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

by Norman Kemp Smith

“The spontaneity of our thought requires that this manifold [of pure a priori intuition] should be run through in a certain manner, taken up, and connected, in order that a knowledge may be formed out of it. This action I call synthesis.”

Fourth Stage.—A 98-104; A 97-8.—As already noted, there are in Kant two persistent but conflicting interpretations of the nature of the synthetic processes exercised by imagination and understanding, the subjectivist and the phenomenalist.[831] Now, on the former view, imagination is simply understanding at work. In other words, imagination is merely the active synthesising side of a faculty whose complementary aspect appears in the logical unity of the concept. From this point of view the transcendental and the empirical factors may be taken as forming a single series. The transcendental and the empirical processes will vary together, some form of transcendental activity corresponding to every fundamental form of empirical activity and vice versa. Such an inference only follows if the subjectivist standpoint be accepted to the exclusion of the phenomenalist point of view. But since Kant constantly alternates between them, and never quite definitely formulates them in their distinction and opposition; since, in fact, they were rather of the nature of obscurely felt tendencies than of formulated standpoints, it is quite intelligible that an inference derived from the one should be drawn even at the very time when the other is being more explicitly developed. This, it would seem, is what actually happened. When we come to consider the evidence derivable from the Reflexionen and Lose Blätter, we shall find support for the view that after January 1780, on the very eve of the publication of the Critique, while the revolutionary, phenomenalist consequences of the Critical hypothesis were becoming clearer to him, he unguardedly allowed the above inference to lead him to recast his previous views in a decidedly subjectivist manner. The view that transcendental imagination has a special and unique activity altogether different in type from any of its empirical processes, namely, the “productive,” is now allowed to drop; and in place of it Kant develops the view that transcendental functions run exactly parallel with the empirical processes of apprehension, reproduction, and recognition. Accordingly, in place of the classification presented in the third stage, we find a new and radically different one introduced into the text, without the least indication that Kant’s standpoint has meantime changed. It is given in A 97:

A. Synopsis of the manifold through sense.

B. Synthesis.

1. Synthesis of apprehension of representations in [inner] intuition.

2. Synthesis of reproduction of representations in imagination.

3. Synthesis of recognition of representations in the concept.

And Kant adds in explanation that “these point to three subjective sources of knowledge which make the understanding itself possible, and which in so doing make all experience possible, in so far as it is an empirical product of the understanding.” What, now, are these three subjective sources of knowledge? They certainly are not those classified in the table of the third stage. A roughly coincides with its first member; consequently B 1 is left without proper correlate. B 2 is altogether different from the previous synthesis of imagination, for in the earlier table transcendental imagination is regarded as being solely productive, never reproductive.[832] It is now asserted to be reproductive—a contradiction of one of his own most emphatic contentions, which can only be accounted for by some such explanation as we are here stating. Nothing is lacking as regards explicitness in the statement of this new position. “...the reproductive synthesis of imagination belongs to the transcendental acts of the soul, and, in reference to it [viz. to the reproductive synthesis], we will call this power too the transcendental power of the imagination.”[833] Lastly, even B 3 does not coincide with the pure apperception of the other table. B 3 is more akin to the recognition which in the third stage is declared to be always empirical. In any case, it is recognition in the concept; and though that may ultimately involve and condition transcendental apperception, it remains, in the manner in which it is here developed by Kant, something very different. But this is a point to which we shall return. There is an added complication, running through this entire stage, which first requires to be disentangled. The transcendental syntheses are declared to condition the pure representations of space and time no less than those of sense-experience.

“This synthesis of apprehension also must be executed a priori, i.e. in reference to representations which are not empirical. For without it we could not have the a priori representations either of space or of time, since these can be generated only through the synthesis of the manifold which sensibility presents in its original receptivity. Thus we have a pure synthesis of apprehension”[834] “...if I draw a line in thought or desire to think of the time from one noon to another, or merely represent to myself a certain number, I must, firstly, apprehend these manifold representations one after the other. But if the preceding representations (the first parts of the line, the antecedent parts of time or the units serially represented) were always to drop out of my thought, and were not reproduced when I advance to those that follow, no complete representation, and none of all the aforementioned thoughts, not even the purest and first basal representations of space and time, could ever arise.”[835]