A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason'

by Norman Kemp Smith

This passage may be compared with the one which occurs in the section on the synthesis of recognition. Our representations, in order to constitute knowledge, must have the unity of some concept; the manifold cannot be apprehended save in so far as this is possible.

“All knowledge demands a concept, though that concept may be quite imperfect or obscure. But a concept is always, as regards its form, something general which serves as a rule. The concept of body, for instance, as the unity of the manifold which is thought through it, serves as a rule to our knowledge of outer appearances.... It necessitates in the perception of something outside us the representation of extension, and therewith the representations of impenetrability, form, etc.”[886]

So far the deduction still moves on the empirical level. When Kant, however, proceeds to insist[887] that this empirical postulate itself rests upon a transcendental condition, the argument is thrown into complete confusion, and the reader is bewildered by the sudden anticipation of one of the most difficult and subtle conclusions of the objective deduction. The same confusion is also caused throughout these sections as a whole by Kant’s description of the various syntheses as being transcendental.[888] They cannot properly be so described. The concepts referred to as unifying the syntheses, and the self-consciousness which is proved to condition the syntheses, are all empirical. They present themselves in concrete form, and presuppose characteristics due to the special contingent nature of the given manifold; as Kant states in so many words in the second edition.

“Whether I can become empirically conscious of the manifold as simultaneous or as successive depends on circumstances or empirical conditions. The empirical unity of consciousness, through association of representations, therefore itself relates to an appearance, and is wholly contingent.”[889]

The argument in these preliminary stages of the subjective deduction, in so far as it is employed to yield proof that all consciousness involves the unity of concepts and the unity of self-consciousness, is independent of any reference to the categories, and consequently to transcendental conditions. In accordance with the plan of exposition above stated, we may now pass to the objective deduction.

OBJECTIVE DEDUCTION AS GIVEN IN THE FIRST EDITION

The transition from the preliminary stages of the subjective deduction to the objective deduction may be made by further analysis either of the objective unity of empirical concepts or of the subjective unity of empirical self-consciousness. It is the former line which the argument of the first edition follows. Kant is asking what is meant by an object corresponding to our representations,[890] and answers by his objective deduction. He substitutes the empirical for the transcendental object,[891] and in so doing propounds one of the central and most revolutionary tenets of the Critical philosophy. Existence takes a threefold, not a merely dual form. Besides representations and things in themselves, there exist the objects of our representations—the extended world of ordinary experience and of science. Such a threefold distinction is prefigured in the Leibnizian metaphysics, and is more or less native to every philosophy that is genuinely speculative. Kant himself claims Plato as his philosophical progenitor. The originality is not in the bare thesis, but in the fruitful, tenacious, and consistent manner in which it is developed through detailed analysis of our actual experience.

In its first stages the argument largely coincides with the argument of the paragraphs which deal with the transcendental object. When we examine the objective, we find that the primary characteristic distinguishing it from the subjective is that it lays a compulsion upon our minds, constraining us to think about it in a certain way. By an object is meant something which will not allow us to think at haphazard. Cinnabar is an object which constrains us to think it as heavy and red. An object is thus the external source of a necessity to which our thinking has to conform. The two arguments first begin to diverge when Kant sets himself to demonstrate that our consciousness of this external necessity is made possible by categories which originate from within.

For this conclusion Kant prepares the way by an analysis of the second main characteristic constitutive of an object, viz. its unity. This unity is of a twofold nature, involving either the category of substance and attribute or the category of cause and effect. The two categories are ultimately inseparable, but lead us to conceive the object in two distinct modes. When we interpret an object through the a priori concept of substance and attribute, we assert that all the contents of our perceptions of it are capable of being regarded as qualities of one and the same identical substance. No one of its qualities can be incongruent with any other, and all of them together, in their unity, must be expressive of its substantial nature.

The causal interpretation of the object is, however, the more important, and is that which is chiefly emphasised by Kant. It is, indeed, simply a further and more adequate mode of expressing the substantial unity of the object. All the qualities must be causally bound up with one another in such a way that the nature of each is determined by the nature of all the others, and that if any one quality be changed all the others must undergo corresponding alterations. Viewed in this manner, in terms of the category of causality, an object signifies a necessitated combination of interconnected qualities or effects. But since no such form of necessitation can be revealed in the manifold of sense, our consciousness of compulsion cannot originate from without, and must be due to those a priori forms which, though having their source within, control and direct our interpretation of the given. Though the objective compulsion is not itself due to the mind, our consciousness of it has this mental a priori source. The concept of an object consists in the thought of a manifold so determined in its specific order and groupings as to be interpretable in terms of the categories of substance and causality.