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

by Norman Kemp Smith

This is the doctrine from which the deduction of the first edition starts; it was, it would seem, the last to be developed.[861] That we find no trace of it in the Prolegomena, and that it is not only eliminated from the second edition, but is expressly disavowed,[862] would seem to indicate that it had been hastily adopted on the very eve of publication, and that upon reflection Kant had felt constrained definitively to discard it. The threefold synthesis can be verified on the empirical level, but there is no evidence that there exist corresponding transcendental activities.

IV. Connected Statement and Discussion of Kant’s Subjective and Objective Deductions in the First Edition

Such are the varying and conflicting forms in which Kant has presented his deduction of the categories. We may now apply our results to obtain a connected statement of the essentials of his argument. The following exposition, which endeavours to emphasise its main broad features, to distinguish its various steps, and to disentangle its complex and conflicting tendencies, will, I trust, yield to the reader such steady orientation as is necessary in so bewildering a labyrinth. In the meantime I shall take account only of the deductions of the first edition,[863] and from them shall strive to construct the ideal statement to which they severally approximate. Any single relatively consistent and complete deduction that is thus to serve as a standard exposition must, like the root-languages of philology, be typical or archetypal, representing the argument at which Kant aimed; it cannot be one of the alternative expositions which he himself gives. Such reconstruction of an argument which Kant has failed to express in a final and genuinely adequate form must, of course, lie open to all the dangers of arbitrary and personal interpretation. It is an extremely adventurous undertaking, and will have to be carefully guarded by constant reference to Kant’s ipsissima verba. Proof of its historical validity will consist in its capacity to render intelligible Kant’s own departures from it, and in its power of explaining the reasons of his so doing. Its expository value will be in proportion to the assistance which it may afford to the reader in deciphering the actual texts.

Our first task is to make clear the nature of the distinction which Kant draws between the “subjective” and the “objective” deductions. This is a distinction of great importance, and raises issues of a fundamental character. In regard to it students of Kant take widely different views. For it brings to a definite issue many of the chief controversies regarding Critical teaching. Kant has made some very definite statements in regard to it; and one of the opposing schools of interpretation finds its chief and strongest arguments in the words which he employs. But for reasons which will appear in due course, adherence to the letter of the Critique would in this case involve the commentator in great difficulties. We have no option except to adopt the invidious position of maintaining that we may now, after the interval of a hundred years and the labours of so many devoted students, profess to understand Kant better than he understood himself. For such procedure we may indeed cite his own authority.

“Not infrequently, upon comparing the thoughts which an author has expressed in regard to his subject, whether in ordinary conversation or in writing, we find that we can understand him better than he understood himself. As he has not sufficiently determined his concept, he has sometimes spoken, or even thought, in opposition to his own intention.”[864]

Let us, then, consider first the distinction between the two types of deduction in the form in which it is drawn by Kant. In the Preface to the first edition,[865] Kant states that his transcendental deduction of the categories has two sides, and assigns to them the titles subjective and objective.

“This enquiry, which is somewhat deeply grounded, has two sides. The one refers to the objects of pure understanding, and is intended to expound and render intelligible the objective validity of its a priori concepts. It is therefore essential to my purposes. The other seeks to investigate the pure understanding itself, its possibility and the cognitive faculties upon which it rests. Although this latter exposition is of great importance for my chief purpose, it does not form an essential part of it. For the chief question is always simply this,—what and how much can the understanding and Reason know apart from all experience? not—how is the faculty of thought itself possible? The latter is as it were a search for the cause of a given effect; and therefore is of the nature of an hypothesis (though, as I shall show elsewhere, this is not really so); and I would appear to be taking the liberty simply of expressing an opinion, in which case the reader would be free to express a different opinion.[866] For this reason I must forestall the reader’s criticism by pointing out that the objective deduction, with which I am here chiefly concerned, retains its full force even if my subjective deduction should fail to produce that complete conviction for which I hope....”

The subjective deduction seeks to determine the subjective conditions which are required to render knowledge possible, or to use less ambiguous terms the generative processes to whose agency human knowledge is due. It is consequently psychological in character. The objective deduction, on the other hand, is so named because it deals not with psychological processes but with questions of objective validity. It enquires how concepts which are a priori, and which as a priori must be taken to originate in pure reason, can yet be valid of objects. In other words, the objective deduction is logical, or, to use a post-Kantian term, epistemological in character.

It is indeed true, as Kant here insists, that the subjective deduction does not concern itself in any quite direct fashion with the Critical problem—how a priori ideas can relate to objects. “Although of great importance for my chief purpose, it does not form an essential part of it.” This, no doubt, is one reason why Kant omitted it when he revised the Critique for the second edition.[867] None the less it is, as he here says, important; and what exactly that importance amounts to, and whether it is really true that it has such minor importance as to be rightly describable as unessential, is what we have to decide.

Though empirical psychology, in so far as it investigates the temporal development of our experience, is, as Kant very justly claims, entirely distinct in aim and method from the Critical enquiry, the same cannot be said of a psychology which, for convenience, and on the lines of Kant’s own employment of terms, may be named transcendental.[868] For it will deal, not with the temporal development of the concrete and varied aspects of consciousness, but with the more fundamental question of the generative conditions indispensably necessary to consciousness as such, i.e. to consciousness in each and every one of its possible embodiments. In the definition above given of the objective deduction, I have intentionally indicated Kant’s unquestioning conviction that the a priori originates independently of the objects to which it is applied. This independent origin is only describable in mental or psychological terms. The a priori originates from within; it is due to the specific conditions upon which human thinking rests. Now this interpretation of the a priori renders the teaching contained in the subjective deduction much more essential than Kant is himself willing to recognise. The conclusions arrived at may be highly schematic in conception, and extremely conjectural in detail; they are none the less required to supplement the results of the more purely logical analysis. For though in the second edition the sections devoted to the subjective deduction are suppressed, their teaching, and the distinctions which they draw between the different mental processes, continue to be employed in the exposition of the objective deduction, and indeed are presupposed throughout the Critique as a whole. They are indispensably necessary in order to render really definite many of the contentions which the objective deduction itself contains. To eliminate the subjective deduction is not to cut away these presuppositions, but only to leave them in the obscure region of the undefined. They will still continue to influence our mode of formulating and of solving the Critical problem, but will do so as untested and vaguely outlined assumptions, acting as unconscious influences rather than as established principles. For these reasons the omission of the subjective deduction is to be deplored. The explicit statement of the implied psychological conditions is preferable to their employment without prior definition and analysis. The deduction of the second edition rests throughout upon the initial and indispensable assumption, that though connection or synthesis can never be given, it is yet the generative source of all consciousness of order and relation. Factors which are transcendental in the strict or logical meaning of the term rest upon processes that are transcendental in a psychological sense.