 300), Kant gives a short
but quite interesting account of why, under each of the four general “titles” of judgments, there must be exactly three
“moments,” no more and no fewer.
33
B 163. Cf. B xix.
16
�3. The question of right (quid juris)
As noted earlier, we have a faculty of understanding, which is to say, a faculty of
concepts, only because our intuition is sensible rather than intellectual. We think, not intuitively,
but discursively only. As Kant says, in a much quoted sentence, “Thoughts without content are
empty. Intuitions without concepts are blind.”34 So, neither (sensible) intuition nor concepts yield
knowledge by themselves. But intuition has a kind of primacy over concepts. To repeat, Kant
argues that the only reason we even have concepts is to make up for the fact that do not have an
intellectual intuition.35 But what is their origin? In the case of empirical concepts, the answer is a
relatively obvious. We derive them from sense experience, via generalization, by attending to
what perceived individuals have in common. We cannot, however, derive pure concepts, or
categories, from experience. This is how Kant describes the relation of categories to intuition in
the Metaphysical Deduction.
The same function that gives unity to the synthesis of various representations in a
judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an
intuition; and this unity, generally expressed, we entitle the pure concept of the
understanding. The same understanding then, indeed through the same operations
by which in concepts, by means of analytical unity, it produced the logical form
34
A 51, B 75. In this sentence, Kant is speaking only of sensible intuitions.
See B 72; A 50-52, B 74-76. According to Kant, the human understanding, is discursive only, not intuitive, as
God’s understanding is, if he exists.
35
17
�of a judgment, also introduces a transcendental content into its representations, by
means of the synthetic unity of the manifold in intuition in general.36
Kant has argued that we need concepts only because our intuition is merely sensible; and he has
argued that we have not just empirical concepts but pure concepts, the categories, which are
resident a priori in the human understanding, manifesting themselves in the very way we think,
that is, in the very way we judge. If Kant is right on these two points, it follows that the pure
concepts have a relation, an a priori and necessary relation, to intuition. He announces in the
passage just quoted what this relation has to be, if the categories apply to intuitions in such a way
as to yield a priori knowledge of the general structure of human experience, and thereby of the
general structure of nature itself as the sum of all appearances.37 The categories can have this
relation by virtue of their unifying function, which is at work in both the logical forms of
judgment and—he says without yet accounting for the manner in which this happens—in
intuition as well. The account of the manner in which this happens is the task of the
Transcendental Deduction.38
It is striking how sharply Kant distinguishes between the two modes of cognition we have
at our disposal, sensibility and the understanding.
The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only insofar
as they unite (sich vereinigen), can knowledge arise. But that is no reason to
36
A 79, B 105.
B 163-165.
38
A 85, B 117. In the Transcendental Deduction, Kant argues generally that a priori categories are applied with
“right” to what is provided by the senses. In the chapters following the Transcendental Deduction, Kant tries to
show how each of the a priori categories is applied to what is provided by the senses.
37
18
�confound the contribution of either with that of the other; rather it is a strong
reason to carefully separate and distinguish the one from the other.39
It is the very sharpness of this distinction that requires Kant to undertake a Transcendental
Deduction of the categories, which purports to show that the categories of the understanding
apply, with right,40 to whatever is encountered in spatio-temporal sense experience. On the other
hand, it also the very sharpness of the distinction that enables Kant to carry out the
Transcendental Deduction and, among other things, begin to answer Hume by justifying the
claim that the category of cause and effect, though not derived from experience nonetheless
determines experience.41 Put with greatest possible simplicity, Kant’s project in the
Transcendental Aesthetic and in the Transcendental Analytic is to show that and how, in spite of
the sharpness of the distinction between sensibility and the understanding, these two modes of
cognition are nonetheless intimately, and intelligibly, related to each other. His project is to
show that the categories, which are unifying functions in judgments, are at the same time
unifying functions in objects (o). Whatever can be given to us in sense experience, whatever can
enter our receiving rooms of space and time, is subject to the categories. It can be grasped a
priori with respect to its general features, and moreover judged with respect to these features in
fundamental propositions that hold a priori for whatever can be met with in experience. Such is
the accomplishment of the faculty of understanding in relation to the faculty of sensibility. Or so
Kant attempts to show.
39
A 51-52, B 75-76.
A 84-85, B 116-117; cf. B xxxiv-xxxx.
41
I say that Kant begins to answer Hume on the question of causality in the Transcendental Deduction. He
completes his answer to Hume in the Second Analogy of the Chapter entitled “System of All Principles (or
fundamental propositions—Grundsätze) of Pure Understanding.”
40
19
�Let us focus on only one of the judgments and its corresponding category. The
hypothetical judgment, “if p then q,” is one judgment. But it possesses two components. Each of
these components is a proposition, a judgment, and can be considered by itself: I can think the
proposition, “p”, by itself and without a preceding “if”; and I can think the proposition, “q”, by
itself and without a preceding “then.” The complex judgment, “if p then q” unites these two
propositions, and it unites them as ground and consequence.42 This relation is a purely logical
one and does not rely on temporal entities or on time itself. Consider the judgment, “If a triangle
has two sides equal, then the angles subtending them are equal as well.” In this judgment, the
“if” clause names the ground, the “then” clause names the consequent. This relationship is nontemporal, though, of course, we need time to think it through. Our mind moves discursively
through time as it thinks the proposition. But the proposition itself does not move through time.
Such a thing is not even conceivable. Thinking through a proposition occurs rapidly or slowly.
The proposition that is thought through does not itself move rapidly or slowly. It does not move
at all. The proposition retains its identity across multiple acts of thinking about it, acts separated
by intervals when it is not thought about. And it retains its identity for multiple subjects thinking
at the same time and at different times as well.43 These subjects can agree about the truth of the
proposition and its provability, or they can disagree about one or the other of these, or they can
disagree about both.44 But this proposition has to be self-identical, it has to be the same
proposition for multiple subjects, for them to have either meaningful agreement or meaningful
disagreement about its truth and provability.
42
A 73, B 98.
A sentence is bound to a particular language; a proposition is not. For that reason, one and the same proposition
can be expressed in multiple languages, or even reformulated (slightly) in different sentences within the same
language. For example, in the geometrical proposition stated above we can substitute “also” for “as well,” and we
can omit “then”: “If a triangle has two sides equal, the angles subtending them are also equal.” There is a difference
between these two sentences. But the same proposition is expressed in both of them.
44
By “proposition” here, I mean only what is to be proved, not the actual proof itself.
43
20
�To restate the matter for the sake of clarity and emphasis, in the general hypothetical
judgment form, “if p then q,” each of the two component propositions can be considered in
isolation from the other. Neither “p,” taken by itself, nor “q,” taken by itself, need have a
reference to the other, inasmuch as “p” here just stands for a proposition you like, and “q”
likewise.45 Only when they are united in the single hypothetical judgment form do “p” and “q”
refer to each other. Their reference is of ground to consequence. Now a ground according to its
sense is the ground of a consequent, and a consequent according to its sense is the consequent of
a ground. The relation of ground and consequent is the unifying function in the hypothetical
judgment, “if p then q.” We can also express this unifying function as the single, albeit complex,
category of causality and dependence, or of cause and effect.46 It is a single category because it
expresses a relation in which “p” and “q” are united in a special way, not as “p and q,” nor as
“either p or q, but not both,” nor in any way other than “if p then q.” We can say that the
premises are the cause of the conclusion.47 When speaking of a-temporal relation, as in a logical
or geometrical proof, the single category of cause and effect says nothing at all about temporal
causation. In the Second Analogy, however, Kant will try to demonstrate that every event,
everything that happens in time (unlike the conclusion of a proof), has a temporally antecedent
45
There can be false as well as true instantiations of “if p then q.” E.g., “If a lead weight is dropped from the top of
mast in a rapidly sailing ship, then it will land some distance behind the mast.” We can come up with particular
instantiations of “p” and “q” that do have a logical relationship to each other—e.g., where “p” stands for “All men
are animals and all animals are mortal” and “q” stands for “All men are mortal.” But in speaking of the form of the
hypothetical judgment, our concern is only with the general “if… then” relationship, without regard to how “p” or
“q” get instantiated in this or that concrete judgment.
46
At A 73, B 98, prior to identifying the categories, Kant names one of the “relations of thought in judgment” as that
“of ground to consequent” (des Grundes zur Folge). This is the relation of the propositions “p” and “q,”
respectively, in the hypothetical judgment, “if p then q.” At B 112, after he has identified the categories, he equates,
in passing, the relation of cause to effect (der Ursache zur Wirkung, alternatively expressed as Kausalität und
Dependenz), which is one of the categories, with the relation of ground to consequent. It should be kept in mind that
Kant is not yet speaking of the categories as schematized, i.e., as endowed with a temporal significance.
Accordingly, cause and effect, or ground and consequent, need not be thought of as relation holding only within
time. See Section 8, below.
47
Cf. Aristotle, Posteriori Analytics 71b16-33; Metaphysics 1013b 20
21
�cause.48 On the way to the Second Analogy, Kant will try to show that the logical concept of
cause and effect gets endowed with a temporal meaning, as do all the other categories. Showing
that is the task of the Schematism chapter. Kant’s claim is that specifically temporal causation,
like causation of any kind, has an anticipatory logical foundation in the unifying function of the
hypothetical judgment.49
Time is an a priori form of pure sensible intuition, and the logical category of cause and
effect is an a priori category, a pure concept of the understanding. Both are a priori endowments
of the human mind. They seem then to fit together perfectly: whatever enters the a priori
receiving room of time, which the human mind possesses a priori, occurs there as an event or as
a component of an event; and this event is thus subject to the category of cause and effect, which
the human mind also possesses a priori.50
Now this is in fact Kant’s view. And it could seem that he has validated it on the basis of
the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Metaphysical Deduction. And so it could seem that with
the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Metaphysical Deduction, Kant has answered Hume:
everything entering the human mind from without, events included, enter the a priori spatiotemporal receptacle of the human mind are thereby subject to the a priori categories of the same
human mind. But Kant realizes that he has not yet answered Hume. For there was an “analytic”
or “regressive” element in the argument of the Metaphysical Deduction, that requires a
48
See again, A 79, B 105” “The same understanding, through the same operations by which in concepts, by means
of analytic unity, it produced the logical form of judgment…etc.” Note that whereas the judgment, “Every effect
must have a cause,” is analytic, the judgment, “Every event must have a cause,” is (as we have already seen)
synthetic.
49
See Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life (New York: Harper and Rowe, 1966), 26-33, for an intriguing argument
that, even if Kant’s argument in the Second Analogy establishes that events are necessarily connected according to a
rule, it still fails to account for the actual experience of causation, this experience being rooted primordially in the
role that our own living and moving bodies play in perception (and not, or not solely, in a schematized category
derived from the form of the hypothetical judgment).
50
A 144, B 183.
22
�“synthetic” or “progressive, supplementation . Granted that we have a priori forms of intuition,
and granted that we have a priori concepts, both of which are necessary for a priori knowledge
of nature (including knowledge that “all alterations take place in conformity with the law of the
connection of cause and effect”), Kant has still not shown that our a priori forms of intuition and
concepts are sufficient for a priori knowledge of nature. For the sharp distinction between
sensibility and the understanding, between sensible intuition and concept, the sustained
elaboration of which is one of Kant’s most impressive achievements, raises a new question of its
own, a question that only Kant could have raised: by what right do we apply a category, an a
priori concept of the understanding, to what is found in our a priori forms of intuition, space and
time?51 It is a tribute to Kant’s intelligence that he realized that this question cannot be
adequately answered just by noting that the faculties of the understanding and sensibility, even as
he has so carefully described them, are faculties of one and the same mind. And it is a tribute to
Kant’s honesty that he did not gloss over the awkward fact that his account raises the question of
the unity of human mind in its cognitive functioning—a question that few, if any, other thinkers
before Kant raised, and none with his sharpness of focus and intensity of concentration. Kant
realized that the human mind might be originally cleft in such a way that a perfect fit between its
two parts was impossible. The question of right (quid juris), that is, the question by what right
can a pure concept of the understanding be applied to what is present in sensibility, is the
question of the Transcendental Deduction. The Metaphysical Deduction purported to
demonstrate that we have, in the very way that the human mind is articulated, what is necessary
for a priori knowledge of the general structure of nature. The Transcendental Deduction will
51
The legitimacy of applying empirical concepts to appearances, which are in space and time, is not essentially
problematic, since empirical concepts are derived, by way of generalization, from spatio-temporal experience to
begin with. Because, for Kant, the categories are not derived from appearances, the legitimacy of their application to
appearances is a special problem, a specifically Kantian problem.
23
�attempt to demonstrate also that we have, in the very way that the human mind operates, what is
sufficient for a priori knowledge of the general structure of nature. Since Kant conceded that the
first edition version of the Deduction was insufficiently clear,52 I shall limit my remarks in the
following to what is going on (some of it) in the second edition version.
4. The Structure of the Transcendental Deduction
The two versions of Transcendental Deduction are the most widely contested texts in the
history of philosophy, with the exception of Aristotle’s De Anima 3.5, to which the
Transcendental Deduction is not entirely unrelated, both texts dealing with what is necessarily
and irreducibly active in the mind. Though Kant attempted to clear up obscurities that he thought
marred the first edition version of the Transcendental Deduction, the second edition itself is not
free of obscurity. Certain terms are used without the qualification that the reader has to supply by
attending to the context not just in light of what has already been said elsewhere but even in light
of what will be said only later in the Deduction. The text is replete with side observations that,
though they are always of considerable interest, can cause the reader to lose the thread of the
argument. Assertions are made early on that do not get fully justified until later on. Most
strikingly, at the end of § 20 we have what appears to be an announcement that the Deduction
has been successfully brought to a conclusion—“Consequently, the manifold of a given intuition
is necessarily subject to the categories”—only to discover, in § 21 ff., that we have hardly
reached the halfway point of the argument. And the Deduction includes, near the end, what
52
In what follows, when I use the abbreviated expression, “Deduction,” by itself, I am referring to the
Transcendental Deduction only, not to the Metaphysical Deduction, and only to the version in the second edition of
the Critique of Pure Reason.
