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

by Norman Kemp Smith

“The functions of the understanding [i.e. the a priori concepts of understanding] can be discovered in their completeness, if it is possible to state exhaustively the functions of unity [i.e. the forms of relation] in judgments.”

The adoption of such a position involves, it may be noted, the giving up of the assertion, which is so emphatically made in the passage above quoted, that it is by the same activities that the understanding discursively forms abstract concepts and creatively organises the manifold of sense. That is in no respect true. There is no real identity—there is not even analogy—between the processes of comparison and abstraction on the one hand and those of synthetic interpretation on the other. The former are merely reflective: the latter are genuinely creative. Discursive activities are conscious processes, and are under our control: the synthetic processes, are non-conscious; only their finished products appear within the conscious field. This, however, is to anticipate a conclusion which was among the last to be realised by Kant himself, namely that there is no proof that these two types of activity are ascribable to one and the same source. The synthetic activities—as he himself finally came to hold—are due to a faculty of imagination.

“Synthesis in general ... is the mere result of the power of imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely ever conscious.”[676]

This sentence occurs in a passage which is undoubtedly a later interpolation.[677] The “scarcely ever” (selten nur einmal) indicates Kant’s lingering reluctance to recognise this fundamental fact, destructive of so much in his earlier views, even though it completes and reinforces his chief ultimate conclusions. With this admission Kant also gives up his sole remaining ground for the contention that there must be a complete parallelism between discursive and creative thinking. If they arise from such different sources, we have no right to assume, without specific proof, that they must coincide in the forms of their activity. This is a point to which we shall return in discussing Kant’s formulation of the principle which is supposed to guarantee the completeness of the table of categories.

This unavowed change in point of view is the main cause of confusion in this section. Its other defects are chiefly those of omission. Kant fails to develop in sufficient detail his view of the nature of the discursive concept, or to make sufficiently clear the grounds for his assertion that conception as an activity of the understanding is identical with judgment. To take the former point first. Kant’s mode of viewing the discursive concept finds expression in the following passage in the Introduction to his Logic:[678]

“Human knowledge is on the side of the understanding discursive; that is, it takes place by means of ideas which make what is common to many things the ground of knowledge: and hence by means of attributes as such. We therefore cognise things only by means of attributes. An attribute is that in a thing which constitutes part of our cognition of it; or, what is the same, a partial conception so far as it is considered as a ground of cognition of the whole conception. All our concepts, therefore, are attributes, and all thought is nothing but conception by means of attributes.”

The limitations of Kant’s view of the concept could hardly find more definite expression. The only type of judgment which receives recognition is the categorical, interpreted in the traditional manner.[679]

“To compare something as a mark with a thing, is called ‘to judge.’ The thing itself is the subject, the mark [or attribute] is the predicate. The comparison is expressed by the word ‘is,’ ... which when used without qualification indicates that the predicate is a mark [or attribute] of the subject, but when combined with the sign of negation states that the predicate is a mark opposed to the subject.”[680]

Kant’s view of analytic thinking is entirely dominated by the substance-attribute teaching of the traditional logic. A concept must, in its connotation, be an abstracted attribute, and in its denotation represent a class. Relational thinking, and the concepts of relation, are ignored. Thus, in the Aesthetic, as we have already noted,[681] Kant maintains that since space and time are not generic class concepts they must be intuitions. This argument, honestly employed by Kant, shows how completely unconscious he was of the revolutionary consequences of his new standpoint. Even in the very act of insisting upon the relational character of the categories, he still continues to speak of the concept as if it must necessarily conform to the generic type. In this, as in so many other respects, transcendental logic is not, as he would profess, supplementary to general logic; it is its tacit recantation. Modern logic, as developed by Lotze, Sigwart, Bradley, and Bosanquet, is, in large part, the recasting of general logic in terms of the results reached by Kant’s transcendental enquiries. Meantime, sufficient has been said to indicate the strangely limited character of Kant’s doctrine of the logical concept.

But on one fundamental point Kant breaks entirely free from the traditional logic. The following passage occurs in the above-quoted pamphlet on The Mistaken Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures: