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

by Norman Kemp Smith

APPENDIX
THE AMPHIBOLY OF THE CONCEPTS OF REFLECTION[1317]

IN this appendix Kant gives a criticism of the Leibnizian rationalism—a criticism already partially stated in the section on the Postulates—and he does this in a manner which very clearly reveals the influence which that rationalism continued to exercise upon his own thinking. Thus Kant speaks of the “mere concept,”[1318] and in doing so evidently means to imply that it exists in its own right, with a nature determined solely by intrinsic factors of a strictly a priori character, in complete independence of the specific material of sense-experience. He denies, it is true, the objective validity of such concepts, and maintains that in their empirical employment they are completely transformed through the addition of new factors. None the less he allows to the concepts an intrinsic nature, and practically maintains that from the point of view of the pure concept, and therefore from the point of view of a logic based upon it, the Leibnizian rationalism is the one true system of metaphysics. For pure thought, Leibniz’s system is the ultimate and only possible philosophy; and were thought capable of determining the nature of things in themselves, we should be constrained to adopt it as metaphysically valid. This is the standpoint which underlies much of Kant’s argument in the Dialectic. It leads him to maintain that the self must necessarily, in virtue of an unavoidable transcendental illusion, believe in its own independent substantial reality, that the mind is constrained to conceive reality as an unconditioned unity, and that the notions of God, freedom, and immortality are Ideas necessarily involved in the very constitution of human thought.

But we must not regard Kant’s doctrine of the pure concept merely as a survival from a standpoint which the Critical teaching is destined to displace and supersede. For Kant is not led through inconsistency, or through any mere lack of thoroughness in the development of his Critical principles, to retain this rationalistic doctrine. To understand the really operative grounds of Kant’s argumentation, and so to place the contents of this section in proper focus, we must recall the fundamental antithesis, developed in my introduction,[1319] between the alternative positions, which are represented for Kant by the philosophies of Hume and Leibniz. Kant, as already observed, is profoundly convinced of the essential truth of the Leibnizian position. He holds to the Leibnizian view of reason. Human reason is essentially metaphysical; its ultimate function is to emancipate us from the limiting conditions of animal existence; it reveals its nature in those Ideas of the unconditioned, the discussion of which Kant reserves for the Dialectic.

The chief defect in Kant’s criticism of Leibniz, as developed in this section, is that the deeper issues, which determine the extent of his agreement with Leibniz, are not raised or even indicated. Consequently, his references to pure thought, and his assertion[1320] that from the point of view of pure thought Leibniz is entirely justified in his teaching, bewilder the reader, who has been made to adopt a Critical standpoint, and therefore to believe that thought can function only in connection with the data of sense-experience. Kant would seem, indeed, to have lapsed into the dogmatic standpoint of the Dissertation, distinguishing between a sensible and an intelligible world, and maintaining that pure thought is capable of determining the nature of the latter. The only difference between his teaching here and in the Dissertation consists in the admission that all knowledge is limited to sense-experience, and that we are therefore unable to determine whether this intelligible world which we must think, and think in the precise manner defined by Leibniz, does or does not exist.

This section is, indeed, like the chapter on Phenomena and Noumena, wrongly located. Giving, as it does, Kant’s criticism of the Leibnizian ontology, it discusses problems of metaphysics; and ought therefore to have found its place in the Dialectic, in natural connection with the corresponding examination of the metaphysical sciences of rational psychology, cosmology, and theology. Architectonic, that ever-present source of so many of Kant’s idiosyncrasies, has again interposed its despotic mandate. As there are only three forms of syllogism, only three main divisions can be recognised in the Dialectic; and the criticism of ontology, to its great detriment, must therefore be located, where it does not in the least belong, in the concluding section of the Analytic.[1321]

But we must follow Kant’s argument as here given. Leibniz views thought as capable of prescribing, antecedently to all experience, the fundamental conditions to which reality must conform. The possible is prior to, and independent of, the actual; and can be adequately determined by pure reason from its own inherent resources. Kant does not here question this assertion of the independence and priority of pure thought. He is content to maintain that what is valid for thought need not hold of those appearances which are the only possible objects of human knowledge, since in sense-experience conditions, unforeseen by pure thought, partly limitative and partly extensive of its concepts, intervene to modify the conclusions which from its own point of view are logically valid. Leibniz, through failure to realise the dual character of thought and sense, overlooked this all-important fact; and, in asserting that what is true for pure thought is valid of the sensuously real, fell victim to the fallacy which Kant entitles transcendental amphiboly.