24
�appears to be an overstatement that, assuming it is not a simple mistake, cries out to be brought
into some kind of agreement with what Kant says a few pages earlier in the Deduction.
Here is what I take to be the structure of the Transcendental Deduction in the second
edition:
The first section, § 15, is introductory and speaks of combination in its general character.
Kant argues here that any analysis of what is present to the mind, of our representations, always
presupposes synthesis.
The next three sections, §§ 16-20, comprise the first half of the Deduction. This half can
be subdivided into two stages. In the first stage, §§ 16-17, Kant gives an account of
apperception—self-consciousness in the act “I think” 53—as such. In the second stage, §§ 18-20,
he argues that objectivity (o) is constituted by apperception—though it is in the first stage, in the
second paragraph of § 17, that Kant says what he means by an object (o) in the context of the
Deduction. In § 20, Kant concludes the first half of the Deduction by arguing that all sensible
intuitions are subject to the categories. But he realizes that the Deduction is not finished at this
point because he has not yet fully accounted for the synthetic character of sensible intuition
itself, which is a presupposition, not a consequence, of the explicit application of categories to
intuition in a judgment.
§ 21 is the bridge from the first to the second half of the Deduction
§§ 22-26 comprise the second half of the Deduction. This half too can be subdivided into
stages. In the first stage, §§ 22-23, Kant argues that the categories yield no knowledge of things53
By apperception, Kant means self-consciousness (B 68). By transcendental apperception, he means consciousness
of self as engaged in the act “I think,” and as thereby constitutive of all a priori knowledge, even (as we shall see) of
objectivity itself. Empirical apperception is consciousness of self as having particular memories, inclinations,
aspirations, etc. Unlike transcendental apperception, empirical apperception varies from individual to individual.
25
�in-themselves, and yet that they extend to objects (g) of sensible intuition in general, that is to
any intuition, be it like or unlike ours, that is receptive and not active (or intellectual, as God’s is,
if he exists). In the second stage, the first three paragraphs of § 24, Kant introduces the
imagination, barely even alluded to up to this point in the Deduction, though silently
presupposed all along; and here he distinguishes between two a priori syntheses, figurative and
intellectual. The remainder of § 24 through the whole of § 25 arrests the development of the
second half of the Deduction. This passage could be called a “digression,” did not the
observations made in it have such a massive bearing, not only on the chief claims of the Critique
of Pure Reason, but on the whole of Kant’s mature philosophy.54 The third stage (proper) of the
second half of the Deduction, § 26, continues from where the third paragraph of § 24 left off.
Here Kant completes the Deduction by arguing that the categories apply to our sensible
intuition, hence to whatever data enter into it from without, hence to whatever can be perceived,
and that they are therefore valid a priori for all possible objects (g) of experience.
§ 27 states the “Outcome” of the Transcendental Deduction, and argues briefly against
two alternative ways of construing the relation between experience and categories.
5. The Transcendental Deduction §§15-20
54
Kant begins this passage with, “This is a suitable place for explaining the paradox…etc.” I think that it is, in fact,
not a suitable place, and that he should have treated this paradox after § 26. Still, this passage does speak to
questions that, even as early as § 16, will likely have occurred to an intelligent reader. Kant may have placed it
where he did in order to forestall objections to the winding up of his argument in § 26 (which is entitled
“Transcendental Deduction of the Universally Possible Use in Experience of the Pure Concepts of the
Understanding”). The passage in § 24 beginning, “This is a suitable place…etc.,” and the whole of § 25 looks like
an insert. I suspect that Kant originally ended § 24 after the first three paragraphs and the section now given as § 26
followed immediately as § 25. Hence the reference in the note at B 136 to § 25, when the more obvious reference
would be to § 26.
26
�Kant holds that all synthesis of what is present to the mind is performed by the
understanding which, construed broadly, is the faculty of combination. We are not, according to
Kant, originally given wholes—whether single individuals, Gestalten, eidē, or any other kind of
organized wholes—but only manifolds of discontinuous and unconnected discreta.55 Because
sensibility, considered independently of the synthetic contribution of the understanding, is
nothing more than a passive faculty of receptivity, it cannot combine. It can only “take in.”
Lacking spatial and temporal continuity, sense data are not yet appearances but, again, the matter
of appearances. Appearances owe their form to the synthetic operation of the mind.
Analysis, according to Kant, presupposes synthesis. The human mind can know
something about its objects by analyzing them only because it has originally synthesized them.56
In breaking down an empirical object into its constituent parts in order to understand how it is, as
we tellingly say, “put together,” the mind aims, or should aim, at following up this analysis with
a recombination of the parts back into a whole. In such recombining, the mind recapitulates and
makes explicit to itself its own prior activity. The synthesis that follows analysis is always, for
Kant, a re-synthesis. The power of the human understanding consists, then, less in taking things
apart than in putting them together in the first place.
Synthesis, regarded as mere putting together, does not by itself does result in knowledge.
For knowledge, what has been merely put together must be conceptually unified. In the
Metaphysical Deduction Kant said,
55
How broad this claim is becomes clear only in the second half of the Transcendental Deduction. See especially B
160, note.
56
This claim has been disputed at length and in numerous studies by Aron Gurwitsch, both on phenomenological
grounds and in light of the empirical findings of gestalt psychologists such as Kurt Kofka and Wolfgang Köhler. See
especially Gurwitsch’s Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press,
1966), 3-68, 175-286.
27
�By means of analysis different representations are brought under one concept—a
procedure (Geschäft) with which general logic deals. What transcendental logic
[in the Transcendental Analytic], on the other hand, teaches is how we bring to
concepts not representations [merely] but the pure synthesis of representations.57
It is through the pure concepts of the understanding, the categories, that this pure synthesis of
representations gets unified. That which bestows conceptual unity on the pure synthesis of
representations is the thinking subject, the ego. The ego bestows this unity in a self-conscious act
that Kant calls transcendental apperception, expressed in the fundamental proposition
(Grundsatz), “I think,” which, Kant says, is “the highest [proposition] in the whole sphere of
human knowledge.”58
It should be obvious that we do not, and cannot, infer the fundamental proposition, “I
think,” from the assumed validity of Newtonian science or from anything else. As an act, the “I
think” is originally present, and I can attend to thematically as long as I exist. As an act,
regardless of what it acts upon, that is, regardless of what content, representation, or object (g),
the “I think,” in an act of attention, is actually directed to at any given moment, it is abiding and
unchanging throughout consciousness. Otherwise I would not know, it would not even occur to
me, that I have thought, and can think, of different things at different times; or even that I who
am thinking the middle of this sentence is the same I that thought the beginning of it. I am a
priori conscious of the act, “I think,” as self-identical regardless of what I happen to think
about.59 The act, “I think,” does not depend on the particular content of empirical thinking,
57
A 78, B 104 (emphasis in the original). Kant speaks frequently of bringing something already synthesized to
concepts or to the unity of apperception..
58
B 135.
59
A 108: “This very transcendental unity of apperception makes out of all possible appearances, which can always
be together in one experience, a connection of all these representations according to laws. For this unity of
28
�which may undergo all kinds of changes. I am a priori self-conscious. I am conscious of myself
as doing, as putting together representations in various ways.60 And that means that even at the
level of speculative reason, quite apart from practical (i.e., moral) reason, I am conscious of
myself as an agent. Human thinking is not just a matter of passively gazing at bits and pieces of
mental data as they happen to float by in time. Rather, human thinking is active. It does not
create; but it does synthesize.61
That I think is self-evident. The question about the act, “I think,” concerns not its
existence its scope. Kant says:
It must be possible for the “I think” to accompany all my representations for
otherwise something would be represented in me (in mir vorgestellt) that could
not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would
be impossible, or at least would be nothing for me (für mich nichts).
This single sentence deserves more scrutiny than can be given here.62 I limit myself to a few
observations. (1) By representations, Kant means broadly whatever is present to the mind: its
acts, objects, appearances, sense data, even fictions and fantasies. (2) Kant says that it must be
possible for the “I think” to accompany all my representations; he does not say that the “I think”
consciousness would be impossible, if the mind in cognition (Erkenntnis) of the manifold could not become
conscious of the identity of the function whereby it synthetically combines it in one cognition.”
60
For an alternative account see Aron Gurwitsch, “A Non-egological Conception of Consciousness,” in Studies in
Phenomenology and Psychology, 287-300.
61
As we shall see in Section 9, below, though I am conscious that I think, and of course that I am, I do not know
exactly what I am. I am conscious that the act, “I think,” has a unifying effect. (A proposition or judgment
constituted by thought has a unity, of subject and predicate in the simplest case: it is one judgment, not two.) So I do
know that I am a unifying agent. But I do not know that this unifying agent that I am—“in myself,” apart from this
act and apart from how I merely appear to myself—is itself an indissoluble unity. Or so Kant argues.
62
This sentence was considered in detail by Dieter Henrich in a course on the Critique of Pure Reason given at
Columbia University in the spring of 1972. See also his article, “The Proof Structure of Kant’s’ Transcendental
Deduction” (Kant on Pure Reason, edited by Ralph C.S. Walker, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 77.
29
�does accompany all my representations.63 For the “I think” to accompany a representation, that
representation must be actually thought about, that is, it must be homed in on, or targeted, in a
focused act of attention and conceptually grasped in a judgment. There are many representations
that are mine, that are present in my spatial and temporal field of view, but which I do not attend
to, such as colors and shapes at the periphery of my vision, or barely audible noises, such as the
sound of an air conditioner that, strangely enough, I seem to become aware of only when it goes
off. (Another example: distinctive odors in a certain building that one never noticed until
returning to it after having been away for some time.) What Kant is claiming is that it must
possible for me to think about, to think about coherently with categories, or to judge, any
particular representation that I have, though by no means all of them at once. The “I think” need
not, or rather cannot, accompany all my representations. I might never have thought about the
sound of the air conditioner, had it not gone off and ceased to make a sound. The “I think”
cannot even accompany all the representations it has at any given moment. I cannot think about
Kant’s Transcendental Deduction, and at the same time think about the background noise in this
room, the ambient temperature, all the different colors and shapes in it, the texture of the pencil I
am holding, etc., even though all these representations are present—as a twentieth century
philosopher will say—at the margin of my field of consciousness, though not as the theme of my
consciousness.64 What Kant is claiming in this sentence is only that I can think about any of
these representations simply by attending to them.65 (3) Kant concludes this sentence with a
63
Cf. A 116: “For in me [representations]…must be at least capable [!] of being so connected….etc.”
Aron Gurwitsch, The Field of Consciousness, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1964.
65
See B 134: “The thought: these representations given in intuition one and all belong to me, means…that I unite
them in one consciousness, or can at least unite them therein….[O]nly insofar as I can grasp the manifold of the
representations in one consciousness, do I call them (nenne ich dieselben) one and all mine.” (Emphasis added in the
translation.) That I can unite representations given in intuition is sufficient to establish that the manifold
representations in an intuition are subject to (or stand under--stehen unter) the categories. Even representations of
mine that are not accompanied by the “I think” are nonetheless subject to the categories. B 136: “[I]nsofar as [the
manifold representations of intuition] must be capable [!] of being combined (müssen verbunden werden können) in
64
30
�reason justifying the first part of it: “for otherwise something would be represented in me that
could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be
impossible.” By this Kant means that something present in the mind that nonetheless could not
be thought about would impossible. But (4!) he ends the sentence with striking qualification, “or
at least would be nothing for me.”
Kant does not think that the oddity of something’s being “in me” but nonetheless
“nothing for me” can be dismissed out of hand. Such a thing is conceivable, again, in light of his
earlier and sharp distinction—a distinction that has to be, certainly not abandoned, but modified,
something Kant has not yet done but will do shortly—between sensibility and the
understanding.66 The qualification “or at least would be nothing for me,” points to one of the
principal tasks of the Transcendental Deduction: to show that whatever is in me, in particular,
whatever is in my spatio-temporal receiving room, really can become something for me, by
being accompanied by the “I think”—which, for Kant, is just a different way of saying that
whatever is in space and time really is subject to the categories.67
In the Metaphysical Deduction, Kant had argued that the categories are unifying
functions in judgment. In the Transcendental Deduction, he states the relation between judgment
and the apperceptive act, “I think.”
[A] judgment is nothing more than the manner of bringing given cognitions to the
objective (o) unity of apperception. 68
one consciousness, they are subject to [the conditions of the original-synthetic unity of apperception].” (Emphasis in
the original.)
66
Henrich “The Proof Structure of Kant’s’ Transcendental Deduction,” p. 77.
67
Cf. A 90. B 123; A 116.
68
B 141. The word translated here as “cognitions,” Erkenntnisse, Kemp Smith translates as “modes of knowledge,”
since “knowledges,” in the plural, does not accord with English usage. A cognition need not take the form of a
31
�Every individual judgment can be reformulated, without any sacrifice to its essential meaning, by
employing the copula “is” (or “are” in the case of subjects expressed in the plural) which
connects subject with predicate.69 The copula “is,” Kant says, is used
in order to distinguish the objective (o) unity of given representations from the
subjective. It indicates their reference (Beziehung) to original apperception and its
necessary unity….Only in this way does there arise… a judgment, that is, a
relation (Verhältnis) that is objectively (o) valid.70
Kant has given objectivity a new meaning. It does not mean things as they are in themselves and
independent of whatever relation they have to our cognitive faculties. Nor does objectivity mean
what all subjects may happen to agree upon, for all subjects may get something wrong, say,
judging (long ago) that things resting on the surface of the earth would necessarily fly off it if the
earth were spinning about its axis. Kant distinguishes objects (o) both from merely subjective
representations and from things-in-themselves. He defines an object and explicates his definition
of it thus.
Object (o) is that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is
united (vereinigt). Now all unification of representations demands unity of
proposition. Kant explicitly speaks of intuition as a cognition (A 19,B 33); and an intuition, pure or empirical, is not
a proposition. When he speaks in the above passage of given cognitions, I understand him to be thinking of
intuitions. For given cognitions can be brought to the unity of apperception only if they preexist being brought to the
unity of apperception. See the passages quoted at the end fn. 79, infra.
