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

by Norman Kemp Smith

This, as Vaihinger remarks, is a point of sufficient importance to justify separate treatment. But it is introduced quite incidentally by Kant, and obscures quite as much as it clarifies the main argument.

It is convenient to start with the second synthesis. Kant’s argument is much clearer in regard to it than in regard to the other two. He distinguishes between empirical and transcendental reproduction. Reproduction in ordinary experience, in accordance with the laws of association, is merely empirical. The de facto conformity of appearances to rules is what renders such empirical reproduction possible;

“...otherwise our faculty of empirical imagination would never find any opportunity of action suited to its capacities, and would remain hidden within the mind as a dead, and to us unknown power.”[836]

Kant proceeds to argue, consistently with his doctrine of objective affinity, that empirical reproduction is itself transcendentally conditioned. The form, however, in which this argument is developed is peculiar to the section before us, and is entirely new.

“If we can show that even our purest a priori intuitions yield no knowledge, save in so far as they contain such connection of the manifold as will make possible a thoroughgoing synthesis of reproduction, this synthesis of the imagination must be grounded, prior to all experience, on a priori principles; and since experience necessarily presupposes that appearances can be reproduced, we shall have to assume a pure transcendental synthesis of the imagination as conditioning even the possibility of all experience.”[837]

In the concluding paragraph Kant makes clear that he regards this transcendental activity as being exercised in a twofold manner: in relation to the empirically given manifold as well as in relation to the a priori given manifold. How this transcendental activity is to be distinguished from the empirical is not further explained. I discuss this point below.[838]

The argument of the section on the synthesis of apprehension, to which we may now turn back, suffers from serious ambiguity. It is not clear whether a distinction, analogous to that between empirical and transcendental reproduction, is being made in reference to apprehension. The actual wording of its two last paragraphs would lead to that conclusion. That, however, is a view which would seem to be excluded by the wider context. Kant is dealing with the synthesis of apprehension in inner intuition, i.e. in time. By the fundamental principles of his teaching such intuition must always be transcendental. Empirical apprehension can only concern the data of the special senses. The process of apprehension referred to in the middle paragraph must therefore itself be transcendental.

But it is in dealing with the synthesis of recognition that the argument is most obscure. It is idle attempting to discover any possible distinction between an empirical and a transcendental process of recognition. For the transcendental process here appears as being the consciousness that what we are thinking now is the same as what we thought a moment before; and it is illustrated not by reference to the pure intuitions of space and time, but only by the process of counting. It may be argued that empirical recognition is mediated by transcendental factors—by pure concepts and by apperception. But unless we are to take transcendental recognition as synonymous with transcendental apperception, which Kant’s actual teaching does not seem to justify us in doing, such considerations will not enable us to distinguish two forms of recognition. Apart, however, from this difficulty, there is the further one that the concepts in and through which the recognition is executed are here described as being empirical. The only key that will solve the mystery of this extraordinary section, hopelessly inexplicable when viewed as a single continuous whole, is, it would seem, the theory of Vaihinger, namely,[839] that from the third paragraph onwards (already dealt with as forming the first stage of the deduction) Kant is making use of manuscript which represents the earliest form in which his explanation of the consciousness of objects was developed, with the strange result that this section is a combination of the latest and of the earliest forms of the deduction. While seeking to make out a parallelism between the empirical, conscious activities of imagination and understanding on the one hand, and its transcendental functions on the other, he must have bethought himself of the earlier attempt to explain consciousness of objects through empirical concepts conditioned by transcendental apperception, and so have attempted to expound the third form of synthesis by means of it. As thus extended it involves a distinction between transcendental and empirical apperception, and upon that the discussion, so far as it concerns anything akin to recognition, altogether turns. But there is not the least further mention of recognition itself. As transcendental, it cannot be taken as the equivalent of empirical apperception; and as a synthesis through concepts, can hardly coincide with pure apperception. The title of the section, “the synthesis of recognition in the concept,” is thus no real indication of the astonishing fare prepared for the reader. The doctrine of a threefold synthesis seems to have occurred to Kant on the very eve of the publication of the Critique. The passage expounding it may well have been hurriedly composed, and when unforeseen difficulties accumulated, especially in regard to recognition as a transcendental process, Kant must have resolved simply to close the matter by inserting the older manuscript.

III. Evidence yielded by the “Reflexionen” and “Lose Blätter” in support of the above analysis.

The evidence, derived by Vaihinger from the Reflexionen and Lose Blätter, briefly outlined, is as follows.[840] (1) In the Reflexionen zur Anthropologie relevant passages are few in number, and represent a standpoint very close to that of the 1770 Dissertation. Imagination is treated only as an empirical faculty.[841] Recognition, which is only once mentioned,[842] is also viewed as merely empirical. The understanding is spoken of as the faculty through which objects are thought.[843] The categories are not mentioned, and it is stated that the understanding yields only ideas of reflection. “All knowledge of things is derived, as regards its matter, from sensation—the understanding gives only ideas of reflection.”[844] So far, these Reflexionen would seem to coincide, more or less, with the first stage of the deduction. They contain, however, no reference to transcendental apperception; and are therefore regarded by Vaihinger as representing a still earlier standpoint.