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

by Norman Kemp Smith

The conclusions arrived at in the objective deduction compelled Kant to revise his previous psychological views. Hitherto he had held to the Leibnizian theory that a priori concepts are obtained by reflection upon the mind’s native and fundamental modes of action. In the Dissertation he carefully distinguishes between the logical and the real employment of the understanding. Through the former empirical concepts are derived from concrete experience. Through the latter pure concepts are creatively generated. Logical and real thinking agree, however, Kant there argues, in being activities of the conscious mind. Both can be apprehended and adequately determined through the revealing power of reflective consciousness. Such a standpoint is no longer tenable for Kant. Now that he has shown that the consciousness of self and the consciousness of objects mutually condition one another, and that until both are attained neither is possible, he can no longer regard the mind as even possibly conscious of the activities whereby experience is brought about. The activities generative of consciousness have to be recognised as themselves falling outside it. Not even in its penumbra, through some vague form of apprehension, can they be detected. Only the finished products of such activities, not the activities themselves, can be presented to consciousness; and only by general reasoning, inferential of agencies that lie outside the conscious field, can we hope to determine them.

Now Kant appears to have been unwilling to regard the ‘understanding’ as ever unconscious of its activities. Why he was unwilling, it does not seem possible to explain; at most his rationalist leanings and Wolffian training may be cited as contributing causes. To the end he continued to speak of the understanding as the faculty whereby the a priori is brought to consciousness. In order to develop the distinctions demanded by the new Critical attitude, he had therefore to introduce a new faculty, capable of taking over the activities which have to be recognised as non-conscious. For this purpose he selected the imagination, giving to it the special title, productive imagination. The empirical reproductive processes hitherto alone recognised by psychologists are not, he declares, exhaustive of the nature of the imagination. It is also capable of transcendental activity, and upon this the “objective affinity” of appearances and the resulting possibility of their empirical apprehension is made to rest. The productive imagination is also viewed as rendering possible the understanding, that is, the conscious apprehension of the a priori as an element embedded in objective experience. Such apprehension is possible because in the pre-conscious elaboration of the given manifold the productive imagination has conformed to those a priori principles which the understanding demands for the possibility of its own exercise in conscious apprehension. Productive imagination acts in the manner required to yield experiences which are capable of relation to the unity of self-consciousness, i.e. of being found to conform to the unity of the categories. Why it should act in this manner cannot be explained; but it is none the less, on Critical principles, a legitimate assumption, since only in so far as it does so can experience, which de facto exists, be possible in any form. As a condition sine qua non of actual and possible experience, the existence of such a faculty is, Kant argues, a legitimate inference from the results of the transcendental deduction.

Though Kant’s insistence upon the conscious character of understanding compels him to distinguish between it and the imagination, he has also to recognise their kinship. If imagination can never act save in conformity with the a priori forms of understanding, some reason must exist for their harmony. This twofold necessity of at once distinguishing and connecting them is the cause of the hesitating and extremely variable account which in both editions of the Critique is given of their relation. In several passages the understanding is spoken of as simply imagination which has attained to consciousness of its activities.[920] Elsewhere he explicitly states that they are distinct and separate. From this second point of view Kant regards imagination as mediating between sense and understanding, and, though reducible to neither, akin to both.

Only on one point is Kant clear and definite, namely, that it is to productive imagination that the generation of unified experience is primarily due. In it something of the fruitful and inexhaustible character of noumenal reality is traceable. Doubtless one chief reason for his choice of the title imagination is the creative character which in popular thought has always been regarded as its essential feature. As Kant, speaking of schematism, which is a process executed by the imagination, states in A 141: “This schematism ... is an art (Kunst) concealed in the depths of the human soul.”[921] This description may perhaps be interpreted in the light of Kant’s account of the creative character of artistic genius in the Critique of Judgment, for there also imagination figures as the truly originative or creative faculty of the human spirit. To its noumenal character we may also trace its capacity of combining those factors of sense and understanding which in the realm of appearance remain persistently opposed.[922] Imagination differs from the understanding chiefly in that it is at once more comprehensive and also more truly creative. It supplements the functional forms with a sensuous content, and applies them dynamically in the generation of experience.

The schemata, which the productive imagination is supposed to construct, are those generalised forms of temporal and spatial existence in which alone the unity of experience necessary to apperception can be realised. They are

“pure (without admixture of anything empirical), and yet are in one aspect intellectual and in another sensuous.”[923]

Or as Kant describes the process in the chapter before us:[924]

“We name the synthesis of the manifold in imagination transcendental, if without distinction of intuitions it is directed exclusively to the a priori combination of the manifold; and the unity of this synthesis is entitled transcendental, if it is represented as a priori necessary in relation to the original unity of apperception. As this unity of apperception conditions the possibility of all knowledge, the transcendental unity of the synthesis of imagination is the pure form of all possible knowledge. Hence, through it all objects of possible experience must be represented a priori.”

The schemata, thus transcendentally generated, are represented by Kant as limiting and controlling the empirical processes of apprehension, reproduction, and recognition. As no experience is attainable save in terms of the schemata, they enable us to determine, on a priori grounds, the degree of constancy and regularity that can be securely counted upon in all experience. This is Kant’s psychological explanation of what he has entitled “objective affinity.”[925] The empirical ground of reproduction is the association of ideas; its transcendental ground is an objective affinity which is “a necessary consequence of a synthesis in imagination, grounded a priori on rules.”[926]

”[The] subjective and empirical ground of reproduction according to rules is named the association of representations. If this unity of association did not also have an objective ground, which makes it impossible that appearances should be apprehended by the imagination except under the condition of a possible synthetic unity of this apprehension, it would be entirely accidental that appearances should fit into a connected whole of human knowledge.... There might exist a multitude of perceptions, and indeed an entire sensibility, in which much empirical consciousness would arise in my mind, but in a state of separation, and without belonging to one consciousness of myself. That, however, is impossible.” [As the subjective and objective deductions have demonstrated, where there is no self-consciousness there is no consciousness of any kind.] “There must therefore be an objective ground (that is, one that can be determined a priori, antecedently to all empirical laws of the imagination) upon which may rest the possibility, nay, the necessity of a law that extends to all appearances—the law, namely, that all appearances must be regarded as data of the senses which are associable in themselves and subject to general rules of universal connection in their reproduction. This objective ground of all association of appearances I entitle their affinity.... The objective unity of all empirical consciousness in one consciousness, that of original apperception, is the necessary condition of all possible perception; and the affinity of all appearances, near or remote, is a necessary consequence of a synthesis in imagination which is grounded a priori on rules.”[927]