69
See fn. 31, supra. The judgment “Bodies of different weights fall with the same speed in a vacuum,” can be
reformulated as “Bodies of different weights are in the class of bodies of that fall with the same speed in a vacuum.”
Such reformulations are certainly odd-sounding. Still, they can be made while perfectly preserving the essential
meaning of the original sentence. Judgments are not, according to Kant, all categorical. Hypothetical and disjunctive
judgements cannot be reduced to categorical judgments. See B 141. But their component judgments, or propositions,
can be formulated, or reformulated, by employing the copula “is.” For example the general hypothetical judgment,
“If p then q,” can be reformulated, depending on the content of the judgments “p” and “q,” along the lines of “If A is
B, then A is C,” where each these two judgments is categorical.
70
B 141-142.
32
�consciousness in the synthesis of them. Consequently unity of consciousness is
that which alone constitutes (ausmacht) the reference (Beziehung) of
representations to an object (g), and therefore their objective (o) validity.71
My consciousness has a dimension, one might say, that is peculiar to me as distinct from you,
hence subjective in the usual sense of the word. But my consciousness also has a dimension that
is not peculiar to me but is common to all of us—and it is consciousness in this latter sense that
constitutes objects (o), and thereby objectivity itself. Kant distinguishes within consciousness
between the empirical ego and the transcendental ego. The empirical ego differs essentially from
subject to subject: my upbringing, antipathies, inclinations, etc., vs. yours. The transcendental
ego does not differ essentially from subject to subject. Though “instantiated” in multiple thinking
human beings, the transcendental ego is essentially the same in all of them. The intersubjective
agreement that can be achieved in mathematics and the sciences—an agreement that is quite
remarkable, indeed astonishing, when you think about it—Kant accounts for by reference to
transcendental ego; and in the same way he accounts for agreement about ordinary objects of
experience as well. It is because you and I constitute objects in the same way, by means of the
same categories and within the same space and time, that we can agree on what we have
constituted. As a consequence, I can say not only that, to use Kant’s example, “If I support a
body, I feel an impression of heaviness (einen Druck der Schwere),” but that “It, the body, is
heavy.”72 So, though we have knowledge only of appearances within the mind, we nonetheless
can distinguish between what is merely subjective in these appearances, what holds for you but
not necessarily for me, and what is objective in them, what necessarily holds for both of us—
71
B 137 (emphasis in the original). When Kant uses Gegenstand the second sentence in this passage, he surely
seems to mean that special kind of Gegenstand that is an Objekt. One cannot fault Kemp Smith too harshly for
translating both terms as “object,” not only for reasons of style but also because Kant himself does not always use
these terms precisely.
72
B 142.
33
�objectivity being (to repeat) constituted by the subject not in its private and empirical functioning
but in its common and transcendental functioning. As a consequence, science can be a common
enterprise and an objective one too, without pretending to transcend appearances and determine
what is in-itself.73
In concluding the first half of the Deduction, Kant says that “all sensible intuitions are
subject to the categories.”
[T]that 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....The categories are nothing other than these functions of
judging, insofar as the manifold of a given intuition is determined in view of them
(in Ansehung ihrer).74
The first half of the Transcendental Deduction has at its conclusion that the manifold in a given
intuition—an already synthesized intuition, it must be emphasized 75—is necessarily subject to
73
And so Kant can say that “the proud name of an ontology, which ps to give, in systematic doctrinal form,
synthetic a priori knowledge of things in general…must give place to a mere Analytic of the pure understanding.” A
247, B 303.
74
B 143.
75
See § 20. “Also steht auch das Mannigfaltige in einer gegebnenen Anschauung notwendig unter Kategorien.” Two
sentences earlier Kant writes, “Also ist alles Mannigfaltige, sofern es in Einer empirische Anschauung gegeben ist,
in Ansehung einer der logischen Funtionen zu urteilen bestimmt, durch die es nämlich zu einem Bewusstsein
überhaupt gebracht wird. Henrich notes that, whereas the German word “einer” can be translated as the indefinite
article, “a” or “an,” it can also be translated as “one.” It is, in fact, cognate with Einheit (unity). Henrich interprets
the peculiar capitalization of Einer as a hint from Kant that what he has in mind here is the “inner unity” of the
intuition. (“The Proof Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction,” 70.) This seems right to me. We must keep in
mind, however, that Kant had another word at his disposal. He could have used vereinigt (unified), also cognate with
Einheit. But he has used vereinigt earlier and with emphasis, in his definition of an object (o): “Objekt aber ist das,
in dessen Begriff das Mannigfaltige einer gegebenen Anschauung vereinigt ist” (§ 17, at B 137). In that sentence he
was speaking of the unity effected by the apperceptive act, “I think.” In § 20, on the other hand, he is speaking of a
unity presupposed by the apperceptive act: “All the manifold, insofar (!) as it is given in Einer empirical
intuition…etc.” (Note the expression, gebracht wird, which is used twice in § 20.) Since Kant has spoken earlier,
and twice in this very section also, of the “unity” (“Einheit”) of apperception, he needs to distinguish the unity that
characterizes the intuition, qua intuition, from the unity of apperception. His way of doing this in § 20 is by
capitalizing “Einer” when speaking of the former. In the concluding sentence of § 20, he does not resort to the
artificial capitalization of “einer” But he expects the reader to keep in mind what the previous capitalization of the
34
�(steht unter) the categories.76 The prior synthesis of the manifold of intuition can be brought to
the unity of apperception in a judgment. But the scope of this prior synthesis has to be
determined in order to rule out the worrisome possibility that some datum of sensibility might be
in me but nothing for me. The first half of the Deduction proceeded on the assumption that
whatever is in me, that whatever happens to be in my spatial and temporal forms of intuition,
really can be something for me. This assumption, it turns out, is equivalent to the assumption that
the pure manifold of sensible intuition provided by sensibility has already been synthesized into
a formal intuition.77 A formal intuition can then be conceptually grasped (begriffen) in an act of
judgment, which employs concepts (Begriffe). The second half of the Transcendental Deduction
aims at validating this assumption.
6. The Transcendental Deduction §§21-24 (first three paragraphs), § 26.
I must apologize in advance for belaboring certain points in this section. My hope is that
the overkill, though inelegant, will contribute to clarity.
The important passage from the Metaphysical Deduction that I quoted in Section 3 above,
bears requoting here.
words was intended to convey. Consider the first sentence of § 21; the note to that sentence; the second sentence of
§ 21, where he capitalizes “Einer” again; and the entire note in § 26, at B 160, beginning “Der Raum, als
Gegenstand vorgestellt….”
76
The expressions “stehen unter” in the title of § 20 and “steht unter” in the concluding sentence of § 20, do not
mean that all sensible intuitions are united in a judgment employing categories, but only that any and every sensible
intuition, because it has been antecedently synthesized by the imagination can be united by category application-which occurs when the synthesis already accomplished by the imagination is subsequently brought to concepts (A
79, B 104) in the act, “I think.”
77
On “formal intuition” vs. mere “form of intuition” (the latter is all that sensibility considered by itself contains),
see again B 160, note. We shall return to this distinction shortly.
35
�The same function that gives unity to the synthesis of various representations in a
judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an
intuition; and this unity, in its most general expression, we entitle the pure concept
of the understanding. The same understanding, through the same operations by
which in concepts, by means of analytical unity, it produced the logical form of a
judgment, also introduces a transcendental content into its representations, by
means of the synthetic unity of the manifold in intuition in general.78
As I noted, this passage claims that the categories, derived a priori not from intuition but from
the understanding, can through their unifying function be applied to sensible intuition and make
knowledge possible. On the basis of the first half of the Transcendental Deduction, we can begin
to appreciate Kant’s earlier statement, here in the Metaphysical Deduction, that the category
“gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition.” The unity effected
by the category, is itself a synthesis. But it presupposes a synthesis, which in this passage from
the Metaphysical Deduction Kant calls a “mere” (blossen) synthesis, presumably because it
produces only contiguous unity of temporal and spatial representations. But once synthesized at
this level, these representations can be accompanied by the “I think,” in a synthesis that is
anything but “mere,” for it produces conceptual unity. As Kant put the matter at the end of § 16,
I am conscious to myself a priori of a necessary synthesis [of representations],
which is called the original synthetic unity of apperception, under which all
78
A 79, B 105.
36
�representations that are given to me must stand, but under which they must also
be brought by means of a synthesis.79
The first synthesis mentioned in this sentence can be called a “higher-order synthesis.” It is the
chief theme of the first half of the Deduction. The second synthesis mentioned in this sentence is
a “lower-order synthesis.” It is the chief theme of the second half of the Deduction.
The passage from the Metaphysical Deduction that I have now quoted twice ends with a
curious formulation that is easy to overlook, given all the other interesting things Kant says
there. In speaking of “intuition in general,” Kant is clearly speaking of sensible, not intellectual,
intuition which, to repeat, we do not possess. But he is not speaking exclusively of our sensible
intuition. By sensible intuition in general, Kant means neither an intellectual intuition nor our
special sensible intuition, that is, our spatio-temporal sensible intuition. If there are other finite
but thinking beings, then they too possess a merely sensible intuition; but it need not be a spatiotemporal sensible intuition.80 We cannot know what alternative form(s) of sensible intuition
other finite thinking beings would possess, or even if there are such beings (angels?), like us in
possessing sensible intuition, but unlike us in possessing a sensible intuition different from ours.
79
“[I]ch mir einer notwendigen Synthesis [gegenbenen Vorstellungen] a priori bewusst bin, welche die
ursprünglische synthetische Einhiet der Apperzeption heisst, unter der alle mir gegenben Vorstelungen stehen, aber
unter die sie auch durch eine Synthesis gebracht werden müssen.” B 135-36. Cf. Jonathan Bennet (Kant’s Analytic,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, 112) points out that Norman Kemp Smith inserts the word “first”
into his translation of the concluding clause: “…but under which they have also first to be brought by means of a
synthesis.” Kemp Smith’s translation is indeed inaccurate, but as an interpretation it is on target. See the use of
“first” (erste) at A 78, B 104; and especially at B 152: “die erste Anwendung…,” a formulation that we shall
consider further in what follows. Regarding the formulation in quoted text above, “but under which they must also
be brought by means of a synthesis,” consider A 78, B 103: “[T]o bring this synthesis [accomplished by the
imagination] to concepts is a function that belongs to the understanding,” and A 78, B 104”: “What transcendental
logic teaches is how we bring to concepts…the pure synthesis of representations.” (Emphasis in the original in both
these sentences.)
80
As forms of sensible intuition, space and time allow for manifolds to be given simultaneously and successively.
But there is no reason in principle why manifolds could not be given some other way than simultaneously and
successively, though we cannot imagine, i.e., form an image of, other modes of receptivity besides these two. There
is no analytic connection between the concept of receptivity and the concepts of spatiality and temporality.
37
�Kant is not just indulging his fancy by entertaining the possibility of a sensible intuition
other than ours. The notion of a sensible intuition in general plays an important role in the
argument of the second half of the Deduction. 81 These are the points Kant wishes to make: (1)
The categories of their very nature have a relation to sensible intuition. (2) There is no reason to
think that our sensible intuition is the only sensible intuition that is possible. (3) Because the
categories are not derived from our sensible intuition, they are in their application not restricted
to our sensible intuition, though this application is of no cognitive use to us. (4) And so, since the
categories do not of their very nature refer to our specifically spatio-temporal intuition, it is
possible to think, without contradiction, of a-spatial and a-temporal things, though by means of
the categories we can know nothing of them.82 Finally (5), on this interpretation of the broad
scope of category application, the locus of the categories in the a priori forms of judgment is
reasserted. If the categories of their own nature had a relation only to our specifically spatiotemporal intuition, one might suspect, falsely, that they were somehow derived from spatiotemporal intuition, as empirical judgments are derived from experience. If, per impossibile, the
81
See B 148: “The pure concepts of the understanding are free from this limitation [i.e., restriction to spatiotemporal objects] and extend to objects (g) of intuition in general, be [the intuition] similar to ours or not, if only it
be sensible.” Cf. B 146: “space and time are the only forms of our [!] possible intuition”; B 150: first sentence of §
24; B 159: first two sentences of § 26—note the distinction here between “objects (g) of a [sensible] intuition in
general” and “whatever objects (g) may present themselves to our [!] senses” (emphasis in the original); B 161: note
the formulation “combination of the manifold of a given [= sensible] intuition in general ” in relation to the
formulation “…in so far as the combination is applied to our [!] sensible intuition” (both emphases in the original);
and B 72 (in a part of the Transcendental Aesthetic that appears only in the second edition.) In § 20, which
concludes the first half of the Deduction, Kant says that all sensible intuitions as subject to the categories. The full
force of this sentence does not become clear until the first paragraph of § 23. John Wetlaufer, in an important but
underappreciated article, “On the Transcendental Deduction: Some Problems of Interpretation and Elements of a
New Reading” (Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 5:1, 1975, 113–131), places appropriate emphasis on Kant’s
distinction between our sensible intuition and a sensible intuition in general (126-127).
82
If we had other forms of sensible intuition, in addition to, or even instead of, space and time, their manifolds too
would be subject to the categories. We would still not in any way know things-in-themselves by means of the
categories. For things-in-themselves, according to Kant, cannot be given in any sensible intuition, be it like or unlike
ours. Knowledge by means of the categories is limited to what can be antecedently given to sensible intuition. What
is given to sensible intuition—vs. what is produced, or created, by intellectual intuition—are not things (inthemselves) but mere representations (Vorstellungen) of things. These representations, mere pointillistic sense data
prior to the syntheses carried out by the faculty of spontaneity, are not extra-mental things but only the effects that
extra-mental things produce on our (finite) mind. These representations are, however, worked up by the
understanding via its categories into that law-governed whole of phenomena that goes by the name of “nature.”
38
�categories were derived from the forms of intuition that characterize our passive faculty of
sensibility, they could not play the role Kant assigns to them in our active faculty of the
understanding.
