Abstract
Without endorsing the suggestion of Henry Allison that the arguments for idealism that concern sensibility in the Critique are thereby subjective and dogmatic I want here to articulate some grounds for thinking that the basis of transcendental idealism should best be understood in relation to the discussion of transcendental apperception. The basis of the argument for seeing transcendental idealism this way will have an unusual structure. I will begin by setting out the grounds for thinking that the relationship of transcendental apperception to the ‘I think’ is considerably more complicated than is generally presented.
Perhaps the real task is to distinguish between two strands of idealism, one genuinely critical and transcendental, and the other, for all Kant’s protestations to the contrary, basically subjective and dogmatic. Let us call the former the idealism of apperception and the latter the idealism of sensibility. 1
1Allison (1974: 127).
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- 1.
The suggestion that the cogito is an inference was in fact explicitly rejected by Descartes and pressed by Pierre Gassendi so it is odd that Kant presents it as being Descartes’ view that it is an inference. The suggestion of a relationship of identity here appears to be strictly analytic.
- 2.
All translations of the Critique of Pure Reason are from Kemp Smith (Kant 2007).
- 3.
Characterizations of transcendental idealism as a specific doctrine are given at the following places: A369; A490–491=B518–519; AA 4: 293; AA 4: 337; AA 29: 928; AA 28: 682. Practically all of these references involve what Allison termed the “idealism of sensibility” though the last mentioned is slightly different in involving a contrast between phenomenal and noumenal substance. None however directly refer to transcendental apperception.
- 4.
Cf. the statement at A248–249: “Appearances, so far as they are thought as objects according to the unity of the categories, are called phaenomena.”
- 5.
Allison (1983: 280–281).
- 6.
“If intuition must conform to the constitution of the objects, I do not see how we could know anything of the latter a priori; but if the object (as object of the senses) must conform to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, I have no difficulty in conceiving such a possibility. Since I cannot rest in these intuitions if they are to become known, but must relate them as representations to something as their object, and determine this latter through them, either I must assume that the concepts, by means of which I obtain this determination, conform to the object, or else I assume that the objects, or what is the same thing, that the experience in which alone, as given objects, they can be known, conform to the concepts.” (Bxvii) For skepticism concerning whether Kant does mean by this to refer to a Copernican revolution in philosophy see Cohen (1985, Chap. 15).
- 7.
The empirical combination is here described as “the relation according to laws of the reproductive imagination, which has only subjective validity” (B141) and clearly refers back to the distinction between association and the transcendental ground of reproduction that was made in the A-Deduction at A100–102.
- 8.
Allison (2004: 167).
- 9.
The view that the argument of the B-Deduction should be viewed as having two steps was influentially formulated by Dieter Henrich and Allison specifically sets his reading against that of Henrich. For the classic account of Henrich’s view of the distinction between the two parts of the B-Deduction see Henrich (1969).
- 10.
All translations of the Prolegomena are from Ellington (Kant 1977).
- 11.
The view that Kant adopts two conceptions of ‘experience’ in the Critique is articulated by Lewis White Beck. Beck (1978: 40–41) describes these two kinds of experience as “Lockean” and “Kantian” experience or “L-experience” and “K-experience”. That Beck finds this distinction in the Critique makes the appearance of the different types of empirical judgment in the Prolegomena less of a novelty and more of an explication of something merely implicit in the Critique.
- 12.
This rationale for the intrinsic impossibility of certain judgments of perception becoming judgments of experience is naturally insufficient in the light of the argument in the Critique of Judgment that certain kinds of pleasure are a priori, namely, those that concern purposiveness (AA 5: 187). Due to this, a new distinction becomes necessary between feelings of what is merely agreeable as opposed to pure judgments of taste that have characteristics of universality and necessity. This distinction mirrors that between judgments of perception and experience in a certain way as the judgments of agreeableness are now those incapable of attaining to a priori status. But what follows from this is clearly that some judgments that have a priori status are not, simply by virtue of that alone, capable of being described as ‘judgments of experience’.
- 13.
Two points are worth adding to this argument. The first is that Kant subsequently refers to a geometrical example as a further indication of the need for a judgment to contain more than mere comparison, namely the principle that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points (AA 4: 301–302). This example is akin to the construction of determinate space at B138. Secondly, the argument concerning judgments of experience is clearly generally aimed at the Humean suggestion that comparison of perceptions alone is sufficient to arrive at judgments of objective validity as is made clear by the way this passage is part of an overall argument that concludes with a justification of the causal principle that has been used in the examples of judgments of experience.
- 14.
In formulating his difficulties with the distinction of the Prolegomena Allison is following, as he acknowledges, the argument of Beck (1978).
- 15.
In the Prolegomena we find the following: “[S]ensation is not an intuition that contains either space or time” (AA 4: 306), a point corroborated in the Critique: “[S]ensation is not in itself an objective representation, and since neither the intuition of space nor that of time is to be met with in it, its magnitude is not extensive but intensive” (B208).
- 16.
This is effectively recognized by Allison: “[A] consciousness of synthesis (considered as activity as well as product) is a necessary condition of apperception.” (Allison 2004, 171)
- 17.
- 18.
Whilst the model in this passage is very complex there are two points worth adding. Firstly, the view that the representation of time requires space was asserted earlier in the Transcendental Aesthetic (A33=B49–50) and is key to the subsequent argument of the Analogies of Experience. Secondly, since the representation of time is by means of space the determination of time will be understood in a primarily spatial manner. The consequences of this latter point for Kantian conceptions of laws of nature would be worth further exploration elsewhere.
- 19.
The puzzle of this statement formed a nodal point of the analysis in Banham (2006) though the view of it presented here is distinct from that given there.
- 20.
It would require a different and more developed argument to discuss the relationship of the categories to the transcendental unity of apperception in some detail.
- 21.
That reference to the categories is included in Kant’s account of the transcendental synthesis of imagination is clearly stated in the B-Deduction (B152) but, I am suggesting, it is not present at each stage and does not account for how the unity of space and time is something distinct from concepts of the understanding (B161n.). Conversely, the failure to discuss self-affection misses an essential part of the argument of the B-Deduction in order to concentrate only on the question of the categories despite the centrality of a unity other than that of the categories to the very opening of the B-Deduction.
- 22.
References
Allison, H. 1974. ‘Transcendental Affinity – Kant’s Answer to Hume’. In L. W. Beck (ed.), Kant’s Theory of Knowledge: Selected Papers from the Third International Kant Congress. Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel, pp. 119–127.
Allison, H. 1983. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. An Interpretation and Defense. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Allison, H. 2004. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. An Interpretation and Defense. Revised & Enlarged edition. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Banham, G. 2006. Kant’s Transcendental Imagination. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Beck, L. W. 1978. ‘Did the Sage of Königsberg Have No Dreams? In L. W. Beck, Essays on Kant and Hume. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 38–60.
Cohen, B. 1985. Revolution in Science. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap.
Henrich, D. 1969. ‘The Proof-Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction’. Review of Metaphysics 22: 640–659.
Kant, I. 1977. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Trans. and ed. J. Ellington. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Kant, I. 2007. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. N. Kemp Smith. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Banham, G. (2010). Transcendental Idealism and Transcendental Apperception. In: Schulting, D., Verburgt, J. (eds) Kant's Idealism. The New Synthese Historical Library, vol 66. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9719-4_6
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