Kant Read online

  Forms of logical judgement

  Pure concepts of the understanding (the categories)

  A Judgements of quantity

  1 Universal

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  1 Unity

  2 Particular

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  2 Plurality

  3 Singular

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  3 Totality

  B Judgements of quality

  1 Affirmative

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  4 Reality

  2 Negative

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  5 Negation

  3 Infinite

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  6 Limitation

  C Judgements of relation

  1 Categorical

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  7 Substance

  2 Hypothetical

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  8 Causality

  3 Disjunctive

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  9 Reciprocity

  D Judgements of modality

  1 Problematic

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  10 Possibility

  2 Assertoric

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  11 Actuality

  3 Apodeictic

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  12 Necessity

  Spotlight: Aristotle’s categories

  Aristotle, thinking philosophically and seeking accordingly the most general and most universal way to understand the world, formulated a set of concepts that apply to any given object. He was the first systematically to do so. These concepts, one can say, characterize an ‘object in general’: any object must be a substance of some shape and kind, in some place at some time, in a certain position, appearing a certain way, acting on some other things, and being itself acted upon by some other things. Standing as an inspiration to Kant, Aristotle offered a list of ten basic concepts, or ‘categories’:

  1 Substance (e.g., a man; a horse; ‘Edward’)

  2 Quantity (e.g., five feet high)

  3 Quality (e.g., talkative)

  4 Relation (e.g., taller than; shorter than)

  5 Place (e.g., on the street corner)

  6 Time (e.g., Tuesday afternoon)

  7 Position (e.g., sitting; standing)

  8 State (e.g., having clothes on; holding a book)

  9 Action (e.g., talking to someone)

  10 Affection (e.g., being spoken to)

  Kant confirms that his purpose in formulating the set of categories is essentially the same as Aristotle’s. He also criticizes Aristotle for not having formulated his list of categories in a systematic way, and for only having employed his philosophical insight to construct the list. By relying upon the established inventory of elementary forms of judgement from the logic books of his own time, Kant was confident that his list of categories was more solidly grounded than Aristotle’s.

  It is telling that later thinkers such as G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) levelled the same kind of criticism at Kant’s own list of categories. Unimpressed with Kant’s having lifted his set of categories from a logic book – and there were indeed controversies at the time of whether there were exactly twelve basic forms of judgement or a different number – Hegel required that any list of categories should be derived with a greater sense of necessity. He argued that each category should derive from the one preceding, as a plant grows from a seed in stages. Inspired by Kant’s initial efforts, this is the ideal towards which Hegel aims in his own logical works.

  The table of logical judgements in the Critique of Pure Reason is not a structure to be passed over. Kant uses this table as a guide for organizing some of his most important discussions, almost like an architectural plan that he applies throughout his philosophy. The clearest example is the first 22 sections of the third Critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgement, where Kant analyses the judgement, ‘this object is beautiful’. Here, he considers the judgement at length from the four different logical angles prescribed directly by the table of judgements, namely, according to quality (Sections 1–5), quantity (Sections 6–9), relation (Sections 10–17) and modality (Sections 18–22).

  We can say in general that the reliability of logical form serves as one of Kant’s great intellectual supports. Not only does he use the table of judgements to structure his discussion of judgements of beauty, he structures the Critique of Pure Reason in the format of traditional logic books of the time. These books begin typically with a discussion of singular ‘concepts’, move on to an account of dual combinations of concepts, or ‘judgements’, and then conclude with an examination of tripartite combinations of judgements, or ‘syllogisms’. With respect to the latter, as we will see, Kant describes the structure of metaphysical speculation in reference to the forms of syllogisms, which are three-part logical sequences where two judgements imply a third, as in (1) ‘All people are mortal’, (2) ‘John is a person’ which implies (3) ‘John is mortal’. It was noted earlier that Kant’s philosophy is inspired by astronomical thinking. He is also moved by a tremendous respect for the elementary structures of Aristotelian logic. Astronomy and Logic are two hands that fundamentally shape his philosophy.

  Key idea: Categories of the understanding

  For each of the twelve logical forms of judgement, Kant discerns a pure concept, or category. Each pure concept expresses the application of the respective logical form of judgement to given sensory stimuli, defining a specific way to integrate and organize the stimuli into a world of objective experience.

  Study questions

  1 What is the difference between the faculty of sensibility and the faculty of understanding?

  2 Kant states that ‘concepts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind’. With respect to the faculties of understanding and sensibility, what does he mean by this?

  3 What is a ‘concept’ according to Kant?

  4 What does Kant mean by a ‘manifold’?

  5 How does Kant describe the process of ‘synthesis’ or ‘combination’?

  6 Why is the table of judgements important for understanding other parts of Kant’s philosophy?

  7 How does Kant arrive at the set of twelve categories from the table of logical judgements?

  8 What is the difference between Aristotle’s understanding of ‘categories’ and Kant’s understanding of them?

  9 Why do some philosophers find Kant’s style of thinking to be unrealistic? How might one reply to such criticisms?

  10 Why are astronomy and logic inspirations for Kant’s philosophy?

  6

  The transcendental deduction

  The transcendental deduction or ‘justification’ of how pure, non-sensory, universalistic categories of the understanding can apply necessarily to what seems to be their very opposite – namely, individual, contingently-occurring sensory items – is one of the most difficult and innovative segments of the Critique of Pure Reason.