Having spoken in §§ 22-23 of the relation of categories to sensible intuition in general,
Kant turns in § 24 to the relation of categories to our sensible intuition. Here he distinguishes
between (1) the original synthetic unity of apperception, the “I think,” which constitutes what I
have called the “higher-order” order synthesis and which Kant calls “intellectual,” and (2) the
“lower-order” synthesis, which he calls “figurative.”83 The latter synthesis is accomplished by
the imagination, more precisely, by what Kant calls the productive imagination, which is also a
priori and hence is distinct from the reproductive imagination, the latter being subject to
empirical laws of association and not a priori.84 The productive imagination is responsible for
the original synthesis of the pure a priori manifold of space and time. As a result of this original
synthesis, any empirical manifold, any data entering space and time from outside the mind, gets
synthesized as a matter of course.
Though the Transcendental Aesthetic spoke of the a priori forms of intuition, space and
time, as though they were originally present to us as already unified, the question of how they
come to possess unity was temporarily suppressed. It resurfaces in the second half of the
Transcendental Deduction. According to Kant, even the mere togetherness of points in empty
space or of moments in empty time is a product of the synthetic activity of the understanding,
construed not narrowly as judgment solely but broadly as combination in general.85
83
B 151.
B 152.
85
For some places where Kant speaks of manifold of pure or a priori intuition (as distinct from a manifold of
empirical or a posteriori intuition, i.e., a manifold of sense data), see A 77, B 103; A 78-79, B 104; A 99-100; B
130; B 140; B 150; B 160, note.; cf. B 202-203.
84
39
�Combination, then, takes two distinct forms: what is accomplished by the productive imagination
and what is accomplished by apperception. Time itself undergoes the synthesis of the productive
imagination, without which it would be only a manifold of moments. It would not be one
continuously flowing time. The synthesis of time is not an accomplishment of sensibility, for this
faculty is, again, only passive. Synthesis, or combination, however, is active; and “all
combination—whether we become (werden) conscious of it or not, whether it is a combination
of the manifold of intuition, or of various concepts…is an act of the understanding.” And yet, to
repeat, the original synthesis of time is not an act of judgment, an apperceptive synthesis, but a
synthesis that precedes this. In what is the most helpful footnote in the Transcendental
Deduction, Kant writes.
Space represented as object (g) (as we need to do in geometry) contains more than
more form of intuition, [it also contains] combination (Zusammenfassung) of the
manifold, given according to the form of sensibility, in an intuitive representation,
so that the form of intuition gives only a manifold, the formal intuition gives unity
of representation. In the Aesthetic I have reckoned this unity as belonging merely
to sensibility, in order to note that it precedes any concept, although, as a matter
of fact, it presupposes as syntheses that does not belong to the senses but through
which all concepts of space and time first become possible. For since by its means
(in that the understanding determines sensibility) space and time are first given as
intuitions, the unity (Einheit) of this a priori intuition belongs to space and time,
and not to the concept of the understanding. 86
86
B 160, note.. Why Kant says in this context that the understanding, and not the imagination, determines sensibility
we shall consider below.
40
�The a priori synthesis of time, as the form of inner sense, is eo ipso the a priori synthesis of
space, as form of outer space. For whatever I am conscious of as being in space, I am also
conscious of as being in time, if only as enduring motionless against the flow of time. In this
way, the a priori synthesis of time affects whatever material or empirical content is received a
posteriori in space and time from sources outside the mind. This “figurative synthesis,” Kant
also calls “the transcendental synthesis of the imagination.”
Immediately after identifying the figurative synthesis and the transcendental synthesis of
the imagination, Kant writes, “Imagination is the faculty of representing in intuition an object (g)
that is not itself present.”87 Imagination can do this in fantasy, of course, and it has an especially
important role to play in artistic production.88 But it also does this in the recollection, memory,
retention, anticipation, and expectation of such things as colors, sounds, and actual objects of
experience. This is the work of the empirical or reproductive synthesis of the imagination. But
the imagination, as transcendental and productive, retains the past moments of pure time
themselves in intuition, prior to and independently of the particular empirical content of what
happens to be met with in time. Similarly, the imagination functioning at this a priori level also
anticipates the future moments of pure time themselves in intuition. This synthesis accomplished
by the productive imagination makes what is in one sense “absent”—the “no-longer” and the
“not-yet”—in another most peculiar sense “present” or, perhaps better, “quasi-present”89
Without this foundational transcendental synthesis of the imagination, a thoroughgoing empirical
and reproductive synthesis of sense data given from without not be possible. Without the
transcendental synthesis of the imagination, the manifold of pure intuition itself would be only a
87
B 151 “Einbildungskraft ist das Vermögen, einen Gegenstand auch ohne dessen Gegenwart in der Anschauung
vorzustellen.” (Emphasis in the original.)
88
Kant also speaks of the imagination as productive, not only in artistic production, but in even in a judgment of
taste. Critique of Judgment, “General Remark” following § 22.
89
The imagination accomplishes these syntheses in what Husserl will later call “retention” and “protention.”
41
�manifold of unconnected points in space and time, a manifold of pure discreta. But, one might
object, we cannot imagine unconnected points in space and time. Exactly! We cannot do such a
thing, Kant would reply, because to imagine points in space and time is precisely to combine
them. Pure, or empty, space and time, considered apart from the transcendental synthesis of the
imagination, are forms of intuition only. The points of pure space and time are originally
unconnected because they belong to a faculty of the mind, sensibility, that is, considered by
itself, simply passive and receptive. As formal intuitions, however, space and time can be
analyzed. They can be divided indefinitely into smaller and smaller elements. And that means,
for Kant, that they were originally synthesized. These formal intuitions, as synthesized wholes,
owe the unity they possess to the transcendental synthesis of the imagination. The members,
elements, or data of the manifold, pure or empirical, that is synthesized by the imagination are
side by side contiguously in space and they succeed one another contiguously in time. But they
are not just somehow stuck together. The effect of the synthesis accomplished by the imagination
is that each element of the synthesized manifold refers, or “points,” from within outward and
beyond itself, to other spatially and temporally contiguous elements.90 At every moment of my
mental life, I am retaining past moments and anticipating future moments. As retained and
anticipated, these moments are both present and not present, though in two different senses of
“present,” in different senses that we are manifestly aware of in temporal consciousness. These
difference between the immediate presence of “the now,” and the imagined presence of the “no
longer” and the “not yet,” we can describe, since we all recognize it. But we cannot explicate the
difference between these two senses of “present” beyond attending to it and describing it.
90
Compare Hegel, Encyclopedia - Philosophy of Nature §§ 255-259..
42
�To illustrate with a few examples from experience: In the middle of listening to a piece of
music, say, a simple melody, I retain what I have just heard and I anticipate what I am about to
hear.91 When listening to a symphony, I retain, depending on the capacity of my tonal memory,
what I have already heard, and I anticipate what I am about to hear. Even when I anticipate
incorrectly and get a surprise, the surprise is effective because there was an immediately
preceding anticipation that went “unfulfilled” (as Husserl will say). Without that anticipation, no
surprise would be possible. In watching a leaf fall, I am aware of its falling by means of my
imagination’s making what is absent, the immediate past and the immediate future, present or
quasi-present. When turning my head and looking about this room, I retain what I have just seen
and I anticipate what I am about to see. Even when staring fixedly at an immobile object, say, a
painting, my awareness that it is not moving is made possible by seeing that it is now what and
where it was a moment ago, or even an hour ago.
To return from the empirical to the a priori, Kant says that the transcendental synthesis of
the imagination is
an action (Wirkung) of the understanding [!] on sensibility; and is its first
application (and thereby the ground of all its other applications) to the objects (g)
of our possible intuition.92
91
This happens even at first note of the melody. It is by retaining in imagination the absence of a prior note that I
hear this one as the first note, as the beginning. And at the last note of the melody, something comparable happens. I
anticipate the absence of a following note, especially if the melody is tonal and the last note is the tonic.
92
B 152. The use of the expression “first application,” to say nothing of “ground,” in this passage should remove
any doubt one might have that the transcendental synthesis of the imagination precedes and conditions the a priori
apperceptive synthesis, as well all a posteriori synthesis of empirical representations or data. Already in the
Aesthetic Kant has said, at B 67, “that which, as representation, can precede (vorhergehen) any and every act of
thinking, is intuition”—a formulation that takes on considerable weight in light of the note at B 160-161. Consider A
79, B 104. “The concepts…give unity (Einheit) to this pure synthesis [i.e., the synthesis of the imagination].” Kant
virtually defines thinking (Denken) as “the act (Handlung) of bringing the synthesis of a manifold, given to the
understanding from elsewhere in intuition, to the unity of apperception.” B 145. In a note to the Preface of the
43
�So the imagination is not a third distinct faculty situated between the distinct faculties of
sensibility and the understanding, as certain passages in the first edition of the Transcendental
Deduction have mislead some to think.93 The imagination is the understanding itself—but qua
acting on what is available to it from sensibility, at the transcendental level by acting on the
manifolds of pure temporal and spatial discreta. By connecting these discreta, the imagination
bestows unity on space and time. It turns them from forms of intuition into formal intuitions, and
thereby makes possible a priori sciences of them, geometry most obviously.94 But it also makes
possible an a priori science of the architectonic propositions of nature in general.
Without the transcendental synthesis of the imagination, our a priori forms of intuition
would be, strange to say, porous, like a net. All sensory data entering the mind from without
would be, by virtue of entering it, in me. But those data that did not caught in fabric of the net,
that slipped through the gaps in it, could become nothing for me. By virtue of the transcendental
synthesis of the imagination, there are no “gaps” in our forms of intuitions. They are formal,
which is to say unified, intuitions. They are not porous.
Kant understands the figurative synthesis of the imagination to be, qua synthesis, an
expression of the spontaneity of the human understanding, which he says is responsible for
whatever synthetic features our representations exhibit—and these features are synthetic because
they can be analyzed, or broken down into smaller parts. The understanding as spontaneity is at
second edition, where Kant is speaking of his Refutation of Idealism, he distinguishes between “empirical
consciousness” and “intellectual consciousness;” and he says that the latter precedes (vorangeht) consciousness of a
relation to something outside me. He is speaking there of the priority of apperception to consciousness of anything
empirical whatsoever.
93
Consider A 124, where a pure imagination is said to be “one of the fundamental [!] faculties of the human soul.”
94
Arithmetic also makes use of space. I count two spatial objects, e.g., two fingers ( B 15-16). But I could in
principle count any discrete spatial objects. Because counting does not rely on any particular spatial object and its
particular features, arithmetic is also an a priori science.
44
�work, and it is at work on two levels. But it is not compelled to be at work at all. It is at work by
virtue of what it is. Kant says,
It is one and the same spontaneity that, in the one case, under the name (unter den
Namen) of the imagination, and in the other, under the name of the understanding,
brings combination to the manifold of intuition.95
Though the vast majority of my representations are never attended to by the “I think” in a
specifically intellectual synthesis, they are all effected by the figurative synthesis.96 The
intellectual synthesis that takes place in the apperceptive act, “I think,” is the accomplishment of
the faculty of spontaneity’s judging, under the “name” of the understanding, this or that item
within the figurative synthesis that has already been accomplished by the same faculty of
spontaneity, under the “name” of the imagination. What the faculty of spontaneity accomplishes
in the figurative synthesis is the preparation of the entirety of sensibility, both its intrinsic, a
priori, and pure manifold of intuition, and its contingent, a posteriori and empirical filling, for
explicit category application in the intellectual synthesis that occurs when the “I think”
accompanies a particular representation in a judgment.97 The figurative synthesis is in fact
performed with reference to a possible, hence subsequent, intellectual synthesis, whether or not
the latter synthesis is actually performed in the case of a given empirical representation,
95
B 162, note b (emphasis added). Cf. B 153: “The understanding, under the title (unter der Benennung) of a
transcendental synthesis of the imagination….” Compare B 152: “[The imagination’s] synthesis is an exercise
(Ausübung) of spontaneity….Imagination is spontaneity.”
96
By “representations” here, I exclude the elemental and unconnected manifold data of intuition, since prior to the
figurative synthesis of the imagination, we are not even marginally, much less thematically, conscious of them. We
are not and cannot be conscious of mere discreta, certainly not of unconnected points in pure, empty space and
unconnected moments in pure, empty time, for consciousness is essentially synthetic. As for empirical discreta, such
as separate and small points of color in space and separate and brief sounds in time, these are still synthetically
connected to the stretches of space and time that surround them. It is that very connection to the surrounding space
and time that enables us to be conscious of distinct points of color as separate from each other and of intermittently
occurring sounds as separate from each other.
97
Compare Aristotle, De Anima, 431b3: “ta men oun eidē to noētikon en tois phantasmasi noei…”
45
�synthesized by the imagination. It is the intimate relationship between these two syntheses that
enables Kant to understand them as two operations of one and the same spontaneity.
Had Kant treated the imagination as a third faculty of the human mind, situated between
and distinct from both sensibility and the understanding, he would have had to show not only
that and how the faculty of the imagination is related to a faculty of sensibility distinct it—which
is difficult enough to show, but which he does show in §§ 24 and 26—he would also have had to
show that and how the faculty of the understanding is related to a faculty of the imagination
ostensibly distinct from it. Kant’s understanding of the human mind as irreducibly two-fold—as
sensibility and the understanding—generates for him the formidable task of showing that, and
how, these two heterogeneous cognitive faculties can fit together so as to yield knowledge
(albeit of what is in space and time only). If he understood the human mind as irreducibly threefold—the faculty of sensibility and the faculty of understanding, and also, between these two, a
separate faculty of imagination—his task would have been impossible to fulfill. By construing
the synthesis of the imagination and the synthesis of apperception as two teleologically related
accomplishments—a lower-order synthesis for the sake of a higher-order synthesis—of “one and
the same faculty of spontaneity,” Kant is disburdened of this impossible task.
But, one might ask, has he not thereby made things too easy for himself. I think not.
