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

by Norman Kemp Smith

Otherwise stated, Kant’s teaching is as follows. The thought of the thing in itself remains altogether indeterminate; it does not specify its object, and therefore yields no knowledge of it; none the less it is a necessary ingredient in the concept of objectivity as such. The object as specified in terms of sense is mere representation; the object as genuinely objective can only be thought. The correlate of the unity of apperception is the thought of the thing in itself. This is what Kant is really asserting, though in a hesitating manner which would seem to indicate that he is himself already more or less conscious of its unsatisfactory and un-Critical character.

The phrase transcendental object occurs once in the second Analogy[788] and twice in the Note on Amphiboly.[789] The passage in the second Analogy may very well, in view of the kind of subjectivism which it expounds, be of early date of writing. By transcendental object Kant there quite obviously means the thing in itself. From the first reference in the Note on Amphiboly no definite conclusions can be drawn. The argument is too closely bound up with his criticism of Leibniz to allow of his own independent standpoint being properly developed. There is, however, nothing in it which compels us to regard it as of late origin; and quite evidently Kant here means by the transcendental object the thing in itself. The phrase substantia phaenomenon is not, as might at first sight seem, equivalent to the empirical object of Kant’s phenomenalist teaching. It is an adaptation of Leibnizian phraseology.[790] The second reference in the Note on Amphiboly occurs in a passage which may perhaps be of later origin;[791] but the transcendental object is there mentioned only in order to afford opportunity for the statements that it cannot be thought through any of the categories, that we are completely ignorant whether it is within or without us, and whether if sensibility were removed it would vanish or remain, and that it can therefore serve only as a limiting concept. We here observe it in the very process of being eliminated. As we shall find, Kant’s teaching is ill-expressed in the sections on Amphiboly; so much so that they could not be recast without seriously disturbing the balance of his architectonic. They were therefore allowed to remain unaltered in the second edition.

We may now pass to the Dialectic. The subjectivist doctrine of the transcendental object is there expressed in a much more uncompromising manner. Let us first consider the references to the transcendental object in the Paralogisms and in the subsequent Reflection. The phrase transcendental object occurs twice in the second Paralogism, once in the third, twice in the fourth, and three times in the Reflection;[792] and in all these cases there is not the least uncertainty as to its denotation. It is taken as equivalent to the thing in itself, and is expounded as a necessary ingredient in the consciousness of our subjective representations as noumenally grounded.

“What matter may be as a thing in itself (transcendental object) is completely unknown to us, though, owing to its being represented as something external, its permanence as appearance can indeed be observed.”[793] “We can indeed admit that something, which may be (in the transcendental[794] sense) ‘outside us,’ is the cause of our outer intuitions, but this is not the object of which we are thinking in the representations of matter and of corporeal things, for these are merely appearances, i.e. mere kinds of representation which are never to be met with save in us, and whose actuality depends on immediate consciousness just as does the consciousness of my own thoughts. The transcendental object is equally unknown in respect to inner and to outer intuition.”[795]

Here Kant at one and the same time distinguishes between, and confounds together, representation and its empirical object. What is alone clear is that by the transcendental object he means simply the thing in itself viewed as the cause of our sensations. In A 358 it is used in a wider sense as also comprehending the noumenal conditions which underlie the conscious subject.

“...this something which underlies the outer appearances and which so affects our sense that it obtains the representations of space, matter, shape, etc., this something viewed as noumenon (or better as transcendental object) might also at the same time be the subject that does our thinking....”

Similarly in A 379-80:

“Though the I, as represented through inner sense in time, and objects in space outside me, are specifically quite distinct appearances, they are not for that reason thought as being different things. Neither the transcendental object which underlies outer appearances, nor that which underlies inner intuition, is in itself either matter or a thinking being, but is a ground (to us unknown) of the appearances which supply to us the empirical concepts of the former as well as of the latter kind.”

The references in the Reflection on the Paralogisms are of the same general character and are equally definite.[796] A 390-1 has special interest in that it explicitly states that to appearances, taken as Kant invariably takes them throughout the Paralogisms in the first edition as mere subjective representations, the category of causality, and therefore by implication the category of substance, is inapplicable.