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

by Norman Kemp Smith

To turn, now, to the other aspect of experience. What are the factors which condition its form? What must we postulate in order to account for the existence of consciousness and for the unitary form in which alone it can appear? Kant’s answer is again ambiguous. He fails sufficiently to insist upon distinctions which yet are absolutely vital to any genuine understanding of the new and revolutionary positions towards which he is feeling his way. The synthetic processes which in the subjective and objective deductions are proved to condition all experience may be interpreted either as conscious or as non-conscious activities, and may be ascribed either to the agency of the individual self or to noumenal conditions which fall outside the realm of possible definition. Now, though Kant’s own expositions remain thoroughly ambiguous, the results of the Critical enquiry would seem—at least so long as the fundamental distinction between matter and form is held to and the temporally sequent aspect of experience is kept in view—to be decisive in favour of the latter alternative in each case. The synthetic processes must take place and complete themselves before any consciousness can exist at all. And as they thus precondition consciousness, they cannot themselves be known to be conscious; and not being known to be conscious, it is not even certain that they may legitimately be described as mental. We have, indeed, to conceive them on the analogy of our mental processes, but that may only be because of the limitation of our knowledge to the data of experience. Further, we have no right to conceive them as the activities of a noumenal self. We know the self only as conscious, and the synthetic processes, being the generating conditions of consciousness, are also the generating conditions of the only self for which our experience can vouch. Kant, viewing as he does the temporal aspect of human experience as fundamental, would seem to be justified in naming these processes “synthetic.” For consciousness in its very nature would seem to involve the carrying over of content from one time to other times, and the construction of a more comprehensive total consciousness from the elements thus combined. Kant is here analysing in its simplest and most fundamental form that aspect of consciousness which William James has described in the Principles of Psychology,[945] and which we may entitle the telescoping of earlier mental states into the successive experiences that include them. They telescope in a manner which can never befall the successive events in a causal series, and which is not explicable by any scheme of relations derivable from the physical sphere.

Obviously, what Kant does is to apply to the interpretation of the noumenal conditions of our conscious experience a distinction derived by analogy from conscious experience itself—the distinction, namely, between our mental processes and the sensuous material with which they deal. The application of such a distinction may be inevitable in any attempt to explain human experience; but it can very easily, unless carefully guarded, prove a source of serious misunderstanding. Just as the synthetic processes which generate consciousness are not known to be themselves conscious, so also the manifold cannot be identified with the sensations of the bodily senses. These last are events in time, and are effects not of noumenal but of mechanical causes.

Kant’s conclusion when developed on consistent Critical lines, and therefore in phenomenalist terms, is twofold: positive, to the effect that consciousness, for all that our analysis can prove to the contrary, may be merely a resultant, derivative from and dependent upon a complexity of conditions; and negative, to the effect that though these conditions may by analogy be described as consisting of synthetic processes acting upon a given material, they are in their real nature unknowable by us. Even their bare possibility we cannot profess to comprehend. We postulate them only because given experience is demonstrably not self-explanatory and would seem to refer us for explanation to some such antecedent generative grounds.

Kant, as we have already emphasised, obscures his position by the way in which he frequently speaks of the transcendental unity of apperception as the supreme condition of our experience. At times he even speaks as if it were the source of the synthetic processes. That cannot, however, be regarded as his real teaching. Self-consciousness (and the unity of apperception, in so far as it finds expression through self-consciousness) rests upon the same complexity of conditions as does outer experience, and therefore may be merely a product or resultant. It is, as he insists in the Paralogisms, the emptiest of all our concepts, and can afford no sufficient ground for asserting the self to be an abiding personality. We cannot by theoretical analysis of the facts of experience or of the nature of self-consciousness prove anything whatsoever in regard to the ultimate nature of the self.

Now Kant is here giving a new, and quite revolutionary, interpretation of the distinction between the subjective and the objective. The objective is for the Cartesians the independently real;[946] the subjective is that which has an altogether different kind of existence in what is entitled the field of consciousness. Kant, on the other hand, from his phenomenalist standpoint, views existences as objective when they are determined by purely physical causes, and as subjective when they also depend upon physiological and psychological conditions. On this latter view the difference between the two is no longer a difference of kind; it becomes a difference merely of degree. Objective existences, owing to the simplicity and recurrent character of their conditions, are uniform. Subjective existences resting upon conditions which are too complex to be frequently recurrent, are by contrast extremely variable. But both types of existence are objective in the sense that they are objects, and immediate objects, for consciousness. Subjective states do not run parallel with the objective system of natural existences, nor are they additional to it. For they do not constitute our consciousness of nature; they are themselves part of the natural order which consciousness reveals. That they contrast with physical existences in being unextended and incapable of location in space is what Kant would seem by implication to assert, but he challenges Descartes’ right to infer from this particular difference a complete diversity in their whole nature. Sensations, feelings, emotions, and desires, so far as they are experienced by us, constitute the empirical self which is an objective existence, integrally connected with the material environment, in terms of which alone it can be understood. In other words, the distinction between the subjective and the objective is now made to fall within the system of natural law. The subjective is not opposite in nature to the objective, but is a subspecies within it.

The revolutionary character of this reformulation of Cartesian distinctions may perhaps be expressed by saying that what Kant is really doing is to substitute the distinction between appearance and reality for the Cartesian dualism of the mental and the material. The psychical is a title for a certain class of known existences, i.e. of appearances; and they form together with the physical a single system. But underlying this entire system, conditioning both physical and psychical phenomena, is the realm of noumenal existence; and when the question of the possibility of knowledge, 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 desire, is an event; but the experiencing of it is an act of awareness, and calls for an explanation of an altogether different kind.

Thus Kant completely restates the problem of knowledge. The problem is not how, starting from the subjective, the individual can come to knowledge of the independently real; but how, if a common world is alone immediately apprehended, the inner private life of the self-conscious being can be possible, and how such inner experience is to be interpreted. How does it come about that though sensations, feelings, etc., are events no less mechanically conditioned than motions in space, and constitute with the latter a single system conformed to natural law, they yet differ from all other classes of natural events in that they can be experienced only by a single consciousness. To this question Kant replies in terms of his fundamental distinction between appearance and reality. Though everything of which we are conscious may legitimately be studied in terms of the natural system to which it belongs, consciousness itself cannot be so regarded. In attempting to define it we are carried beyond the phenomenal to its noumenal conditions. In other words, it constitutes a problem, the complete data of which are not at our disposal. This is by itself a sufficient reason for our incapacity to explain why the states of each empirical self can never be apprehended save by a single consciousness, or otherwise stated, why each consciousness is limited, as regards sensations and feelings, exclusively to those which arise in connection with some one animal organism. It at least precludes us from dogmatically asserting that this is due to their being subjective in the dualistic and Cartesian sense of that term—namely, as constituting, or being states of, the knowing self.

A diagram may serve, though very crudely, to illustrate Kant’s phenomenalist interpretation of the cognitive situation.