There is nothing contradictory about one faculty functioning at two levels. A comparison might
help here. It is by one and the same “faculty” that I both pick up a hammer and subsequently
hammer a nail with it. I cannot do the latter without doing the former, though I can do the former
without doing the latter. And yet I am doing, with one and the same “faculty,” both things. What
is distinctive about the figurative synthesis of the productive imagination and the subsequent
46
�intellectual synthesis of apperception is that both are “doings,” unlike sensibility which is a
passive and receptive “being done to,” only.
The combination that allows for human knowledge, as distinct from sensation merely,
requires a priori the following: (1) a given manifold, a plethora of discrete “pointillistic” data,
which is the original content of sensibility; (2) a putting together of these data, side by side and
one after the other, which is accomplished by the imagination; and (3) an expressly conceptual
unifying of this togetherness, which is accomplished by the “I think” in an act of judgment. The
bare “given-ness” of the manifold, whether pure or empirical, is all that sensibility by itself
provides. The putting together, simultaneously and successively, of the manifold, and the
subsequent conceptual unifying of what has been put together, are the two different syntheses
accomplished by one faculty of combination, that is, of spontaneity, or the understanding
construed broadly. The first synthesis is for the sake of the latter synthesis.
I noted earlier that the second edition version of the Deduction contains what appears to
be an overstatement. It occurs in the concluding paragraph of § 26.
As mere representations, [appearances] are subject to (stehen unter) no law of
connection (Verknüpfung) save what the connecting faculty (das verknüpfnede
Vermögen) prescribes. Now it is imagination that connects the manifold of
sensible intuition; and imagination is dependent for the unity (Einheit) of its
intellectual [!] synthesis upon the understanding, and for the manifoldness of its
apprehension upon sensibility. All possible perception is thus dependent upon
synthesis of apprehension, and this empirical synthesis in turn upon
transcendental synthesis, and therefore upon the categories. Consequently, all
47
�possible perceptions, and therefore everything that can [!] come to empirical
consciousness, that is, all appearances of nature must, so far as their connection is
concerned, be subject to the categories.98
In this passage, Kant is emphasizing the dependency of all that we can be conscious of a
posteriori, on the categories. What is surprising is his speaking of an intellectual synthesis
accomplished by the imagination. For, as we have seen, a few pages earlier he identified the
transcendental synthesis of the imagination with figurative synthesis, and he contrasted it with
intellectual synthesis: “the intellectual synthesis…is carried out by the understanding alone
without aid of the imagination.”99 Kant also glossed “figurative synthesis” with the Latin
“synthesis speciosa”—and the word speiciosa (from specio—to see or look at) has a reference to
sight.100 In the above passage, Kant is arguing that perception is dependent upon the categories
by way of being conditioned by the unity accomplished a priori by the productive synthesis of
the imagination, which of course conditions everything than can be given to us in space and time,
sights most obviously, but perceptions of any kind. But how can Kant speak of an intellectual
synthesis of the imagination?
To address this question, let us return to the empirical example from § 19 that we briefly
considered earlier. I can say, “If I support a body, I feel an impression of heaviness.” According
98
B164. By consciousness (Bewusstsein), Kant typically means not just any awareness, however so vague or
“marginal,” but the apperceptive act in its reference to an already synthesized intuition. Hence when Kant writes
here, “everything that can come to empirical consciousness,” he is thinking of anything that be a matter of
experience. And by “experience” he typically means not just any awareness but empirical cognition (B 161, 166,
218). Kant uses “can” here as he used “must be able to” in the first sentence of § 16 (which I commented on earlier),
and with the same import.
99
B 152.
100
In the Metaphysical Deduction, at A 78, B 103, Kant wrote of the imagination that it is “a blind, but
indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are
scarcely ever conscious.” This sentence, though preserved in the second edition, was part of the first edition, as was
the passage at A 79, B 105 where Kant spoke of a “mere” synthesis. As Kant explicates the performance of the
imagination in the second edition, it turns out that its synthesis is not exactly “blind” after all. And its synthesis is
“mere” only in the sense that it is not a judgment.
48
�to Kant, this formulation possesses only subjective validity. It says something about me, about
what I feel. But if I employ the copula “is,” I make a judgment, and it possesses objective
validity.
To say, “The body is heavy,” is not merely to state that the two representations
have always been conjoined in my perception, however often that perception is
repeated; what we are asserting is that they are combined in the object, whatever
the state of the subject may be.101
The two representations are “body” and “heavy.” Each of these two representations, taken by
itself, is a synthesis of a manifold. These representations are not a mere multiplicity of sense
data. They are perceptual representations, apprehended through sight and touch; and, as Kant has
said, even perception is subject to the categories. So the perceptions of both “body” and “heavy”
are subject to the categories; but neither the individual body, seen as extended, nor its particular
heaviness, felt as pressure, is an object (o), strictly so called. One can say that each of these is an
object in the sense of a Gegenstand. But because neither of them, in the two perceptions
achieved by the synthesis of the imagination, is yet judged, neither is yet an object in the sense of
an Objekt.102 For if they were objects in this latter sense, then concepts would be used in the
synthesis of them that is accomplished by the imagination.103 Kant has said, however,
101
B 142 (emphasis in the original).
In this connection see B 234 – A 191, B 236, where Kant distinguishes between loose and strict use of the word,
Objekt.
103
B 137.
102
49
�Concepts are based on the spontaneity of thinking (Denkens)….The only use the
understanding can make of concepts is to judge by means of them…. Thinking is
cognition (Erkenntnis) through concepts.104
Perceiving is not thinking; it is not judging. Still, what the imagination has synthesized—in this
case body and heaviness—has a reference, according to its very sense, to a possible judgment. It
is in this sense, and only in this sense, that each of these two representations of perception is
subject to the categories. But when these two representations are actually brought to concepts in
a judgment, something new emerges, not merely two representations, even two Gegenstände, a
seen body and a felt heaviness, but an Objekt, in which the two representations are combined,
indeed unified, in the apperceptive act, I think. This empirical judgment, “The body is heavy,” is,
to be sure, not deducible from what is accomplished at the a priori level. It presupposes
experience. But though a posteriori, the judgment is made possible by, and must conform to,
what is accomplished at the a priori level.
The above passages shed should make more understandable the implication of the first
sentence of § 16 that, though not every one of my representations, even when construed as
having an inner unity produced by synthesis of the imagination, is in fact accompanied by the “I
think,” it can be accompanied by it. The inner unity of space and of time, which they possess by
being elevated from mere forms of intuitions to formal intuitions, is a unity that, Kant says,
“precedes any concept.” But, he also says, “it presupposes a synthesis,” by means of which “the
understanding determines sensibility.”105 One might have expected him to say that, in this
synthesis, “the imagination determines sensibility.” But he is using the term, “understanding,”
104
105
A 68-69, B 93-94.
B 160, note.
50
�broadly, as spontaneity and combination of any kind and at any level. He uses the term
“understanding” broadly this way not only in second edition of the Transcendental Deduction,
but in the first edition as well:
The unity of apperception in reference (or relation, Beziehung) to the synthesis of
the imagination is the understanding, and this same unity, with respect
(beziehungsweise) to the transcendental synthesis of imagination, [is] the pure
understanding.106
This sentence is actually a definition of the faculty of understanding, broadly construed, which is
so far from being a faculty distinct from the imagination that it said here to be precisely the
reference of the “I think” to what the imagination, by synthesizing the manifold of intuition,
offers to it, originally at the a priori level, and subsequently at the empirical level.107 Since there
would be no productive synthesis of the imagination at all without its having a necessary relation
to a possible judgment, the inner unity of a formal intuition, which is accomplished by the
productive synthesis of the imagination, is said to depend upon the categories.108 The figurative
106
A 119 (emphasis in the original). Compare the sentence occurring at A 118: “Thus the transcendental unity of
apperception refers itself (bezieht sich) to the pure synthesis of imagination.” In an unpublished fragment, Kant
writes, “The unity of apperception in relation to the faculty of imagination is the understanding.” Notes and
Fragments (translated by Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rauscher, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005—from the series, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant.), 258. Immediately following
this sentence, Kant has written the one word, “Rules,” after which he expatiates further along the lines of the second
clause quoted in the text above.
107
The distinction between or “originally” and “subsequently,” or between a priori and a posteriori, should not be
taken in a literally temporal sense, as though there was some time when a priori operations alone took place, after
which empirical operations followed. Kant’s distinction between a priori and a posteriori should be understood only
in terms of what in cognition is, respectively, “founding” and “founded,” or between what the human mind supplies
out of its own resources and what is supplied to it from without. “[T]he impressions of the senses supplying the first
stimulus, the whole faculty of knowledge opens out to them (in Ansehung ihrer), and experience is brought into
existence” (A 86). “In the order of time…no knowledge in us precedes experience, and with experience all our
knowledge begins. But though all our knowledge begins with experience it does not follow that it all arises out of
experience.” (B 1—emphasis in the original.)
108
B 144 note: “[T]he unity of intuition, whereby an object (g) is given…always includes in itself a synthesis of the
manifold given for an intuition, and already contains the reference (Beziehung) of this manifold to the unity of
apperception.” (Emphasis added.). In § 24, Kant can speak of the understanding both as determining inner sense and
51
�synthesis and the intellectual synthesis are as intimately connected as is possible without being
simply identical.109 It is for this reason, I think, that Kant momentarily, and in opposition to what
he has said earlier, speaks of an intellectual synthesis of the imagination. The imagination would
not be what it is without its intrinsic reference to the unity of apperception.
The Transcendental Deduction, with all its twists and turns, returns in § 26 to the claim
made in § 15 that
all combination—whether we become conscious of it or not, whether it is a
combination of the manifold of intuition, or of various concepts…is an act of the
understanding. To this act the general name “synthesis” may be assigned….110
as thinking (i.e., judging): B 150: “the understanding, as spontaneity, is able to determine (bestimmen) inner sense
through the manifold of given representations in conformity with (gemäss) the synthetic unity of apperception, and
thus [so] to think synthetic unity of the apperception of the manifold of a priori sensible intuition….” And yet, in the
same section, at B 152, he can assign the first of these two but intimately related operations to the imagination: The,
the synthesis of the imagination “.insofar as it is an exercise of spontaneity… is able to determine sense a priori in
respect of its form in conformity with the unity of apperception….[I]ts synthesis of intuition, conforming as it does
to categories, must be the transcendental synthesis of imagination.” (Emphasis in the original.) That the manifold
representations of intuition must be capable of being combined in one consciousness, and that they thereby subject
to the conditions of the original-synthetic unity of apperception (B 136), whether are not they are attended to in an
act of judgment, is the reason why Kant can call the synthesis of the imagination both “figurative” and, in his
apparent overstatement, “intellectual.” Without this intrinsic reference of the imagination to the synthetic unity of
apperception the former would provide us with, at most, a mere “rhapsody of perceptions” (A156, B 195). Since for
Kant, the categories extend to objects (g) of a sensible intuition in general (B 148, 159, discussed in Section 6,
above), one might raise the question of whether those (hypothetically entertained) thinking and finite beings
different from us and possessing forms of sensible intuition different from ours would also need imagination to
synthesize the manifold of their sensible intuition prior to judgment. The answer is that they would definitiely need
imagination. But, no more for them than for us, would they need or even have an imagination independent of the
understanding. The imagination, as Kant makes amply clear, especially in the second edition version of the
Transcendental Deduction, is so to speak part and parcel of the understanding. For the very purpose of the
understanding, in the case of being whose intuition is only sensible, is to connect and unify what sensibility, taken
by itself, can only receive. From the great mass of data present in sensibility, but already synthesized figuratively by
the imagination, the “I think” selectively attends to, or “accompanies,” this or that representation, thereby
synthesizing it intellectually in a judgment.
109
John Wetlaufer speaks of the manifold in an intuition (synthesized by the imagination) as possessing a kind of
“pre-predicative unity.” (“On the Transcendental Deduction: Some Problems of Interpretation and Elements of a
New Reading,” 124). That’s sound right. But one could go a bit further and say that, for Kant, the manifold in an
intuition synthesized by the imagination possesses a “proto-predicative unity.” For it does not just precede
predication (or judgment); it has an intrinsic, anticipatory, and prefigured reference to a possible predication.
110
§ 15 B 130 (emphasis added). In this sentence, Kant writes, in reference to the manifold of intuition, “sinnlichen
oder nicht sinnlichen.” Because our understanding does not combine the manifold of an intellectual intuition, it has
52
�That, and how,111 one faculty—call it “synthesis in general,”112 “combination in general,”
“spontaneity” simply, or “understanding” broadly—accomplishes two distinct but intimately
related a priori syntheses is what Kant attempts to show in the Transcendental Deduction. The
validity of the argument of the Transcendental Deduction, which is progressive and synthetic
throughout, stands or falls with the success or failure of this attempt.
Representations synthesized in me virtue of the productive synthesis of the imagination,
which conditions all reproductive and empirical syntheses of the imagination, are not just in me.
Every representation, synthesized in me by virtue of the faculty of spontaneity “under the title of
the imagination,” can become an object (o) synthesized for me by virtue of the faculty of
spontaneity “under the title of the understanding.” And this is just what happens when I turn my
attention to something already synthesized by the imagination. From the fact that a
representation has been synthesized by the imagination it follows that it is, as Kant says, subject
to the categories, a formulation that means this much, but, as far as I can see, not more than this:
it is possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany it. This is what the Transcendental Deduction has
purportedly demonstrated. And so it can now be said, at the end of the Transcendental
Deduction, simply and without a qualifying clause:
It must be possible for the “I think” to accompany all my representations.
been proposed that this phrase be emended to “empirischen oder nicht empirischen.” It is conceivable, though just
barely, that Kant was thinking momentarily of an intuitive understanding—cf. supra fn. 19—which might well
combine, or rather create and order, the manifold of a “nicht sinnlichen” intuition. Yet in the continuation of the
sentence Kant speaks about how we represent things to ourselves. But whatever we are to make of the phrase,
“sinnlichen oder nicht sinnlichen,” Kant’s general claim in § 15 is clear, though controversial: whatever we can
analyze into parts, we ourselves have previously synthesized into wholes.
111
With, however, more to be said about “how” in the Schematism chapter.
