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

by Norman Kemp Smith

5. THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN HUMAN AND ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE

The inwardness of Kant’s Critical standpoint may perhaps be made clearer by a brief consideration of his view of animal intelligence. We are accustomed nowadays to test a psychology of human consciousness by its capacity to render conceivable an evolution from lower forms. How does Kant’s teaching emerge from such a test?

It may at once be admitted that Kant has made no special study of animal behaviour, and was by no means competent to speak with authority in regard to its conditions. Indeed it is evident that anything which he may have to say upon this question is entirely of the nature of a deduction from results obtained in the human sphere. But when this has been admitted, and we are therefore prepared to find the problems approached from the point of view of the difference rather than of the kinship between man and the animals, we can recognise that, so far as the independent study of human consciousness is concerned, there is a certain compensating advantage in Kant’s pre-Darwinian standpoint. For it leaves him free from that desire which exercises so constant, and frequently so deleterious an influence, upon many workers in the field of psychology, namely, to maintain at all costs, in anticipation of conclusions not yet by any means established, the fundamental identity of animal and human intelligence. This besetting desire all too easily tends to the minimising of differences that may perhaps with fuller insight be found to involve no breach of continuity, but which in the present state of our knowledge cannot profitably be interpreted save in terms of their differentiating peculiarities.

The current controversy between mechanism and vitalism enforces the point which I desire to make. Biological problems, as many biologists are now urging, can be most profitably discussed in comparative independence of ultimate issues, entirely in view of their own domestic circumstances. For only when the actual constitution of organic compounds has been more completely determined than has hitherto been possible can the broader questions be adequately dealt with. In other words, the differences must be known before the exact nature and degree of the continuity can be defined. They cannot be anticipated by any mere deduction from general principles.

The value of Kant’s analysis of human consciousness is thus closely bound up with his frank recognition of its inherent complexity. Not simplification, but specification, down to the bedrock of an irreducible minimum of correlated factors, is the governing motive of his Critical enquiries. His results have therefore the great advantage of being inspired by no considerations save such as are prescribed by the actual subject-matter under investigation. As already noted, Kant maintains that human consciousness is always an awareness of meaning, and that consequently it can find expression only in judgments which involve together with their other factors the element of recognition or self-consciousness.

This decides for Kant the character of the distinction to be drawn between animal and human intelligence. As animals, in his view, cannot be regarded as possessing a capacity of self-consciousness, they must also be denied all awareness of meaning. However complicated the associative organisation of their ideas may be, it never rises to the higher level of logical judgment. For the same reason, though their ideas may be schematic in outline, and in their bearing on behaviour may therefore have the same efficiency as general concepts, they cannot become universal in the logical sense. “Animals have apprehensions, but not apperceptions, and cannot, therefore, make their representations universal.”[39] In support of this position Kant might have pointed to the significant fact that animals are so teachable up to a certain point, and so unteachable beyond it. They can be carried as far as associative suggestion will allow, but not a step further. To this day it remains true—at least I venture the assertion—that no animal has ever been conclusively shown to be capable of apprehending a sign as a sign. Animals may seem to do so owing to the influence of associated ideas, but are, as it would appear, debarred from crossing the boundary line which so sharply distinguishes associative suggestion from reflective knowledge.

But Kant is committed to a further assertion. If animals are devoid of all awareness of meaning, they must also be denied anything analogous to what we must signify by the term consciousness. Their experience must fall apart into events, that may, perhaps, be described as mental, but cannot be taken as equivalent to an act of awareness. “Apprehensio bruta without consciousness,”[40] such is Kant’s view of the animal mind. Its mental states, like all other natural existences, are events in time, explicable in the same naturalistic fashion as the bodily processes by which they are conditioned; they can not be equated with that human consciousness which enables us to reflect upon them, and to determine the conditions of their temporal happening.

The distinction which Kant desires to draw is ultimately that between events and consciousness of events. Even if events are psychical in character, consisting of sensations and feelings, there will still remain as fundamental the distinction between what is simply a member of the causal series of natural events and the consciousness through which the series is apprehended. Kant’s most explicit statements occur in a letter to Herz.[41] He is referring to data of the senses which cannot be self-consciously apprehended:

“I should not be able to know that I have them, and they would therefore be for me, as a cognitive being, absolutely nothing. They might still (if I conceive myself as an animal) exist in me (a being unconscious of my own existence) as representations ..., connected according to an empirical law of association, exercising influence upon feeling and desire, and so always disporting themselves with regularity, without my thereby acquiring the least cognition of anything, not even of these my own states.”[42]

As to whether Kant is justified in maintaining that the distinction between animal and human consciousness coincides with the distinction between associative and logical or reflective thinking, I am not concerned to maintain. This digression has been introduced solely for the purpose of defining more precisely the central tenets of Kant’s Critical teaching.