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

by Norman Kemp Smith

In the next section he sets himself to discover from an examination of analytic thinking what this rule or principle actually is, and in so doing he for the first time discloses, in any degree at all adequate, the real nature of the position which he is seeking to develop. He connects the required principle with the nature of the act of judging, considered as a function of unity.

Section I. The Logical Use of the Understanding.—This section,[670] viewed as introductory to the metaphysical deduction of the categories, is extremely unsatisfactory. It directs attention to the wrong points, and conceals rather than defines Kant’s real position. Its argumentation is also contorted and confused, and only by the most patient analysis can it be straightened out. The commentator has presented to him a twofold task from which there is no escape. He must render the argument consistent by such modification as will harmonise it with Kant’s later and more deliberate positions, and he must explain why Kant has presented it in this misleading manner.

The title of the section would seem to imply that only the discursive activities of understanding are to be dealt with. That is, indeed, in the main true. Confusion results, however, from the clashing of this avowed intention with the ultimate purpose in view of which the argument is propounded. Kant is seeking to prove that we can derive from the more accessible procedure of the discursive understanding a clue sufficient for determining those pre-logical activities which have to be postulated in terms of his new Copernican hypothesis. But though that is the real intention of this section, it has, unfortunately, not been explicitly recognised, and can be divined by the reader only after he has mastered the later portions of the Analytic. Kant’s argument has also the further defect that no sufficient statement is given either of the nature of the discursive concept or of its relation to judgment. These lacunae we must fill out as best we can from his utterances elsewhere. I shall first state Kant’s view of the distinction between discursive and synthetic thinking, and then examine his treatment of the nature of the concept and of its relation to judgment.

As already noted,[671] the distinction between transcendental and general logic marks for Kant all-important differences in the use of the understanding. In the one employment the understanding, by creative synthetic activities, generates from the given manifold the complex objects of sense-experience. In so doing it interprets and organises the manifold through concepts which originate from within itself. By the other it discriminates and compares, and thereby derives from the content of sense-experience the generic concepts of the traditional logic. Now Kant would seem to argue in this section that if the difference in the origin of the concepts in those two cases be left out of account, and if we attend only to the quite general character of their respective activities, they will be found to agree in one fundamental feature, namely, that they express functions of unity. Each is based on the spontaneity of thought—on the spontaneity of synthetic interpretation on the one hand, of discrimination and comparison on the other. This feature common to the two types of activity can be further defined as being the unity of the act whereby a multiplicity is comprehended under a single representation. In the judgment “every metal is a body” the variety of metals is reduced to unity through the concept body. In an analogous manner the synthetic understanding organises a manifold of intuition through some such form of unity as that of substance and attribute. That is the category which underlies the above proposition, and which renders possible the specific unity of the total judgment. To quote the sentence with which in a later section Kant introduces his table of categories:

“The same understanding, and by the same operations by which in concepts, by means of analytic unity, it has produced the logical form of a judgment, introduces, by means of the synthetic unity of the manifold in intuition in general, a transcendental element into its representations....”[672]

Now Kant’s exposition is extremely misleading. As his later utterances show, his real argument is by no means that which is here given. We shall have occasion to observe that Kant is unable to prove, and does not ultimately profess to prove, that it is “the same understanding,” and still less that it is “the same operations,” which are exercised in discursive and in creative thinking. But this is a criticism which it would be premature to introduce at this stage. We must proceed to it by way of preliminary analysis of the above exposition. Kant’s argument does not rest upon any such analogy as that just drawn, between the concepts formed by consciously comparing contents and the concepts which originate from within the understanding itself. Both, it is true, are functions of unity, but otherwise there is, according to Kant’s own teaching, not the least resemblance between them. A generic or abstract concept expresses common qualities found in each of a number of complex contents. It is itself a content. A category, on the other hand, is always a function of unity whereby contents are interpreted. It is not a content, but a form for the organisation of content.[673] It can gain expression only in the total act of judging, not in any one element such as the discursive concept. But though the analogy drawn by Kant thus breaks down, his argument is continued in a new and very different form. It is no longer made to rest on any supposed resemblance between discursive and creative thinking, regarded as co-ordinate and independent activities. It now consists in the proof that the former presupposes and is conditioned by the latter. Through study of the understanding in its more accessible discursive procedure, we may hope to discover the synthetic forms according to which it has proceeded in its pre-logical activities. When we determine the various forms of analytic judgment, the categories which are involved in synthetic thinking reveal themselves to consciousness.

Thus in spite of Kant’s insistence upon the conceptual predicate, and upon the unity to which it gives expression, immediately he proceeds to the deduction of the categories, the emphasis is shifted to the unity which underlies the judgment as a whole. What constitutes such propositions as “all bodies are divisible,” “every metal is a body,” a unique and separate type of judgment is not the character of the predicate, but the category of substance and attribute whereby the predicate is related to the subject. To that category they owe their specific form; and it is a function of unity for which the discursive understanding can never account. As Kant states in the Prolegomena, if genuine judgments, that is, judgments that are “objectively valid,” are analysed,

“...it will be found that they never consist of mere intuitions connected only (as is commonly believed) by comparison in a judgment. They would be impossible were not a pure concept of the understanding superadded to the concepts abstracted from intuition. The abstract concepts are subsumed under a pure concept, and in this manner only can they be connected in an objectively valid judgment.”[674]

Thus the analogy between discursive and a priori concepts is no sooner drawn than it is set aside as irrelevant. Though generic concepts rest upon functions of unity, and though (as we shall see immediately) they exist only as factors in the total act of judging, there is otherwise not the least resemblance between them and the categories.[675] The clue to the categories is not to be found in the inherent characteristics of analytic thinking, or of its specific products (namely, concepts), but solely in what, after all abstraction, it must still retain from the products which synthetic thinking creates. Each type of analytic judgment will be found on examination to involve some specific function whereby the conceptual factors are related to, and unified with, the other elements in the judgment. This function of unity is in each case an a priori category of the understanding. That is the thesis which underlies the concluding sentence of this section.