112
Even in the first edition, Kant ties the imagination to conceptual unifying, i.e., to judgment, as two moments or
stages of synthesis, broadly construed. Cf., e.g., A 77-78, B103: “By synthesis in its most general sense, I mean the
act (Handlung) of putting different representations together and [!] of grasping what is manifold in them in one
cognition….[S]ynthesis is that which gathers (sammelt) the elements for cognition and [!] unites (vereinigt) them
into (zu) a certain content.”
53
�Period.
There can be only one source of unity, even if it is effective at two levels. I have emphasized the
productive synthesis of the imagination as “first”—following Kant: “the understanding’s first
application and the ground of all its other applications.” Kant may have thought that there was
never a time when an imaginative synthesis was occurring without apperception taking place.
Apperception is always directed to something synthesized. But, to repeat, not all that gets
synthesized by the imagination gets “apperceived.” The synthesis of the imagination includes
vastly more than does the synthesis of apperception.
It should be noted that the Transcendental Deduction does not depend on the specific
table of categories that Kant presents earlier in the Transcendental Analytic. Its conclusion
therefore holds whether or not the table is complete. But Kant has argued that the category of
ground and consequent is embedded in the hypothetical judgment—if p then q—as its unifying
function. It makes no sense to claim that we received this form of judgment from experience. It
is simply one of the ways in which the human mind thinks and must think. To the objection that
we cannot be so confident that how we humans think applies to things “outside” the mind, Kant
would respond, “Right on!” The categories apply only to appearances which, as such, are in
space and time, hence “inside” the mind.113 An appearance, as a distinct from a thing-in- itself,
exists only within, or as coordinated with, the human mind. So Kant grants, or rather insists on,
the inapplicability of the human mind’s categories to things “outside,” or beyond, or existing
independently of, the human mind, to things-in-themselves as distinct from appearances. But it is
113
I put “outside” and “inside” in quotations here, because these terms have spatial connotations, and space itself is,
for Kant, “inside” the mind. In the “Refutation of Idealism” (B 274-279), Kant sets out to prove “the existence of
objects (g) in space [!] outside me” (emphasis added). Contrary to what is occasionally said, he does not attempt in
the “Refutation of Idealism” to prove the existence of things-in-themselves in space outside me. For the latter are not
in space at all.
54
�the application of categories to intra-mental appearances that elevates them to objects (o), to
rule-governed features of an objective, hence inter-subjectively accessible, world of spatiotemporal experience, or nature.
The Transcendental Deduction does not purport to show in detail how the categories
apply to objects of experience. To answer the question of “how” more adequately, and that
means with reference to the table presented in the Metaphysical Deduction, Kant needs the
following “Schematism” chapter, the task of which is to show how each of the categories get
endowed with a temporal meaning. Nor does the Transcendental Deduction demonstrate the
individual a priori principles, or fundamental propositions (Grundsätze), among which is the a
priori synthetic judgment, “Every event has a cause.” These fundamental propositions need their
own proofs, and supplying them is the task of the chapter Principles” chapter, which purports to
demonstrate that these fundamental propositions are true and hold for nature as such, that is, that
they are true regardless of the particular empirical findings of natural science.114 These
propositions are not proven by, nor do they immediately follow from, the Transcendental
Deduction’s preparatory proof that the categories can be applied with right to appearances.
What the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic (the latter being only
first part of the Transcendental Logic) together purport to show is there are a priori synthetic
judgments, demonstratively true, and serving as general architectonic laws of nature, laws to
which special empirical laws—discovered a posteriori through experience—must conform, but
from which they cannot be derived, either by logical deduction or in any other way.115 Kant’s
114
See A.C. Ewing, A Short Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (London: Methuen & Co., Second
Edition, 1950), 134-135 for a helpful table coordinating in detail the various forms of judgment, categories,
schemata, and fundamental propositions.
115
B 163-165. If properly empirical laws were somehow deducible in their particularity from the architectonic laws
of nature, from the fundamental propositions treated in the “Principles” chapter, they too would be a priori and not
55
�grounding of natural science does not go so far as to endow specific empirical laws of nature
with the certainty that can hold only for a priori laws. But—assuming it is successful—this
grounding does demonstrate (1) that there must be causes for all events in nature, causes distinct
from and preceding the events themselves, (2) that these causes are also events in nature and
depend on further causes, which are also events, and (3) that the natural scientist who is engaged
in searching for causes is engaged in an objective enterprise. This is the advance that Kant has
made over Hume’s skepticism; and the modesty of this advance, given the extraordinary
complex and extended argumentation that Kant has to employ, can only deepen our respect for
the penetration of Hume’s insight into the problem of causality.
7. Reason and the Unconditioned
The Transcendental Analytic, with reliance on the Transcendental Aesthetic, aims at
demonstrating a set of a priori synthetic judgments that hold for everything that appears or can
appear to human mind. These are the fundamental propositions of a metaphysics of nature. The
The Transcendental Dialectic, aims at showing that the most venerable arguments of classical
metaphysics, arguments pertaining to things, not just as they appear to the human mind, but as
they are in themselves, are irremediably flawed. Such are the arguments advanced on behalf of
the immortality of the soul and arguments advanced on behalf of the existence of God. Such also
are the arguments advanced for the limited or unlimited extent of the world in space and time,
and arguments for and against freedom of the will. These last two, and arguments relating to
empirical at all. That empirical laws of nature in their particularity and interconnectedness are not constituted, or
even anticipated, a priori is, for Kant, a source of “a marked pleasure, even of admiration (Bewunderung),” as they
should be for all of us. Critique of Judgment, Introduction, VI (Werke Band 8, 261). Kant realizes that, even on his
interpretation of the human mind, there are limits to what it constitutes in the phenomenal realm (to say nothing of
the noumenal realm).
56
�them, generate, Kant tries to show, antinomies—or opposed conclusions—by logically valid
proofs that are nonetheless unsound because they assume without warrant that space and time,
and the sum of appearances in space and time called nature, have an existence independent from
our minds. A solution to the antinomies, Kant holds, is possible only if we make the distinction
between nature, as the sum of appearances in space and time, and things-in-themselves. The
existence of the Antinomies is not deduced from the argument of first part of the Critique, but is
met with, Kant argues, in the investigation of nature itself. The existence of the Antinomies
serves, then, as an independent confirmation of the argument of the first part of the Critique.
That argument can, however, be appealed to in working out a solution to the Antinomies.
According to Kant, the inconclusive proofs and contradictory conclusions that have
marred the history of metaphysics have arisen from the attempts of speculative reason to
comprehend what he calls “the Unconditioned,” that is, an ultimate uncaused cause or ground of
all that, on inspection, presents itself as conditioned. Kant maintains that we set out in quest for
the Unconditioned, not because of a mere psychological need, be it hubris, insecurity, fear of the
death, unwillingness to gaze into the abyss, or what have you, but because this quest is
demanded—Kant even says commanded—by reason itself.116 Dialectical illusion arises
unavoidably only to the extent that reason seeks its fulfillment, its telos, in a theoretical
apprehension of the Unconditioned. In the Canon of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant suggests
that reason might find its telos, the Unconditioned, not in theoria but in praxis, in the realm of
human willing and action. Turning this suggestion into a demonstration is initiated in the
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and is completed in the Critique of Practical Reason.
116
B xx; A 296, B 353.
57
�In the latter work, Kant attempts to show that reason can legislate an unconditional moral
law, a law expressing to us humans not what is, unconditionally, but what ought to be,
unconditionally. The word “ought”—when used in reference to human action—expresses an
imperative addressed to a rational being, who by virtue of his sensuous (or animal) nature, is
inclined to disobey it.
This [practical] rule … is, for a being in whom reason is not the sole determining
ground of the will [but who has inclinations that can be opposed to reason], an
imperative, that is, a rule that is designated by an “ought” (ein Sollen), which
expresses the objective (o) necessity of the act, and signifies that if reason entirely
determined the will the act would inevitably happen according to the rule.117
Kant agrees with Hume that “the ought” cannot be derived from “the is”—unless, of course, we
already endow “the is” with a moral character. But, that “the ought” cannot be derived from “the
is” does not mean that it is irrational. Quite the opposite. The “ought” is derived from the
conditional “would.” What I, a rational being encumbered by sensuous inclinations, ought to do
is what a rational being unencumbered by sensuous inclinations would do.118
117
Critique of Practical Reason. Book 1, Chapter 1, 1, Definition, Remark (Werke, Band 6, 126). Inclinations for
Kant pertain to the senses and feelings, to what he calls the lower faculty of desire. The higher faculty of desire is
practical reason itself. See ibid. Chapter 1, Theorem 2, Remark 1 (129-133).
118
Though Kant defines obligation with reference to what a purely rational being, i.e., God, would do, he does not
derive the moral law from religious belief. Quite the opposite: “Even the Holy One of the Gospel must first be
compared with our ideal of moral perfection before he is recognized as such.” Groundwork of the Metaphysics of
Morals. Second Section, (James Ellington translation, Indianapolis IN: Hackett, 1981, 21); Werke, Band VI, 36.
Leo Strauss, who is generally worlds away from Kant in his understanding of morality, agrees with him that
morality does not come from religious belief. Quite the opposite: “One has not to be naturally pious, he has merely
to have a passionate interest in genuine morality, in order to long with all his heart for revelation: moral man as such
is the potential [!] believer.” The Law of Reason in the Kuzari (in Persecution and the Art of Writing, Glencoe IL:
The Free Press, 1952), 140. Kant would add that, since the moral law cannot issue from religion, even less from
experience, it can only issue from reason itself.
58
�Acting rationally means, minimally, not acting inconsistently. Acting inconsistently
means acting in opposition to what he calls the categorical imperative. 119 Kant gives several
formulations of the categorical imperative. I shall focus here on the formulation that is, in my
opinion, the clearest and least vulnerable to criticism.
Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the
person of another, always as an end [that is, as possessing intrinsic worth] and
never as a means, or instrument, merely [that is, as possessing worth only for
someone else.].120
Kant holds that every rational being must think of himself as an end. It is not possible for a
rational being, Kant says, to think of himself as mere means—as, we sometimes say, merely a
“doormat” for others to wipe their feet on. If I think that you have slighted me, I say naturally
something along the lines of, “Treat me like a human being.” I do not naturally say, “Treat me
like a person who lives three hundred miles north of here,” or “Treat me like a music lover,” or
“Treat me like a hunter.” I can say these latter things to be sure, and in certain very odd contexts
they may be exactly the right things to say.” But it is much more natural to say “Treat me like a
human being.” Now a human being is a rational animal. And since I do not mean, “Treat me like
an animal,” when I say “Treat me like a human being,” I must mean by this expression, “Treat
me like a rational being.”121 We insist on being treated as rational beings because we
immediately recognize that rationality, which is constitutive of our humanity, has intrinsic worth.
119
Kant also calls the categorical imperative the moral law, more precisely, the moral law as it holds for a rational,
but nonetheless finite being. An infinite rational being, or God (if he exists), acts according to the moral law. But the
moral law does not address him in the form of an imperative, since, unlike finite rational beings, he has no
inclination to act against it.
120
Werke, Band 6, 61: “Handle so, dass du die Menschheit, sowohl in deiner Person, als in der Person eines jeden
andern, jederzeit zugleich als Zweck, niemals bloss als Mittel brauchest.” Consider Thomas Aquinas, ST 2-2 q. 64
art. 2, ad 3: “man is naturally free and existing for himself” (homo est naturaliter liber et propter seipsum existens,).
121
I mean something similar when I say, “Treat me like an adult.” We understand an adult to have reached, as we
say, the age of reason and to be, as we also say, responsible for his actions.
59
�Reason has intrinsic worth because through it we humans, unlike irrationals animals, are oriented
to the Unconditioned.
Now, any reason I can give for why you should treat me as an end, and not a means
merely, is at the same time a reason that you can give for why I should treat you as an end and
not as a means merely.122 Reason, as such, ignores what is private about us, and speaks only to
what we have in common. If you are an end, and I treat you as a means merely, I am treating you
as something you are not. I am acting irrationally. For me to treat you as means merely is as
irrational as treating an automobile as a washing machine, or a shoe as a pencil. In fact, it is
much more irrational. For in these amusing cases, I would only be treating one thing as another
thing. But in treating you as a mere means, I am now treating a person as a thing;123 and that is
not so amusing. It is reason itself commands us not to act irrationally and opposition to the
categorical imperative, just as it commands us not to think irrationally and in opposition to the
principle of non-contradiction.124
122
If you say that you do not regard yourself as an end but as a means merely, I cannot prove that you are wrong,
though I can doubt that you are telling the truth. If, however, I come to think that you are telling the truth and really
do regard yourself as a means merely, then I have to be wary of the implications of how you regard yourself for how
you will treat me. Still, your regarding yourself as a mere means does not entitle me to treat you as a mere means,
not if I think you are mistaken in how you regard yourself. Should one assert, circumspectly and sotto voce of
course, that, though some human beings (the wise few?) are ends, others (the unwise many?) are means merely, i.e.,
that they are only things and not persons, Kant would respond that, until and unless a rigorous argument is advanced
on behalf of this assertion, it does not merit serious consideration. For it is too much at odds with how we actually
encounter and interact with others, especially with how we require them to treat us. We cannot reasonably require
those we treat as mere things to treat us as something other than mere things, or reasonably expect, or even hope,
that they will do so.
123
Consider Boethius’s definition of person, “A person is an individual substance of a rational nature,” and Thomas
Aquinas’s defense of this definition in Summa Theologiae 1, q. 29, art. 1. Boethius’ definition is elegant. An
individual substance of a non-rational nature is only a thing. A universal substance of a rational nature is only a
concept, such as a genus or a species. Compare Kant’s definition, which is in basic agreement with Boethius’s. “A
person is a subject whose acts admit of imputation. Moral personality is nothing other than the freedom of a rational
being under moral laws.” Metaphysics of Morals, Introduction IV “Preliminary Concepts.”
