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

by Norman Kemp Smith

“Without some empirical representation supplying the material for thought, the actus, ‘I think,’ would not take place....”[1077]

The empirical is indeed “only the condition of the application or employment of the pure intellectual faculty,” but as such is indispensable. This is repeated in even clearer terms in B 429.

“The proposition, ‘I think,’ in so far as it amounts to the assertion, ‘I exist thinking,’ is no mere logical function but determines the subject (which is then at the same time object) in respect of existence, and cannot take place without inner sense....”

This admission is the more significant in that it follows immediately upon a passage in which Kant has been arguing that thinking, taken in and by itself, is a merely logical function.

The real crux lies in the question as to the legitimacy of Kant’s application of the predicate existence to the transcendental subject. Its employment in reference to the empirical self in time is part of the problem of the Refutation of Idealism in the second edition; and the answer there given is clear and definite. Consciousness of the empirical self as existing in time involves consciousness of outer objects in space. But as Kant recognises that a transcendental ego, not in time, is presupposed in all consciousness of the empirical self, the question whether the predicate of existence is also applicable to the transcendental self cannot be altogether avoided, and is indeed referred to in B 277. The attitude to be taken to this latter question is not, however, defined in that section.

In the first edition Kant has insisted that the categories as pure forms of the understanding, in isolation from space and time, are merely logical functions “without content.” Interpreted literally, this would signify that they are devoid of meaning, and therefore are incapable of yielding the thought of any independent object or existence. As merely logical forms of relation, they presuppose a material, and that is supplied only through outer and inner sense. Such is not, however, the way in which Kant interprets his own statement. It is qualified so as to signify only that they are without specific or determinate content. They are taken as yielding the conception of object in general. Passages in plenty can be cited from the first edition[1078]—passages allowed to remain in the second edition—in which Kant teaches that the pure forms of understanding, as distinct from the schematised categories, yield the conception of things in themselves. This view is, indeed, a survival from his earlier doctrine of the transcendental object.[1079] In all passages added in the second edition the consequences of his argument are more rigorously drawn, and the doctrine of the transcendental object is entirely eliminated. It is now unambiguously asserted that the pure forms of understanding, the “modes of self-consciousness in thinking,”[1080] are not intellectual concepts of objects. They “yield no object whatsoever.” The only object is that given through sense. And since in thinking the transcendental subject we do, by Kant’s own account, think an “object,” he is led to the conclusion, also explicitly avowed, that the notion of existence involved in the ‘I think’ is not the category of the same name.[1081] So also of the categories of substance and causality.

“If I represent myself as subject of thoughts or as ground of thinking, these modes of representation do not signify the categories of substance or of cause....”[1082]

The notion of the self, like the notion of things in themselves, is a concept distinct from all the categories.[1083]

This conclusion is reinforced by means of an argument which is employed in the section of the first edition on Paralogisms. Apperception is the ground of the possibility of the categories, and these latter on their side represent only the synthetic unity which that apperception demands. Self-consciousness is therefore the representation of that which is the condition of all unity, and which yet is itself unconditioned.

“...it does not represent itself through the categories, but knows the categories and through them all objects in the absolute unity of apperception, and so through itself. Now it is, indeed, very evident that I cannot know as an object that which I must presuppose in order to know any object....”[1084]