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

by Norman Kemp Smith

“No one could dream of asserting that that which he has once come to recognise as mere representation is an outer cause.”

We may now turn to the passages in the chapter on the Antinomies.

“The non-sensuous cause of our representations is completely unknown to us, and therefore we cannot intuit it as object.... We may, however, entitle the purely intelligible cause of appearances in general the transcendental object.... To this transcendental object we can ascribe the whole extent and connection of our possible perceptions....”[797]

Appearances can be regarded as real only to the extent to which they are actually experienced. Otherwise they exist only in some unknown noumenal form of which we can acquire no definite concept, and which is therefore really nothing to us. This, Kant declares, is true even of that immemorial past of which we are ourselves the product.

“...all the events which have taken place in the immense periods that have preceded my own existence mean really nothing but the possibility of extending the chain of experience from the present perception back to the conditions which determine it in time.”[798]

In other words, we may not claim that such events, empirically conceived, have ever actually existed in any such empirical form. A similar interpretation is given to the assertion of the present reality of what has never been actually experienced.

“Moreover, in outcome it is a matter of indifference whether I say that in the empirical progress in space I can meet with stars a hundred times farther removed than the outermost now perceptible to me, or whether I say that they are perhaps to be met with in cosmical space even though no human being has ever perceived or ever will perceive them. For though they might be given as things in themselves, without relation to possible experience, they are still nothing for me, and therefore are not objects, save in so far as they are contained in the series of the empirical regress.”[799] “The cause of the empirical conditions of this process, that which determines what members I shall meet with and how far by means of such members I can carry out the regress, is transcendental and is therefore necessarily unknown to me.”[800]

Such is the form in which Kant’s pre-Critical doctrine of the transcendental object survives in the Critique.[801] It contains no trace of the teaching of the objective deduction of the first and second edition or of the teaching of the refutation of idealism in the second edition. It closely resembles Mill’s doctrine of the permanent possibilities of sensation, and is almost equally subjectivist in character. As already noted,[802] it also lies open to the further objection that it involves an illegitimate application of the categories to things in themselves. As Kant started from the naïve and natural assumption that reference of representations to objects must be their reference to things in themselves, he also took over the current Cartesian view that it is by an inference in terms of the category of causality that we advance from a representation to its cause. The thing in itself is regarded as the sole true substance and as the real cause of everything which happens in the natural world. Appearances, being representations merely, are wholly transitory and completely inefficacious. Not only, therefore, are the categories regarded as valid of things in themselves, they are also declared to have no possible application to phenomena. Sense appearances do not, on this view, constitute the mechanical world of the natural sciences; they have a purely subjective, more or less epi-phenomenal, existence in the mind of each separate observer. It was very gradually, in the process of developing his own Critical teaching, that Kant came to realise the very different position to which he was thereby committed. The categories, including that of causality, are pre-empted for the empirical object which is now regarded as immediately apprehended; and the function of mediating the reference of phenomena to things in themselves now falls to the Ideas of Reason. The distinction between appearance and reality is no longer that between representations and their noumenal causes, but between the limited and relative character of the entire world in space and time and the unconditioned demanded by Reason. But these are questions whose discussion must meantime be deferred.[803]

I may now briefly summarise the evidence in favour of the view that the doctrine of the transcendental object is a pre-Critical or semi-Critical survival and must not be taken as forming part of Kant’s final and considered position. (I) Of the six sections in which the phrase transcendental object occurs, three[804] were omitted in the second edition, and in the passages which were substituted for them it receives no mention. There are various reasons which can be suggested in explanation of the retention of the other three[805] in the second edition. The Note on Amphiboly was too unsatisfactory as a whole to encourage Kant to improve upon it in detail. The other two are outside the limit at which Kant thought good to terminate all attempts to improve, whether in major or in minor matters, the text of the first edition.[806] To have recast the Antinomies as he had recast the Paralogisms would have involved alterations much too extensive. Also, there were no outside polemical influences—or at least none acting quite directly—such as undoubtedly reinforced his other reasons for revising the Paralogisms. (2) Secondly, the transcendental object is not mentioned in the later layers of the deduction of the first edition, nor in the deduction of the second edition, nor in any passage or note added in the second edition. That Kant should thus suddenly cease to employ a phrase to which he had accustomed himself is the more significant in view of his conservative preference for the adapting of familiar terminology to new uses. It can only be explained as due to his recognition of the completely untenable character of the teaching to which it had given expression. As the object of knowledge is always empirical, it can never legitimately be called transcendental. (3) Thirdly, the general teaching of the passages in which the phrase transcendental object occurs is by itself sufficient proof of their early origin. They reveal not the least trace of the deepened insight of his final standpoints. As we know, it was certain difficulties involved in the working out of the objective deduction that delayed the publication of the Critique for so many years; and the sections which deal with these difficulties contain Kant’s maturest teaching. In them he seems to withdraw definitely from the positions to which he had unwarily committed himself by his un-Critical doctrine of the transcendental object. I now pass to the second section constitutive of the first stage.

A 84-92=B 116-24, I. § 13.—Just as in II. § 3 Kant deals solely with the first of the two questions formulated in the letter of 1772 to Herz—the reference of sense-representations to an object,—so in I. § 13 he raises only the second—that of the objective validity of intellectual representations (now spoken of as pure concepts of understanding, or pure a priori concepts, and only in one sentence as categories). And just as in the former section he carries the problem a step further, yet without attaining to the true Critical position, so in this latter he still assumes that it is the application of these pure concepts to real independent objects, i.e. to things in themselves, which calls for justification. We must again consider the exact terms in which this problem is formulated in the letter to Herz.[807]