124
The categorical imperative (especially in the formulation considered above) causes, or should cause, the
phenomenal world itself to look differently that it would without it. See the striking formulation in the Critique of
Practical Reason, On the Deduction of the Fundamental Propositions of Pure Practical Reason: “This law is to
procure for the sensible world, as a sensible nature (regarding what pertains to rational beings), the form of an
intelligible, that is, of a supersensible, nature, though without interrupting the mechanism of the former.” (Dieses
60
�Kant understands the categorical imperative to be constituted by reason itself, which
precisely qua reason frames its propositions in the language of universals. This is true of
ordinary political legislation too; and it is true of speculative reason in all its ventures as well.
Because reason is not private but common, we can reason together, about both practical matters
and speculative matters. Reason has, we might say, “a mind of its own.” We can ignore reason,
to be sure. But doing so will lead to error, to falsity in speculation and to immorality in action.
There is a striking parallelism in the accounts of our relationship to others in the first and
second Critiques. Just as, in the Critique of Pure Reason, the possibility of intersubjective
agreement in theoretical matters is founded upon an objectivity made possible by distinguishing
between the empirical ego and the transcendental ego, so, in the Critique of Practical Reason,
the recognition of others as ends in themselves with respect to whom I have obligations is
founded on consciousness of the moral law as an expression of the ego, not as a bundle of
subjective inclinations, but as rational will articulating objective law. And just as the self that
knows by constituting objectivity differs in no essential way from other human knowers, so the
self that acts morally differs in no essential way from other human actors.125 The Critique of
Pure Reason grounds a metaphysics of nature, and the Critique of Practical Reason grounds a
metaphysics of morals. The dual metaphysics that emerges from these two critiques is an account
of human nature that harmonizes the modern conception of nature, the world of appearances
Gesetz soll der Sinnenwelt, als einer sinnliche Natur (was die vernünftigen Wesen betrifft), die Form einer
Verstandeswelt, d.i., einer übersinnlichen Natur verschaffen, ohne doch jener ihrem Mechanism Abbruch zu tun.
Werke, Band 6, 156.) Kant is saying here that, though we know (through the argument of the Transcendental
Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason) that all appearances in space and time, including the bodies of human
beings, are governed by thoroughgoing determinism, our consciousness of the moral law actually makes human
beings appear as persons, and not as spatio-temporal objects merely.
125
There are, of course, many empirical egos. But there are just as many transcendental egos, or—perhaps it would
be better to say—just as many instantiations of the transcendental ego, although in the rules of their proper operation
they do not differ from one another.
61
�standing under architectonic laws prescribed a priori by the human understanding, with the with
the ancient and medieval conception of man as teleological.
The Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason could seem to rule out the
very freedom that the Critique of Practical Reason presupposes. Such a thing would be
catastrophic for reason, for it would then be in conflict with itself. Kant attempts to solve this
problem by arguing that we human beings are members of two worlds, the world as it appears,
which (Kant argues) can be known to be exhibit thoroughgoing determinism, and the world as it
is “in itself,” which (Kant also argues) can be thought, without the slightest contradiction, to
have room for freedom. Both metaphysics are rooted ultimately in the consciousness that the ego
has of itself, as a synthesizing agent in the act of knowing and as a rationally autonomous agent
in the act of willing, the former characterized by spontaneity, the latter by freedom. 126 We have
already considered something of what Kant means by spontaneity, but we need to take a closer
look at it.
8. Empirical character and intelligible character
It is sometimes is sometimes said that, according to Kant, everything of which we are
conscious is subject to time. Whereas this is true of what we know in the strict sense of that
word, it is not true of what we are only conscious of. Knowledge always requires an intuition
adequate to the thing known.
126
In Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (concluding note to Part 1), Kant equates freedom with
spontaneity.
62
�In whatever manner and by whatever means a cognition may refer (beziehen) to
objects (g), intuition is that through which it immediately refers to them, and to
which all thought as a means is directed… Thought must…refer ultimately to
intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility because in no other way can an
object (g) be given to us.127
It is clear that in this passage, as in others that we have considered, Kant is concerned with how
objects are known, with how they are constituted. But what of the subject that engages in the act
of constituting objects? I do not mean here the empirical ego, with its particular perceptions,
feelings, memories, anticipations, hopes, fears, pleasures, pains, longings and the like, all of
which go into distinguishing you from me. For Kant, just as much as for Hume, the ego
understood this way is only a process of transitory perceptions and feelings. By the subject
engaged in the act of constituting objects I am speaking of the transcendental ego.
In his solution to the Third Antinomy, Kant does not base his argument for the possibility
of freedom on our consciousness of the moral law, for the latter does not get thematically treated
until the Critique of Practical Reason. In the solution to the Third Antimony, Kant argues for a
freedom that is presupposed by, but not yet identified with, properly moral freedom—a
“freedom-from,” one might call it, not yet identified with “freedom-for.” Kant says,
We should, therefore, in a subject belonging to the sensible world have, first, an
empirical character, whereby its actions (Handlungen) as appearances, stand in
thoroughgoing connection with other appearances in accordance with unvarying
laws of nature. And since these actions can be derived from the other
127
A 19, B 33.
63
�appearances, they constitute together with them a single series in the order of
nature.128
The “empirical character” of the subject is what makes it an empirical ago. Its actions are
appearances in time, and these are connected with other appearances, forming “a single
series in the order of nature.” In this sense the empirical ego or subject is entirely subject
to the principle of cause and effect. It is not free. But, Kant continues:
Secondly, we should also have to allow the subject an intelligible character, by
which it is indeed the cause of those same actions as appearances, but which does
not itself stand under any conditions of sensibility, and is not itself appearance.
We can entitle the former [i.e., the empirical character of the subject] the
character of such a thing as (or in) appearance, the latter [i.e., the intelligible
character of the subject] its character as thing-in-itself.
Now this acting subject would not, in its intelligible character, stand under any
conditions of time, for time is only the condition of appearances, not of things-inthemselves. In this subject [as a thing-in-itself], no action would begin or cease;
and it would not, therefore, have to conform to the law of the determination of all
that is alterable in time: that everything that happens must have its cause in the
appearances that precede it. In its causality [as a thing-in-itself], so far as it is
intellectual (intellektuell), it would not have a place in the series of those
128
A 539, B 567 ff.
64
�empirical conditions through which the event is rendered necessary in the world
of sense.129
Kant argues that the thing-in-itself can be consistently thought of as both free, because it is not in
time and thereby not subject to the schematized category of cause and effect, and yet also as a
cause, because without the thing-in-itself there would be no appearances (appearances being, for
Kant, appearances of something that does not itself appear). For these reasons the thing-in-itself
can be consistently thought of as a free cause, even a free will.
Kant removes the will from the phenomenal realm and lodges it in the noumenal realm of
things-in-themselves. But he also argues that the subject as thinking, and not only as willing,
must be thought of as thing-in-itself, and equally free from the thoroughgoing determinism of
nature.
Man is one of the appearances of the sensible world, and in so far one of the
natural causes, whose causality must stand under empirical laws. Like all other
things in nature he must have an empirical character. This character we observe
(bemerken) through the powers and faculties which he reveals in his actions. In
lifeless or merely animal nature we find no basis for thinking that any faculty is
conditioned otherwise than in a merely sensible manner. Man however, who
knows (kennt) all the rest of nature through the sense, cognizes himself (erkennt
129
Ibid., cont. Kemp Smith mistranslates intellektuell as “intelligible.” His note 3 (p. 468) suggests that he does not
understand exactly what is going on in this particular passage. The subject has an intelligible character, insofar as it
can be thought, and must be thought, apart from the data of sense-experience. But its activity is an intellectual (vs.
phenomenal) causality—not identical to an intellectual (i.e., divine) intuition, but imaging it, one might say.
65
�sich selbst) through pure apperception; and this indeed in inner acts and inner
determinations which he cannot reckon as impressions of the senses.130
Kant’s claim here that man “cognizes himself through pure apperception” is striking. For “pure
apperception” clearly means non-empirical apperception. Pure apperception is the act of the
transcendental ego. So this particular thing-in-itself, the transcendental ego, can be in some sense
known, or cognized, after all. But how is this possible if all concepts, pure as well as empirical,
have meaning and yield knowledge only of objects of possible experience,131 that is, knowledge
of what can be given to us from without—however our much our faculty of understanding in its
syntheses contributes to making what is given objective? Kant answers, more precisely he gives
us the means to answer, this question in the apparent digression from the argument of
Transcendental Deduction that I referred to earlier.
9. Transcendental Deduction, § 24 (last five paragraphs) - § 25.
The passages dealing with the intelligible vs. the empirical character of the ego that I
have quoted above occur in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Like most of what
occurs in the first edition, these passages are included in the second edition as well. In rewriting
the Transcendental Deduction for the second edition, Kant elaborates further on his conception
of the transcendental ego as active in thinking, not just in willing.
[The understanding’s] synthesis, therefore, if the synthesis be considered by itself
alone is nothing but the unity of the act, of which as an act, it is conscious to
130
A 546, B 574.
Kant claims at B 147 that even mathematical concepts yield knowledge only insofar as they can be applied to
empirical intuition. Cf. A 156, B 195.
131
66
�itself, even without sensibility, but through which it is yet able to determine
sensibility.132
When Kant says here, “if the synthesis be viewed by itself,” he means if it be considered
independently of exactly what it synthesizes. The unity of the act is the unity of the “I think.”
Thought is an act. It is, to be sure “empty”, without a corresponding intuition, for then it has no
content, it has nothing to synthetically grasp, that is, to conceptualize.133 It is for this reason that,
when Kant says that the understanding is conscious to itself of the unity of its act “even apart
from sensibility,” I understand him to mean that the act of the understanding can be isolated from
the particular content of sensibility that it is able to determine through its acts.134 Still, this selfconsciousness, as Kant elaborates it in the second edition of Transcendental Deduction, is not
knowledge strictly so-called.
[I]n the transcendental synthesis of the manifold of representations in
general, and therefore in the synthetic original unity of apperception, I am
132
B 153. Kemp Smith glosses “without sensibility” as “without the aid of sensibility.” The consciousness “I think”
is not consciousness of a manifold merely but rather consciousness of an act, albeit an act of synthesizing a
manifold. I interpret Kant to be arguing, not that the “I think” could occur even without any manifold, pure or
empirical, to synthesize, but only that self-consciousness, as occurring in the apperceptive act, does not rely on any
particular manifold given through sensibility, not even on the pure manifolds of the forms of sensible intuition that
are peculiar to us. Still, some form of sensible intuition must be given for the “I think” to be the act of synthesis that
Kant holds it to be. B 133; 135.
133
See B 422, note, concluding sentence.
134
See B 135. “The fundamental proposition of the necessary unity of apperception (the ‘I think’)…reveals the
necessity of a synthesis of the manifold given in intuition, without which the thoroughgoing identity of selfconsciousness cannot be thought” (emphasis added). What is at issue here is the identity of self-consciousness, its
identity over time, as distinct from the manifold of representations, which vary over time. Identity of selfconsciousness over time surely presupposes the unity of its act: the former is a consequence of the latter, not vice
versa.
67
�conscious (bewusst) of myself, not as I appear to myself, not as I am in
myself, but only that I am.135
Note the absence of the apophantic “as” in transcendental apperception. In transcendental
apperception I am conscious of myself, neither as I appear not as I am, but only that I am.136
Indeed, Kant has said earlier in the Deduction,
This fundamental proposition of the necessary unity of apperception is…an
identical, and therefore analytic proposition.137
The fundamental proposition is the very “I think” that can accompany all my representations.
The predicate “think” is analytically contained in the concept of the subject “I.” The ego is
conscious of itself in thinking, and thinking is, according to Kant, an act. The contradictory of
any analytic proposition is one that cannot be thought without contradiction, and the proposition
“I think” is no exception. The proposition, “I do not think,” is a proposition that I cannot think
without contradiction. But as an analytic proposition, or judgment, the “I think,” does not extend
my knowledge. The predicate only explicates what is already thought that in the subject.138
This representation [i.e., the original synthetic unity of apperception – the “I
think] is a thought, not an intuition. Now in order to know ourselves, there is
required in addition to (or beyond—ausser) the act of thought, which brings the
manifold of every possible intuition to the unity of apperception, a determinate
135
B 157. Consider the distinction Kant makes, in the Preface to second edition between “intellectual consciousness
of my existence” [which I possess] and “determination of my existence through intellectual intuition [which I do not
possess].” B xi (emphasis in the original).
136
There is a curious parallel between what Kant says here about the transcendental ego and what Thomas Aquinas
repeatedly says about God: we can know that he exists, but we cannot know his essence.
137
B 135.
138
Kant calls analytic judgments “explicative,” and synthetic judgments “ampliative.” Only the predicates in the
latter add something beyond what is already thought (even if confusedly thought) in the concept of the subject. A 7,
B 11.
68
�mode of intuition, whereby this manifold is given; it therefore follows that
although my own existence is not indeed appearance (still less illusion), the
determination of my existence can take place only in conformity with the form of
inner sense [i.e., time]….Accordingly I have no knowledge of myself as I am but
merely as I appear to myself. The consciousness of self is very far from being
knowledge of the self….I exist as intelligence, which is conscious solely of its
power of combination (Verbindungsvermögen); but in respect of the manifold
which it has to combine I am subject to a limiting condition (entitled inner sense),
namely, that this combination can be made intuitable only according to relations
of time, which lie entirely outside the concepts of the understanding strictly
regarded (eigentlichen Verstandesbegriffen).139
Mere consciousness of self is not genuine knowledge of self because it lacks the appropriate
intuition. By means of sensible, temporal intuition I can know myself as I appear. The
consciousness that “I am,” however, is not the consciousness of myself as just appearing
(whatever that might mean), but as being, as existing, unequivocally. But to this selfconsciousness I have no corresponding intuition, no intellectual intuition, that would enable me
to determine in what manner I exist, i.e., what I am in addition to that I am. Nonetheless mere
consciousness of self, though not knowledge properly so called, is not insignificant.
The “I think” expresses the act of determining my existence. Existence is already
given thereby, but the mode in which I am to determine this existence, that is, the
manifold belonging to it, is not thereby given.140
139
140
B 157 – B 159.
B 158, note.
