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

by Norman Kemp Smith

Kant’s thinking, as I have already pointed out, is here perverted by the continuing influence of the Leibnizian rationalism. He is forgetting that, on Critical principles, even the categories are meaningless except in their reference to the contingently given. If that be true of the strictly a priori, it must hold with even greater force of empirical concepts with sensuous content. As the sole legitimate function of concepts, whether a priori or empirical, is to organise and unify the material of sense, there can be no such thing as the mere or bare concept. Such a combination of words is without Critical significance. A concept as such must refer to, and embody insight into, the real. Only in proportion to its incompleteness, that is, to its indefiniteness, can it remain without specific and quite determinate location within the context of unified experience. It may, indeed, be found convenient to retain the phrase “mere concept” notwithstanding its misleading character and rationalistic origin. It must, however, be used only to mark the indefiniteness, indeterminateness, or incompleteness which prevents it from adequately revealing the denotation to which through the nature of its content it necessarily refers. Meaning and existence, connotation and denotation, are complementary the one to the other, and though not, perhaps, coextensive (if that term has itself meaning in this connection), are none the less inseparably conjoined. When Kant’s utterances, as frequently happens, imply the contrary, they may be taken as revealing the strength and insidious tenacity of the influences from which he was sufficiently courageous, but not always sufficiently watchful, to break away.

The doctrine of the “mere concept” finds its natural supplement in the equally un-Critical assertion that

“...perception [evidently employed in the less pregnant sense, as signifying ‘sensation accompanied by consciousness’], which supplies the material to the concept, is the sole character of actuality.”[1272]

This same position is expressed equally strongly by Kant in his Reflexionen (ii. 1095).

“Possibility is thought without being given; actuality is given without being thought; necessity is given through being thought.”

Such statements are entirely out of harmony with Kant’s central teaching. There is no lack of passages in the Critique which inculcate the direct contrary. Though the element of sensation is a sine qua non of all experience of the actual, the formal elements are no less indispensable. In their absence the merely given would reduce to less than a dream; for even in dreams images are interpreted and are referred to some connected context. The given, merely as such, cannot enter the field of consciousness, and is therefore “for us as good as nothing.” As Caird has pointed out, we find in Kant

“...two apparently contradictory forms of expression—(1) that the understanding by means of its conceptions refers our preceptions to objects, and (2) that conceptions are referred to objects only indirectly through perceptions. The former mode of expression is preferred whenever Kant has to show that ‘perceptions without conceptions are blind’; the latter when he has to show that ‘conceptions without perceptions are empty.’”[1273] “We can understand the possibility of Kant’s looking at the subject in these two opposite ways, only if we remember the reciprocal presupposition of perception and conception in the judgment of knowledge, and the way in which Kant tries to explain it, now from the point of view of perception, and now from the point of view of conception. The effect of this is, no doubt, a formal contradiction which Kant himself never disentangles, but which we must endeavour to disentangle, if we would do justice to him.”[1274]

The one-sidedness of Kant’s definition of actuality is certainly due to the cause suggested by Caird. The definition, notwithstanding its misleading character, serves to enforce against the older rationalism, with which Kant throughout this section is almost exclusively concerned, the central tenet through which the Critical teaching is distinguished from that of Leibniz, namely, that neither existence, possibility, nor necessity, can be established save by reference to the contingent nature of the sensuously given. Proof by reference to the possibility of experience can establish only those conditions which can be shown to be de facto necessary in order that consciousness of time may be accounted for. The formal conditions of experience, which in and by themselves are determinable neither as actual nor as possible, are established as actual, and so as necessary, by reference to the merely given; they are necessary only in this merely relative fashion, as being indispensable to what can never itself be viewed as other than contingent.

“Our knowledge of the existence of things reaches, then, only so far as perception and its continuation according to laws of nature can extend. If we do not start from experience, or do not proceed according to laws of the empirical connection of appearances, our guessing or enquiring into the existence of anything will only be an idle pretence.”[1275]