Kant’s clearest statement of the fallacy is in A 280 = B 336. It reduces, formally stated, to the fallacy of denying the antecedent. In accordance with the dictum de omni et nullo, we can validly assert that what belongs to or contradicts a universal concept, belongs to or contradicts the particulars which fall under that concept. Leibniz employs the principle in a negative and invalid form. He argues that what is not contained in a universal concept is also not contained in the particulars to which it applies. “The entire intellectualist system of Leibniz is reared upon this latter principle.” And as Kant points out,[1322] the reason why so acute and powerful a thinker succumbed to this obvious fallacy is to be found in his view of sense as merely confused thought; or, to state the same point in another way, in his interpretation of appearances as being the confused representations of things in themselves.[1323] All differences between appearance and reality are, on this view, due merely to lack of clearness in our apprehension of the given. Sense, when completely clarified, reduces without remainder to pure thought; and in the concepts, which thought develops from within itself, lie the whole content alike of knowledge and of real existence. Owing to a metaphysical theory of the nature of the real, itself due to a false interpretation of the nature and function of pure thought, and ultimately traceable to an excessive preoccupation with knowledge of the strictly mathematical type,[1324] Leibniz failed to do justice to the fundamental characteristics of our human experience, and in especial to the actual given nature of space, time, and dynamical causality. His rationalistic metaphysics has its roots in the Cartesian philosophy,[1325] and is, in Kant’s view, the perfected product of philosophical thinking, when developed on dogmatic, i.e. non-Critical, lines. It is the opposite counterpart of the empirical or sceptical type of philosophy which in modern times found its first great supporter in Locke, and which, as Kant held, obtained its perfected expression in the philosophy of Hume. While Descartes and Leibniz intellectualise appearances, Locke and Hume regard the a priori concepts of understanding as merely empirical products of discursive reflection. Both commit the same fundamental error of failing to recognise that understanding and sensibility are two distinct sources of representations.[1326] Both consequently strive, in equally one-sided fashion, to reduce the complexity of experience to one alone of its constituent elements. This section of the Critique ought to have developed the Critical teaching in its opposition to both these alternative attitudes; Kant arbitrarily limits it to criticism of the Leibnizian rationalism.

Kant’s method of introducing and arranging his criticism is artificial, and need be no more than mentioned. Critical reflection upon the sources of our knowledge, which Kant, in order to distinguish it from reflection of the ordinary type, entitles transcendental reflection, is, he states, a duty imposed upon all who would profess to pass a priori judgments upon the real. It will trace the concepts employed to their corresponding faculties, intellectual and sensuous, and will reveal the independence and disparity of sensibility and understanding, and so will effectually prevent that false locating of concepts to which transcendental amphiboly is due. Such reflection, he further argues, consists in a comparison of the representations with the faculty to which they are due, and like ordinary comparison will determine the relations of (1) identity and difference, (2) agreement and opposition, (3) inner and outer, (4) determinable and determining (matter and form). In this arbitrary but ingenious fashion Kant contrives to obtain the four main headings required for his criticism of the Leibnizian ontology.

(1) Under the first heading he deals with the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. It is, Kant maintains, a typical example of the fallacy of transcendental amphiboly. Leibniz argues that if no difference is discoverable in the concept of things, there can be none in the things themselves; things which are identical in conception must be identical in all respects. But this, Kant replies, is true only so long as the concepts abstract from the sensuous conditions of existence. Thus no two cubic feet of space are alike. They are distinguishable from one another by their spatial location; and that is a difference which concerns the conditions of intuition; it is not to be discovered in the pure concept.[1327] Spaces, alike for thought, are distinguishable for sense. To take another of Kant’s illustrations: two drops of water, if indistinguishable in all their internal properties of quality or quantity, are conceptually identical. Through differences of location in space, irrelevant to their conception, they can none the less be intuited as numerically different. The principle of indiscernibles is not a law of nature, but only an analytic rule for the comparison of things through mere concepts.[1328]

(2) A second principle of the Leibnizian metaphysics is that realities can never conflict with one another. This is supposed to follow from the fact that in pure thought the only form of opposition is logical negation. Realities, being pure affirmations, must necessarily harmonise with one another. This principle ignores the altogether different conditions of sense-existence. Space, time, and the resulting possibility of dynamical causality supply the conditions for real opposition. Two existences, though equally real and positive, may annul one another. Two forces acting upon a body may neutralise one another. From the above logical principle Leibniz’s successors[1329] profess to obtain the far-reaching metaphysical conclusions, that all realities agree with one another, that evil is merely negative, consisting exclusively in limitation of existence, and that God, without detriment to the unity of his being, can be constituted of all possible realities.