69
�Kant emphasizes again that in the “I think,” existence is thereby given. “I think” (hence “I exist’)
is an analytic, indeed an identical proposition.”141
…since I do not have another self-intuition which gives the determining in me (I
am conscious only of the spontaneity of it) prior to the act of determination, as
time does in the case of determinable, I cannot determine my existence as that of a
self-active being.142
Note again that knowledge is the determination of what something is, determination through
concepts and intuition. “I cannot [in the “I think” of transcendental apperception] determine my
existence as a self-active being.” A self-active being would be active in the strongest sense of the
expression. It would be able act in relation to itself and not only in relation to what is given to it.
A self-active being would be would be self-determining or morally free. But, according to Kant,
consciousness of my synthetic, productive, and determining activity in relation to what is other
than me (a manifold of intuition, pure or empirical, to be united; or even diverse concepts to be
connected) is not conscious of self-determination. Whether I—as I am “in-myself”—am morally
free or not, or for that matter, immortal or mortal, remains unknown.
[All] that I can do is to represent to myself the spontaneity of my thought, that is
[the spontaneity] of the determination [or, more precisely, the spontaneity of the
act of determination]; and my existence is still only determinable, sensibly, that
is, as the existence of an appearance.” (Emphasis added).
141
Compare B 420-425 (from the Paralogisms) with B 131-135 and B 155-159 (both from the Transcendental
Deduction). If we take these passages together it looks as though a fourth possibility not explored in the Introduction
to the Critique of Pure Reason, and tempting to dismiss as nonsensical, is taken seriously by Kant. “I think” is an
analytic, but nonetheless empirical, proposition (or judgment). Only by making this claim, strange though it sounds,
can Kant both accomplish the task Transcendental Deduction and rule out the possibility of a proof for the
immortality of the soul. This matter requires further exploration, which, however, will not be undertaken here.
142
Ibid.
70
�To this Kant adds a qualification.
But it is owing to this spontaneity [of my thought] that I entitle myself an
intelligence.143
It is only consciousness of the spontaneity of thought that (assuming he did not change his mind
on this point) Kant must have been thinking of when, in the solution to the Second Antinomy, he
said that man “cognizes himself through pure apperception.”
We are now in a position to respond to one of the most common criticisms of the Critique
of Pure Reason, namely, that Kant applies the categories to the things-in-themselves, which
transcend any possible experience, by saying that they exist, even that they are causes. But in
doing so he violates his express claim that the categories, existence and cause among them, apply
only to objects of experience.
Kant cannot be rescued from this criticism solely by repeating his observation that the
categories can be used to think, though not to know, things-in-themselves. For we must really
know, and not just think, that at least one a-spatial, a-temporal thing-in-itself really does exist in
order to be able to say that our spatial, temporal experience is of appearances only and not of
things as they are in-themselves. The whole argument of the Critique of Pure Reason depends on
our knowing at least this much. Nor can Kant be rescued from the charge of applying the
categories to things that transcends any possible experience solely by saying that it is the unschematized categories, the categories without temporal meaning, that he applies to things-in-
143
Ibid.
71
�themselves. For Kant also teaches that, without this temporal meaning, the categories yield not
even the slightest knowledge of objects.144.
Of objects. But what does this say about the relation of categories to the subject, to the
ego itself? Here we note a curiosity: though Kant uses the expression “things-in-themselves,” in
the plural, to name the unknowable that lies behind appearances, he also frequently uses the
expression “the thing-in-itself,” in the singular, to name the same unknowable that lies behind
appearances. As far as I know, the only individual thing-in-itself that Kant ever says that we
know exists, the only thing that he says we know is not just a spatio-temporal appearance, is the
transcendental ego itself.145 Now, in transcendental apperception I am conscious that I am, but I
do not know what I am, for this self-consciousness lacks the intuition that would elevate it to
knowledge properly so called, to a knowledge that would determine my existence, to a
knowledge of what I am. And yet the consciousness that I am is surely, in some circumscribed
sense of the word, knowledge that I am. This knowledge that I am is highly restricted in that 1) it
is not knowledge of an object at all, but of the subject; and 2) it is expressed in the analytic
proposition “I think,”146 which as analytic does count as an extension of our knowledge. The
existence, then, and not just the appearance, of the knowing subject is self-evident, precisely
because “I think” is an analytic judgment. My existence is given with, is in fact identical with,
144
A 146, B 185: “The schemata of the pure concepts of the understanding are thus the true and sole conditions
under which these concepts obtain relation to objects (o) and so possess significance (or meaning—Bedeutung).”
(Emphasis in the original.) See the sentence that at the end of B 150.
145
The other candidate for a thing-in-itself, not construable as an appearance only, would be God. However, Kant
argues at great length in the section of Critique of Pure Reason called “The Ideal of Pure Reason,” that we do not
and cannot know that God exists. But he also argues there and elsewhere that we can think, without contradiction,
that God exists. And more than that. He argues in the Critique of Practical Reason (Book II, Chapter II, sections 46; Werke, Band 6, 252-264) that we must postulate that God exists (and also that the soul is immortal) in order to
make sense to ourselves of how the highest good—according to Kant, happiness in proportion to moral worth—
which ought to be, could be.
146
B 135; 407.
72
�my thinking.147 Consequently, it is self-evident that at least one thing-in itself exists, namely, the
ego that which is that is engaged in thinking. This self-evident knowledge is sufficient to ground
the distinction between appearances and the thing-in-itself that the argument of the book turns
on. Two questions arise. Does this distinction itself entail an illegitimate application of the
category of existence? And when we say that the ego as thing-in-itself is a transcendental cause
of appearances, does this amount to an illegitimate application of the category of causality?
No. For the issue of legitimate vs. illegitimate category application (in relation to
knowing, as distinct from thinking merely) always concerns application of the categories to
objects, legitimately to objects of a possible experience and illegitimately to objects that
transcend any possible experience. In fact, even when these categories are employed in speaking
about the subject, they are not applied to the subject.148 Rather, the subject—in a way that Kant,
unlike his greatest successors, seems to have thought does not admit of further explication—is
itself the origin of the categories.149 We must remember that the categories are functions of unity
in judgments, and that the table of categories is derived from the table of judgments. A judgment
expresses the “I think” and the different forms of judgment express the different ways in which I
think. Accordingly the categories are originally, though, so to speak, only latently, present
“within” the “I think.” In saying that the “I think” discloses my existence to me, and even the
causality of my thought as regards the constitution of objects, these two categories are not
applied at all, for there is nothing genuinely distinct from them, like an intuition, to which they
could be applied. The fundamental proposition “I think,” even “I think” actively and not
passively, is explicative only, not ampliative. Because the proposition is analytic, the predicate,
147
B 422, note.
B 131; B 408-409; 422, and note.
149
The subject, unlike an object, is surely not constituted as existing by applying the category of existence to it. For
all category application presupposes an existing subject to perform it.
148
73
�“think,” adds nothing to the subject, “I,” but only makes explicit what already thought in this
subject.150
When categories are applied to an object, the application extends them beyond their
origin in the subject. When the categories are employed with reference to the knowing subject,
they remain where they are: they come with the subject, originally. The existence and the
causality (in constituting objects) of the transcendental subject, and the unity of its act, are
evident in self-consciousness. In fact, not only is it a mistake to say that the categories are
applied to the subject, to the ego that thinks; when one uses expressions like “existence,”
“causality,” and “unity” with reference to the “I think,” it is a mistake even to call then
“categories,” which are, after all, only “concepts of an object [g] in general.”
[T]he concept of combination (Verbindung) contains, besides the concept of the
manifold and of its synthesis, also the concept of the unity of the manifold.
Combination is representation of the synthetic unity of the manifold. The
representation of this unity cannot, therefore, arise out of the combination. Rather,
it is what, by adding itself to the representation of the manifold, first makes
possible the concept of the combination. This unity, which precedes a priori all
concepts of combination, is not the category [!] of unity (§ 10); for all categories
are grounded in logical functions of judgment, and in these functions
combination, and therefore unity of given concepts is already thought. Thus the
150
I cannot, for example, infer from the proposition, “I think,” not even from the “I think” understood as existent
and actively constituting objects in categorial syntheses, the proposition, “I am a simple substance” (and hence, by
virtue of being simple that I cannot be de-composed, i.e. that I am naturally immortal). For the latter is a synthetic
judgment that goes outside of the subject “I” and appends to it a predicate “simple substance” that is not thought in
the subject. On other hand, and as already noted several times, the proposition, “I think,” is analytic. The concept of
the subject, “I,” contains within itself the predicate “think”—and thinking, as Kant understands it, is essentially
active, constitutive of objects, even causative of them qua objects.
74
�category already presupposes combination. We must therefore seek yet higher for
this unity (as qualitative, § 12), namely in that which itself contains the ground of
the unity of diverse concepts in judgments, and therefore of the possibility of the
understanding, even as regards its logical employment.151
The question of how Kant can apply the categories to things-in-themselves resolves into the
question of how the thinking subject can know that he is and not simply that he appears. Kant’s
answer is that it is immediately evident that the thinking subject is self-conscious and, moreover,
can it direct itself to its own faculties and operation. The transcendental ego’s recognition that it
exists as thinking, and thereby as active, even causative (of combination), and that its act
possesses unity, is—instead of category application to something given from without—
reflection, a self-relation that is inward and original, even originating.
One may not be fully satisfied with this answer to the question of how Kant can employ
the terms “existence,” “causality,” and “unity” when speaking of the thing-in-itself that is the
transcendental ego. But it is, I submit, Kant’s answer, indeed, the only possible answer that can
be given in Kantian terms. And it bears serious consideration, touching as it does and the
overarching question that will occur to the thoughtful reader of the First Critique: “How is a
Critique of Pure Reason Possible?”152 However that question is to be answered adequately, or
even adequately addressed, Kant was surely not deaf to it. He did not, as is commonly alleged,
thoughtlessly violate his own rules of category application any more than he naively assumed the
validity of Newtonian science in order to prove the validity of Newtonian science. He did not
spend the decade in which he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason in a stupor.
151
B 128. B 129-131.
The part of the First Critique that includes Kant’s treatment of the “I think,” he calls the “Transcendental
Analytic.” It consists, he says, in the dissection (Zergliederung) of all our a priori knowledge into the elements of
the pure understanding (Verstaneserkenntnis). A 64, B 89.
152
75
�In conclusion I draw attention to a most interesting parallel and opposition between the
self-consciousness of transcendental apperception and the consciousness of the moral law,
between the a priori analytic proposition, “I think,” and the a priori synthetic proposition, “I am
obliged” (to act such that the maxim of my will could always hold at the same as principle
establishing universal law). The predicate “think” is analytically contained in the concept of the
ego. But the predicate “am obliged etc.” is not analytically contained in concept of the ego; it is
synthetically connected to the concept of the ego by an act of practical reason, which thereby
makes the consciousness of the moral law “a fact of reason,” even “the sole fact of reason.” 153
The analytic proposition, “I think,” expresses the spontaneity of the understanding; the a priori
synthetic proposition “I am obliged…” expresses the freedom of the will. In both propositions
the ego is conscious of itself as active.154 The conception of the ego as active, in both thinking
and willing, is the ultimate ground of Kant’s dual metaphysics, of nature and of morals.
153
B 135; Critique of Practical Reason § 7 (Werke, Band 6, 141-142). Needless to say, the fact of reason is not what
gets called “a brute fact.” A fact of reason is something made (factum) by reason.
154
The general parallelisms within the dual metaphysics that Kant attempts to ground are striking. Speculative
Reason: The argument of the Prolegomena moves “regressively” from taking the existence of natural science
properly so called—which Hume had called into question—as given, without a rigorously justifying argument, to
the point of departure for the Critique of Pure Reason. The latter then moves “progressively” by arguing rigorously
from what Kant attempts to show pertains to the very nature of speculative reason to a justification of what was
merely assumed in the Prolegomena—thereby answering Hume. The Prolegomena is not an essential part of Kant’s
speculative philosophy, but only an introduction to it, starting from what is commonly taken for granted. The
Critique of Pure Reason, however, grounds an a priori science of nature, explicated in the Metaphysical
Foundations of Natural Science, which in turn grounds empirical natural science (which for Kant is,
paradigmatically, physics, since he holds, controversially, that there is only so much science in given field of inquiry
as there is mathematics in it). Practical Reason: The argument of the Groundwork moves “regressively” from taking
the existence of free choice and duty (which the “eudaemonists” had called into question) as given, without a
rigorously justifying argument, to the point of departure for the Critique of Practical Reason. The latter work then
moves “progressively” by arguing rigorously from what Kant thinks pertains to the very nature of practical reason to
a justification of what was merely assumed in the Groundwork (thereby answering the “eudaemonists,” and also
Hume, who says: “Reason is, and ought [!] only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other
office but to serve and obey them.” A Treatise of Human Nature, II, iii, 3). The Groundwork is not an essential part
of Kant’s practical philosophy, but only an introduction to it, starting from what is commonly taken for granted. The
Critique of Practical Reason, however, grounds an a priori science of morals, explicated in the Metaphysics of
Morals (consisting of a “Doctrine of Right” and a “Doctrine of Virtue”),which in turn grounds an empirical moral
science, explicated in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.
Publication dates of the above works:
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; second edition: 1787)
76
�Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (1783)
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786)
Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
Metaphysics of Morals (1797)
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)
Publication dates of three other late, and major works.
Critique of Judgment (1790); Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason (1793), Opus Postumum (1804).
77
�
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Kant's grounding of a dual metaphysics
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Santa Fe Baccalaureate Address, Spring 1991
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The privilege of reason : evolution and history
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Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Subject
The topic of the resource
Reason
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
20012118
Friday night lecture
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d109731cec9e3786809f86729f817fa9.mp3
ab2a571ea3a246ed5de0322dfd1ee6c4
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Meem Library
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Santa Fe, NM
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
CD
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
00:59:19
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The privilege of reason : identity and eternity
Description
An account of the resource
Audio recording of a lecture given on July 20, 2016 by James Carey as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Carey, James
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Santa Fe, NM
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-07-20
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
mp3
Subject
The topic of the resource
Reason
Language
A language of the resource
English
Graduate Institute
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