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

by Norman Kemp Smith

GENERAL OBSERVATIONS ON THE TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETIC

I. First Paragraph.—“To avoid all misapprehension” Kant proceeds to state “as clearly as possible” his view of sensuous knowledge. With this end in view he sets himself to enforce two main points: (a) that as space and time are only forms of sensibility, everything apprehended is only appearance; (b) that this is not a mere hypothesis but is completely certain. Kant expounds (a) indirectly through criticism of the opposing views of Leibniz and of Locke. But before doing so he makes in the next paragraph a twofold statement of his own conclusions.

Second Paragraph.—This paragraph states (a) that through intuition we can represent only appearances, not things in themselves, and (b) that the appearances thus known exist only in us. Both assertions have implications, the discussion of which must be deferred to the Analytic. The mention of the “relations of things by themselves” may, as Vaihinger suggests,[565] be a survival from the time when (as in the Dissertation[566]) Kant sought to reduce spatial to dynamical relations. The assertion that things in themselves are completely unknown to us goes beyond what the Aesthetic can establish and what Kant here requires to prove. His present thesis is only that no knowledge of things in themselves can be acquired either through the forms of space and time or through sensation; space and time are determined solely by our pure sensibility, and sensations by our empirical sensibility. Failure to recognise this is, in Kant’s view, one of the chief defects of the Leibnizian system.

Third and Fourth Paragraphs. Criticism of the Leibniz-Wolff Interpretation of Sensibility and of Appearance.—Leibniz vitiates both conceptions. Sensibility does not differ from thought in clearness but in content. It is a difference of kind.[567] They originate in different sources, and neither can by any transformation be reduced to the other.

“Even if an appearance could become completely transparent to us, such knowledge would remain toto coelo different from knowledge of the object in itself.”[568] “Through observation and analysis of appearances we penetrate to the secrets of nature, and no one can say how far this may in time extend.... [But however far we advance, we shall never be able by means of] so ill-adapted an instrument of investigation [as our sensibility] to find anything except still other appearances, the non-sensuous cause of which we yet long to discover.”[569]

We should still know only in terms of the two inalienable forms of our sensibility.[570] The dualism of thought and sense can never be transcended by the human mind. By no extension of its sphere or perfecting of its insight can sensuous knowledge be transformed into a conceptual apprehension of purely intelligible entities.

Leibniz’s conception of appearances as things in themselves confusedly apprehended is equally false, and for the same reasons.[571] Appearance and reality are related as distinct existences, each of which has its own intrinsic character and content. Through the former there can be no hope of penetrating to the latter. Appearance is subjective in matter as well as in form. For Leibniz our knowledge of appearances is a confused knowledge of things in themselves. Properly viewed, it is the apprehension, whether distinct or confused, of objects which are never things in themselves. Sense-knowledge, such as we obtain in the science of geometry, has often the highest degree of clearness. Conceptual apprehension is all too frequently characterised by obscurity and indistinctness.

This criticism of Leibniz, as expounded in these two paragraphs, is thoroughly misleading if taken as an adequate statement of Kant’s view of the relations between sense and understanding, appearance and reality. These paragraphs are really a restatement of a passage in the Dissertation.

“It will thus be seen that we express the nature of the sensuous very inappropriately when we assert that it is the more confusedly known, and the nature of the intellectual when we describe it as the distinctly known. For these are merely logical distinctions, and obviously have nothing to do with the given facts which underlie all logical comparison. The sensuous may be absolutely distinct, and the intellectual extremely confused. That is shown on the one hand in geometry, the prototype of sensuous knowledge, and on the other in metaphysics, the instrument of all intellectual enquiry. Every one knows how zealously metaphysics has striven to dispel the mists of confusion which cloud the minds of men at large and yet has not always attained the happy results of the former science. Nevertheless each of these kinds of knowledge preserves the mark of the stock from which it has sprung. The former, however distinct, is on account of its origin entitled sensuous, while the latter, however confused, remains intellectual—as e.g. the moral concepts, which are known not by way of experience, but through the pure intellect itself. I fear, however, that Wolff by this distinction between the sensuous and the intellectual, which for him is merely logical, has checked, perhaps wholly (to the great detriment of philosophy), that noblest enterprise of antiquity, the investigation of the nature of phenomena and noumena, turning men’s minds from such enquiries to what are very frequently only logical subleties.”[572]

The paragraphs before us give expression only to what is common to the Dissertation and to the Critique, and do so entirely from the standpoint of the Dissertation. Thus the illustration of the conception of “right” implies that things in themselves can be known through the understanding. The conception, as Kant says, represents “a moral property which belongs to actions in and by themselves.” Similarly, in distinguishing the sensuous from “the intellectual,” he says that through the former we do not apprehend things in themselves, thus implying that things in themselves can be known through the pure intellect. The view developed in the Analytic, alike of sensibility and of appearance, is radically different. Sensibility and understanding may have a common source; and both are indispensably necessary for the apprehension of appearance. Neither can function save in co-operation with the other. Appearance does not differ from reality solely through its sensuous content and form, but also in the intellectual order or dispensation to which it is subject. But in the very act of thus deepening the gulf between appearance and reality by counting even understanding as contributing to the knowledge only of the former, he was brought back to a position that has kinship with the Leibnizian view of their interrelation. Since understanding is just as essential as sensibility to the apprehension of appearances, and since understanding differs from sensibility in the universality of its range, it enables us to view appearances in their relation to ultimate reality, and so to apprehend them as being, however subjective or phenomenal, ways in which the thing in itself presents itself to us. Such a view is, however, on Kant’s principles, quite consistent with the further contention, that appearance does not differ from reality in a merely logical manner. Factors that are peculiar to the realm of appearance have intervened to transform the real; and in consequence even completed knowledge of the phenomenal—if such can be conceived as possible—would not be equivalent to knowledge of things in themselves.