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

by Norman Kemp Smith

THE DOCTRINE OF INNER SENSE

We have still to consider a doctrine of great importance in Kant’s thinking, that of inner sense. The significance of this doctrine is almost inversely proportionate to the scantiness and obscurity of the passages in which it is expounded and developed. Much of the indefiniteness and illusiveness of the current interpretations of Kant would seem to be directly traceable to the commentator’s failure to appreciate the position which it occupies in Kant’s system. Several of Kant’s chief results are given as deductions from it, while it itself, in turn, is largely inspired by the need for a secure basis upon which these positions may be made to rest. The relation of the doctrine to its consequences is thus twofold. Kant formulates it in order to safeguard or rather to justify certain conclusions; and yet these conclusions have themselves in part been arrived at owing to his readiness to accept such a doctrine, and to what would seem to have been his almost instinctive feeling of its kinship (notwithstanding the very crude form in which alone he was able to formulate it) with Critical teaching. It was probably one of the earliest of the many new tenets which Kant adopted in the years immediately subsequent to the publication of the inaugural Dissertation, but it first received adequate statement in the second edition of the Critique. Kant took advantage of the second edition to reply to certain criticisms to which his view of time had given rise, and in so doing was compelled to formulate the doctrine of inner sense in a much more explicit manner. Hitherto he had assumed its truth, but had not, as it would seem, sufficiently reflected upon the various connected conclusions to which he was thereby committed. This is one of the many instances which show how what is most fundamental in Kant’s thinking is frequently that of which he was himself least definitely aware. Like other thinkers, he was most apt to discuss what he himself was inclined to question and feel doubt over. The sources of his insight as well as the causes of his failure often lay beyond the purview of his explicitly developed tenets; and only under the stimulus of criticism was he constrained and enabled to bring them within the circle of reasoned conviction. We may venture the prophecy that if Kant had been able to devote several years more to the maturing of the problems which in the face of so many difficulties he had brought thus far, the doctrine of inner sense, or rather the doctrines to which it gives expression, would have been placed in the forefront of his teaching, and their systematic interconnection, both in the way of ground and of consequence, with all his chief tenets would have been traced and securely established.

This would have involved, however, two very important changes. In the first place, Kant would have had to recognise the unsatisfactory character of the supposed analogy between inner and outer sense. As already remarked,[980] no great thinker, except Locke, has attempted to interpret inner consciousness on the analogy of the senses; and the obscurities of Kant’s argument are not, therefore, to be excused on the ground that “the difficulty, how a subject can have an internal intuition of itself, is common to every theory.” Secondly, Kant would have had to define the relation in which he conceived this part of his teaching to stand to his theory of consciousness. But both these changes could have been made without requiring that he should give up the doctrines which are mainly responsible for his theory of inner sense, namely, that there can be no awareness of awareness, but only of existences which are objective, and that there is consequently no consciousness of the generative, synthetic processes[981] which constitute consciousness on its subjective side. It is largely in virtue of these conclusions that Kant’s phenomenalism differs from the subjective idealism of his predecessors. If we ignore or reject them, merely because of the obviously unsatisfactory manner in which alone Kant has been able to formulate them, we rule ourselves out from understanding the intention and purpose of much that is most characteristic of Critical teaching.

The doctrine of inner sense, as expounded by Locke, suffers from an ambiguity which seems almost inseparable from it, namely, the confusion between inner sense, on the one hand as a sense in some degree analogous in nature to what may be called outer sense, and on the other as consisting in self-conscious reflection. This same confusion is traceable throughout the Critique, and is, as we shall find, in large part responsible for Kant’s failure to recognise, independently of outside criticism, the central and indispensable part which this doctrine is called upon to play in his system.

The doctrine is stated by Kant as follows. Just as outer sense is affected by noumenal agencies, and so yields a manifold arranged in terms of a form peculiar to it, namely, space, so inner sense is affected by the mind itself and its inner state.[982] The manifold thereby caused is arranged in terms of a form peculiar to inner sense, namely, time. The content thus arranged falls into two main divisions. On the one hand we have feelings, desires, volitions, that is, states of the mind in the strict sense, subjective non-spatial existences. On the other hand we have sensations, perceptions, images, concepts, in a word, representations (Vorstellungen) of every possible type. These latter all refer to the external world in space, and yet, according to Kant, speaking from the limited point of view of a critique of knowledge, form the proper content of inner sense. “...the representations of the outer senses constitute the actual material with which we occupy our minds,”[983] “the whole material of knowledge even for our inner sense.”[984] (These statements, it may be observed, are first made in the second edition.) As Kant explains himself in B 67-8, he would seem to mean that the mind in the process of “setting” representations of outer sense in space affects itself, and is therefore constrained to arrange the given representations likewise in time. No new content, additional to that of outer sense, is thereby generated, but what previously as object of outer sense existed merely in space is now also subjected to conditions of time. The representations of outer sense are all by their very nature likewise representations of inner sense. To outer sense is due both their content and their spatial form; to inner sense they owe only the additional form of time; their content remains unaffected in the process of being taken over by a second sense. This yields such explanation as is possible of Kant’s assertion in A 33 that “time can never be a determination of outer appearances.” He may be taken as meaning that time is never a determination of outer sense as such, but only of its contents as always likewise subject to the form of inner sense.[985]

This is how Kant formulates his position from the extreme subjectivist point of view which omits to draw any distinction between representation and its object, between inner states of the self and appearances in space. All representations, he says,[986] all appearances without exception, are states of inner sense, modifications of the mind. Some exist only in time, some exist both in space and in time; but all alike are modes of the identical self, mere representations (blosse Vorstellungen). Though appearances may exist outside one another in space, space itself exists only as representation, merely “in us.”

Now without seeking to deny that this is a view which we find in the second edition of the Critique as well as in the first,[987] and that even in passages which are obviously quite late in date of writing Kant frequently speaks in terms which conform to it, we must be no less insistent in maintaining that an alternative view more and more comes to the front in proportion as Kant gains mastery over the conflicting tendencies that go to constitute his new Critical teaching. From the very first he uses language which implies that some kind of distinction must be drawn between representations and objects represented, between subjective cognitive states in the proper sense of the term and existences in space.

“Time can never be a determination of outer appearances. It belongs neither to form nor position, etc. On the other hand it determines the relation of representations in our inner state.”[988]

Similarly in those very sentences in which he asserts all appearances to be blosse Vorstellungen, a distinction is none the less implied.

“Time is the formal a priori condition of all appearances in general. Space, as the pure form of all outer intuition, is as a priori condition limited exclusively (bloss) to outer appearances. On the other hand as all representations, whether they have outer things as their object or not, still in themselves belong, as determinations of the mind, to the inner state, and this inner state is subject to the formal condition of inner intuition, that is of time, time is an a priori condition of all appearance whatever. It is, indeed, the immediate condition of the inner appearance (of our souls), and thereby mediately likewise of outer appearances.”[989]