  This chapter will discuss the two versions of the transcendental deduction – the ‘A’ version of 1781 and the ‘B’ version of 1787 – explaining how, through successive acts of organizing sensory stimuli, we construct the world around us, or what is usually called ‘nature’. Central to the transcendental deduction is our sense of self, or ‘I’, which is at the basis of all our systematizing mental processing. The chapter will conclude with a reference to how in the ‘B’ version, Kant contrasts limited, receptive human awareness with God’s unlimited, creative awareness.

  Upon encountering the phrase ‘transcendental deduction’, it could be assumed that Kant is attending to a logical relationship, as when ‘deducing’ that if some shape is an equilateral triangle, then that shape must also be a figure, closed with three sides, each of which is a straight line of identical length. The term ‘deduction’ might also invoke an image of Sherlock Holmes, since he solved crimes by using logical deduction. Given the importance of logic for Kant, ‘transcendental deduction’ seems to refer to a logical deduction of a transcendental sort.

  In the transcendental deduction of the categories, this is not how Kant uses the term ‘deduction’. The history o
f legal reasoning supplies us with a different meaning, and Kant has this legal sense in mind when he discusses the transcendental deduction.

  ‘Deductions’ were published by governmental authorities in the German and surrounding kingdoms to justify legal positions on serious questions, often when the issue was volatile enough to lead to war. The practice began in the late 1500s and soon reached the point where the deductions became long and elaborately printed, with thousands published between the 1600s and 1800s. By entitling his discussion a ‘deduction’, Kant invokes the legal tradition to reinforce the intellectual gravity and sobriety of his inquiry.

  The style of reasoning involved in legal deductions recalls the general search for presuppositions that we described in Chapter 1. We saw that Kant often argues ‘backwards’ by starting with an established fact to reveal the necessary presuppositions of that fact. Similarly, if a question were to arise over the rights associated with a tract of land, for instance, a legal deduction would work ‘backwards’ to trace the history of ownership to identify the original titleholder. In this respect, Kant’s procedure in transcendental argumentation – a procedure which likewise traces a proposition back to its source – can be appreciated as being modelled upon the history of legal thinking. We have seen how Kant thinks like an astronomer and logician. He also thinks like a lawyer.

  The term ‘deduction’ here means ‘justification’ or ‘legitimation’ in answer to the question, ‘With what right?’ do the categories of the understanding apply to experience, and moreover, apply necessarily to experience. The question emerges because as ‘pure’ concepts, the categories lack sensory content. When considering in contrast, concepts derived from experience – empirical concepts – these clearly have the right to apply to experience, for they are extracted from experience itself. Tracing empirical concepts back to their respective sense impressions reveals their ‘birthright’, or ‘genealogy’. We cannot trace the pure concepts of the understanding back to any sense impressions, however, since they do not derive from any sensory experience. They exhibit a necessity and universality that sensory experience itself can never express.

  Since the pure concepts of the understanding do not arise from sensory experience, Kant’s question is why they should apply to sensory experience at all! Establishing this connection and application is the project of the transcendental deduction. He aims to describe how, as a requirement for producing knowledge, the faculty of understanding – the faculty which contains the categories – gives rules to the faculty of sensibility, without which there would be neither knowledge nor experience. Since the understanding is a faculty of concepts, the transcendental deduction aims to justify how the categories apply to experience, both in general and necessarily. For Kant, ‘knowledge’ is ‘a whole in which representations stand compared and connected’ (A 97). This definition reveals one of our main concepts in the transcendental deduction: it reveals that at the core of the deduction is the notion of ‘connection’, or what he also calls ‘combination” (Verbindung) and more technically, ‘synthesis’. Knowledge requires synthesis, which is the crucial concept.

  The first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason was published in 1781; the second edition appeared six years later in 1787. Between the first and second editions, Kant reworked the transcendental deduction, giving us two complementary renditions of the same project to think about. These are commonly referred to as the ‘A’ (first edition) version and the ‘B’ (second edition) version. We will consider each in turn.

  1 The transcendental deduction: first edition, ‘A’ version

  Let us begin our exposition with some reflections on an ordinary experience. Suppose that we are watching a baton twirler performing. The twirler is spinning the baton, tossing it up into the air, catching it, passing it behind her back so that it briefly goes out of sight, moving it up and down, sideways, and in all sorts of directions, all very rapidly. Consider, as we watch, how the image of the baton on the back of one’s retina parallels the baton’s movements, never at rest, sometimes disappearing, and then suddenly returning, and so on. Nothing about the retinal image of the baton stands still, as the tiny linear shape spins round and round, appearing, disappearing and then appearing again. The full episode produces several series of discrete and different images on the retinal surface. This describes the raw perceptual situation, or set of sensory inputs from the twirling baton.

