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

by Norman Kemp Smith

By way of this primary distinction between existence and meaning Kant advances to all those other distinctions which characterise our human experience, between appearance and reality, between the real and the Ideal, between that which is judged and the criteria which control and direct the judging process. Just because all awareness is awareness of meaning, our human experience becomes intelligible as a purposive activity that directs itself according to Ideal standards.

The contrast between the Kantian and the Cartesian views of consciousness can be defined in reference to another important issue. The diaphanous view commits its adherents to a very definite interpretation of the nature of relations. Since they regard consciousness as passive and receptive, they have to maintain that relations can be known only in so far as they are apprehended in a manner analogous to the contents themselves. I do not, of course, wish to imply that this view of relational knowledge is in all cases and in all respects illegitimate. Kant, as we shall find, has carried the opposite view to an impossible extreme, assuming without further argument that what has been shown to be true of certain types of relation (for instance, of the causal and substance-attribute relations) must be true of all relations, even of those that constitute space and time. It cannot be denied that, as William James and others have very rightly insisted, such relations as the space-relations are in some degree or manner presentational. This does not, however, justify James in concluding, as he at times seems inclined to do, that all relations are directly experienced. Such procedure lays him open to the same charge of illegitimate reasoning. But even if we could grant James’s thesis in its widest form, the all-important Critical question would still remain: in what does awareness, whether of presented contents or of presented relations, consist, and how is it possible? In answering this question Kant is led to the conclusion that consciousness must be regarded as an activity, and as supplying certain of the conditions of its own possibility. Its contribution is of a uniform and constant nature; it consists, as already noted, of certain relational factors whose presence can be detected in each and every act of awareness.

There is one other respect in which Kant’s view of consciousness differs from that of his Cartesian predecessors.[32] Consciousness, he maintains, does not reveal itself, but only its objects. In other words, there is no awareness of awareness. So far as our mental states and processes can be known at all, they are known in the same objective manner in which we apprehend existences in space.[33] Now if that be so, a very important consequence follows. If there is no awareness of awareness, but only of meanings all of which are objective, there can be no consciousness of the generative, synthetic processes that constitute consciousness on its subjective side. For consciousness, being an act of awareness in which meaning is apprehended, has a twofold nature, and must be very differently described according to the aspect which at any one time we may have in view. When we regard it on its objective side as awareness of meaning, we are chiefly concerned with the various factors that are necessary to meaning and that enter into its constitution. That is to say, our analysis is essentially logical. When, on the other hand, we consider consciousness as an act of awareness, our problem is ontological or as it may be entitled (though the term is in this reference somewhat misleading, since the enquiry as defined by Kant is essentially metaphysical) psychological in character. Between these two aspects there is this very important difference. The logical factors constitutive of meaning can be exhaustively known; they are elements in the meanings which consciousness reveals; whereas the synthetic processes are postulated solely in view of these constituent factors, and in order to account for them. The processes, that is to say, are known only through that which they condition, and on Kant’s teaching we are entirely ruled out from attempting to comprehend even their possibility.[34] They must be thought as occurring, but they cannot be known, i.e. their nature cannot be definitely specified. The postulating of them marks a gap in our knowledge, and extends our insight only in the degree that it discloses our ignorance. As consciousness rests upon, and is made possible by, these processes, it can never be explained in terms of the objective world to which our sense-experience, and therefore, as Kant argues, our specific knowledge, is exclusively limited. The mind can unfold its contents in the sunshine of consciousness, only because its roots strike deep into a soil that the light does not penetrate. These processes, thus postulated, Kant regards as the source of the a priori elements, and as the agency through which the synthetic connections necessary to all consciousness are brought about.

According to Kant’s Critical teaching, therefore, consciousness, though analysable, is not such as can ever be rendered completely comprehensible. When all is said, it remains for us a merely de facto form of existence, and has to be taken just for what it presents itself as being. It is actually such as to make possible the logical processes of judgment and inference. It is actually such as to render possible a satisfactory proof of the scientific validity, within the field of sense-experience, of the principle of causality, and of such other principles as are required in the development of the positive sciences. It is also such as to render comprehensible the controlling influence of Ideal standards. But when we come to the question, how is consciousness of this type and form possible, that is, to the question of its metaphysical significance and of the generative conditions upon which it rests, we find, Kant maintains, that we have no data sufficient to justify any decisive answer.

The ontological, creative, or dynamical aspect of consciousness, I may further insist, must be constantly borne in mind if the Critical standpoint is to be properly viewed. The logical analysis is, indeed, for the purposes of the central portions of the Critique much the more important, and alone allows of detailed, exhaustive development; but the other is no less essential for an appreciation of Kant’s attitude towards the more strictly metaphysical problems of the Dialectic.

