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

by Norman Kemp Smith

First Stage.—A 104-10; A 84-92 (B 116-24).

A 104-10; II. § 3.—This is the one passage in the Critique in which Kant explicitly defines his doctrine of the “transcendental object”; and careful examination of the text shows that by it he means the thing in itself, conceived as being the object of our representations. Such teaching is, of course, thoroughly un-Critical; and as I shall try to show, this was very early realised by Kant himself. The passages in which the phrase “transcendental object” occurs are, like the section before us, in every instance of early origin. It is significant that the transcendental object is not again referred to in the deduction of the first edition.[755] Though it reappears in the chapter on phenomena and noumena, it does so in a passage which Kant excised in the second edition. The paragraphs which he then substituted make no mention of it. The doctrine is of frequent occurrence in the Dialectic, and combines with other independent evidence to show that the larger part of the Dialectic is of early origin. That the doctrine of the transcendental object is thus a pre-Critical or semi-Critical survival has, so far as I am aware, not hitherto been observed by any writer upon Kant. It has invariably been interpreted in the light of the sections in which it does not occur, and, as thus toned down and tempered to something altogether different from what it really stands for, has been taken as an essential and characteristic tenet of the Critical philosophy. It was in the course of an attempt to interpret Kant’s entire argument in the light of his doctrine of the transcendental object that I first came to detect its absence from all his later utterances. But it is important to recognise that the difficulties which would result from its retention are quite insuperable, and would by themselves, even in the absence of all external evidence of Kant’s rejection of it, compel us to regard it as a survival of pre-Critical thinking. As Vaihinger does not seem to have detected the un-Critical character of this doctrine, it is the more significant that he should, on other grounds, have felt constrained to regard the passage in which it is expounded as embodying the earliest stage in the development of the deduction. He would seem to continue in the orthodox view so far as to hold that though the doctrine of the transcendental object is here stated in pre-Critical terms, it was permanently retained by Kant in altered form.

The doctrine of the transcendental object, as here expounded, is as follows:

“Appearances are themselves nothing but sensuous representations which must not be taken as capable of existing in themselves (an sich) with exactly the same character (in ebenderselben Art) outside our power of representation.”[756]

These sense-representations are our only possible representations, and when we speak of an object corresponding to them, we must be conceiving an object in general, equal to x.

“They have their object, but an object which can never be intuited by us, and which may therefore be named the non-empirical, i.e. transcendental object = x.”[757]

This object is conceived as being that which prevents our representations from occurring at haphazard, necessitating their order in such manner that, manifold and varied as they may be, they can yet be self-consistent in their several groupings, and so possess that unity which is essential to the concept of an object.

“The pure concept of this transcendental object, which in fact throughout all our knowledge is always one and the same, is that which can alone confer upon all our empirical concepts relation in general to an object, i.e. objective reality.”[758]

What renders this doctrine impossible of permanent retention was that it allowed of no objective existence mediate between the merely subjective and the thing in itself. On such teaching there is no room for the empirical object; and immediately upon the recognition of that latter phenomenal form of existence in space, Kant was constrained to recognise that it is in the empirical object, not in the thing in itself, that the contents of our representations are grounded and unified. Any other view must involve the application of the categories, especially those of substance and causality, to the thing in itself. The entire empirical world has still to be conceived as grounded in the non-empirical, but that is a very different contention from the thesis that the thing in itself is the object and the sole object of our representations. The doctrine of the transcendental object has thus a twofold defect: it advocates an extreme subjectivism, and yet at the same time applies the categories to the thing in itself.