  Note how throughout the rapid changes of the baton’s image, one nonetheless says to oneself (perhaps one has seen the performance before), ‘the girl is twirling the baton’. In having this thought, one is applying to the dynamic sensory situation, the concept of ‘baton’, which does an interesting job: it effectively holds together and stabilizes the experience of the baton’s movement. If one were to attend mainly to the concept applied, thinking that one already understands these performances and knows all-too-well how they typically unfold, it could be easy to overlook the particular sensory nuances of the performer’s baton twirling on this occasion. With such a conceptually focused mentality, and through it, having grasped the essence of the situation early on, the performance might soon become unexciting and monotonous.

  Within this scenario, the concept of the baton functions importantly to introduce a dimension of constancy, predictability and familiarity into the perceptually dynamic presentation. This function becomes especially evident if one keeps in mind the fluctuating movements that, moment to moment, are being presented on the back of everyone’s retina who is watching the twirling. The concept of ‘baton’ operates cognitively to ‘freeze’ the twirling object’s movement by holding together all at once in a single intellectual summary, the object’s series of changing positions. To ‘hold together’ in this way, is literally to comprehend the baton’s movements.

  Kant extends this idea and considers our daily experience as a whole. In doing so, he recognizes that our experience is always held together by a vast array of concepts, mostly empirical ones. In the present situation with the baton twirler, we have concepts operating such as ‘baton’, ‘person’, ‘grass’, ‘stadium’, ‘people’, ‘sky’, ‘car’, ‘pole’, ‘light’,’ ‘shirt’, ‘seat’, ‘crowd’, and ‘cheering’. Without such concepts, and many others like them, our experience would be nothing but ‘one great blooming, buzzing confusion’, to use the words of the philosopher William James (1842–1910), who had in mind an infant’s preconceptual impression of the world.

  Since raw perception is a manifold of sensation in perpetual flux, Kant concludes that any stabilities or constancies of which we are aware in ordinary perception must arise from our own activity of holding together that sensory manifold into certain forms. We ourselves stabilize the flux of raw perception into recognizable objects which maintain their integrity through time. Such is his main idea. Our application of concepts to experience makes possible the ordinary perception of objects such as the baton.

  In the first edition version of the transcendental deduction, Kant describes this process of how we hold together our experience in three steps. He begins by asserting that in any act of perception we must first hold together some given set of sensations to form a rudimentary image. In the above example, this would be an initial grouping of sensations into a linear form – the straight-lined figure of the baton – that is distinguishable from the background surroundings. This is the initial ‘apprehension’ of the item that we will soon recognize as a baton. To complete the awareness of this item, we need to remember or ‘reproduce’ the linear images from one moment to another, so that the previous presentation of the linear form coheres in continuity with the present impression of it. This yields an awareness of the ‘same’ baton as existing through a series of moments. Finally, we comprehend the baton as a kind of thing by applying the concept of ‘baton’ to the complex image. To perceive the baton as such we need consequently to (1) apprehend the basic linear image, (2) hold together as similar, a series of those linear images over time, and (3) apply a concep
t to this set of linear images to comprehend the series of images as referring to a kind of thing, and indeed a single object in which all of our images refer and cohere.

  Each of the three stages involves a ‘putting together’ of elements or, as Kant describes it, a ‘synthesis’. This activity of synthesis is the work of our own consciousness in its effort to make sense of the manifold of sensations, and in the longer view, to make sense of the world as a whole. In technical terms, Kant characterizes the first stage as a synthesis of apprehension whereby we form an initial image, the second stage as a synthesis of reproduction whereby we hold together a series of images to form a composite image of the thing over time, and the third stage as a synthesis of recognition in a concept where we apply a concept to the composite image and comprehend it as a kind of object.

  Key idea: Synthesis

  Kant maintains that after receiving sensory stimuli, the mind extensively processes the stimuli, aiming to stabilize them for comprehension. For example, it organizes the stimuli into perceivable objects and assigns to them spatial and temporal locations. At the centre of this mental processing is the spontaneous and creative act of ‘binding together’ various elements. Kant refers to this process as synthesis, or combination.

  In this threefold synthesis, the imagination does a great deal of work. Kant states accordingly, not to mention provocatively, that ‘imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself’ (A121n). With this realization, he maintains that the faculty of imagination underlies all awareness of the world and all knowledge. It is a faculty that stands in relation to both the faculty of understanding, which supplies concepts (as in the ‘synthesis of recognition in a concept’) and the faculty of sensibility, which supplies intuitions (as in the ‘synthesis of apprehension’ and the ‘synthesis of reproduction’). The faculty of imagination integrates and harmonizes our understanding and our sensibility in the threefold synthesis that produces ordinary experience.