Hegel and his disciples have been the chief culprits in subordinating, or rather in entirely eliminating, this aspect of Kant’s teaching. Many of the inconsistencies of which they accuse Kant exist only if Kant’s teaching be first reduced to a part of itself. To eliminate the ontological implications of his theory of consciousness is, by anticipation, to render many of his main conclusions entirely untenable, and in particular to destroy the force of his fundamental distinction between appearance and reality. If consciousness knows itself in its ultimate nature—and such is Hegel’s contention—one half of reality is taken out of the obscurity in which, on Kant’s reading of the situation, it is condemned to lie hidden. Man is more knowable than nature, and is the key to nature; such is Hegel’s position, crudely stated. Contrast therewith the teaching of Kant. We can know nature more completely (though still very incompletely) than we can ever hope to comprehend the conditions that make possible and actual man’s spiritual life. The moral consciousness is an autonomously acting source of independent values, and though a standing miracle, must be taken for all that on independent and separate enquiry it is found to be. Hegel, in his endeavour to establish an intellectual monism, does violence to some of the highest interests which he professes to be safeguarding. Kant, while outlining in Idea a Kingdom of Ends, remains satisfied with a pluralistic distinction between the intellectual and the moral categories. The antithesis of the two philosophies is in some degree the ancient opposition between Aristotle and Plato, restated in modern terms.

4. PHENOMENALISM, KANT’S SUBSTITUTE FOR SUBJECTIVISM

The revolutionary character of the above conclusions is shown by the difficulty which Kant himself found in breaking away from many of the presuppositions that underlie the views which he was renouncing; and this is nowhere more evident than in his constant alternation throughout the Critique between a subjectivism[35] that is thoroughly Cartesian—we might almost, allowing for his rationalism, say Berkeleian—in character, and a radically different position which may be entitled phenomenalism. The latter is alone genuinely Critical, and presents Kant’s teaching in its maturest form. For though first formulated only in those portions of the Analytic that are late in date of writing, and in those passages of the second edition which supplement them, it would seem to be the only logical outcome of Kant’s other main doctrines.

I have especially in mind Kant’s fundamental distinction between appearance and reality; it has an all-important bearing upon the Cartesian opposition between the mental and the material, and especially upon the question as to what view ought to be taken of our so-called subjective experiences. The objective is for the Cartesians the independently real; the subjective is asserted to have an altogether different kind of existence in what is named the field of consciousness. Kant’s phenomenalist restatement of this distinction is too complex and subtle to be made intelligible in the brief space available in this Introduction—it is expounded in the body of the Commentary[36]—but its general character I may indicate in a few sentences. All subjectivist modes of stating the problem of knowledge, such as we find in Hume and in Leibniz no less than in Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley, are, Kant finally concluded, illegitimate and question-begging. Our so-called subjective states, whether they be sensations, feelings, or desires, are objective in the sense that they are objects for consciousness.[37] Our mental states do not run parallel with the system of natural existences; nor are they additional to it. They do not constitute our consciousness of nature; they are themselves part of the natural order which consciousness reveals. They compose the empirical self which is an objective existence, integrally connected with the material environment in terms of which alone it can be understood. The subjective is not opposite in nature to the objective, but a sub-species within it. While, however, the psychical is thus to be regarded as a class of known appearances, and as forming together with the physical a single system of nature, this entire order is, in Kant’s view, conditioned by an underlying realm of noumenal existence; and when the question of the possibility of the knowing, that is, of the experiencing of such a comprehensive natural system, is raised, it is to this noumenal sphere that we are referred. Everything experienced, even a sensation or feeling, is an event, but the experiencing of it is an act of awareness, and calls for an explanation of an altogether different kind.

Thus the problem of knowledge, stated in adequate Critical terms, is not how we can advance from the merely subjective to knowledge of the independently real,[38] but how, if everything known forms part of a comprehensive natural system, consciousness and the complex factors which contribute to its possibility are to be interpreted. On this latter question, as already indicated, Kant, though debarring both subjectivism and materialism, otherwise adopts a non-committal attitude. So long as we continue within the purely theoretical domain, there are a number of alternatives between which there are no sufficient data for deciding. To debar subjectivism is not to maintain the illusory or phenomenal character of the individual self; and to rule out materialism is not to assert that the unconscious may not generate and account for the conscious. In other words, they are ruled out not for any ulterior reasons derived from their supposed metaphysical consequences, but solely because they are based on palpable misinterpretations of the cognitive situation that generates those very problems to which they profess to be an answer.