Abstract
Kant famously defends an approach to knowledge involving two ‘stems’ that necessarily interact to generate knowledge of the external world. This comprises, on the one hand, the receptivity of our sensibility, responsible for intuitive representations, and, on the other hand, the spontaneity of our understanding, conceived as a faculty of conceptual representation. It seems that the differentiation between these two ‘stems’ aligns quite neatly with the distinction between natural and normative influences on our knowledge respectively. Conceived this way, one of the persisting questions of Kant scholarship is how nature and the normative can interact in such a way as to produce empirical representations that are shaped by our conceptual constraints. To explain how this is possible, Kant introduces the faculty of imagination, which, guided by the understanding, allows subjects of experience to “synthesize” the representational input of sensibility into conceptually shaped representations. Kant’s philosophy thus offers a complex account of the imagination as the capacity responsible for synthesizing the sensory and conceptual aspects of representation, thereby acting as an intermediary between nature and normativity.
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- 1.
Cf. Sellars (1968, 16).
- 2.
CPJ 5:232. Cf. 28.1:235 ff.
- 3.
At least in the 2nd edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Cf. B162. In the first edition the synthesis of apprehension is only the first part of the threefold synthesis. Cf. A98–100 and Sect. 5.3 below.
- 4.
Cf. Sellars (1978a, § 48).
- 5.
A140/B179/80.
- 6.
Jay Rosenberg and John McDowell, both of whom have worked extensively on Sellars’ Kant-interpretation, share this estimation. Cf. Rosenberg (2007b, 240) and McDowell (2009, 114). Rosenberg in this paper gives an excellent sketch of Sellars’s theory of perception in general and his conception of image-models as products of productive imagination in particular. The way he relates the latter to Kant’s account of the threefold synthesis (ibid., Fn.12) is, however, quite problematic, as we will see below.
- 7.
Sellars introduces this activity of the imagination by way of “phenomenological reflection” (Sellars 1978a, §§ 3, 27), but the implications of the concepts thus gained will prove paramount and, moreover, they are in line with what Kant has to say about the empirical activity of the productive imagination.
- 8.
- 9.
We will find that this statement is in need of elaboration with respect to the Kantian approach. Cf. below Sect. 5.5.
- 10.
For the metaphor of a line that is supposed to separate what is situated ‘above’ it (in the sphere of the conceptual or spontaneous) and that what lies ‘below’ it as purely receptive cf. McDowell (2009).
- 11.
- 12.
Sellars does not make this important difference explicit, but ultimately gives a description of the role of empirical and transcendental schemata that fits this Kantian distinction when he distinguishes “empirical structure” from “‘categorial’ features” (Sellars 1978a, § 39) Cf. ibid., §§ 22, 24. For the distinction in the Critique of Pure Reason cf. A160/B199.
- 13.
Cf. Sellars (1978a, §22).
- 14.
- 15.
Cf., for instance, Sellars (1976, § 24).
- 16.
Cf. the quote above from A 191 / B 236.
- 17.
Cf. ibid. § 28; Sellars (1976, § 51).
- 18.
Cf. Sellars (1978a, § 28).
- 19.
- 20.
Cf. Sellars (1978b, 280/1).
- 21.
Cf. Sellars (1982, 87).
- 22.
For the conception of mis-taking cf. Sellars (1982, 109).
- 23.
Cf., for instance, Haag (2007, Ch. 7 and 8).
- 24.
Kant, through the addition of “as appearance”, directs attention to what we have learned to call the act/object-ambiguity.
- 25.
This is made entirely clear in B162 Fn.
- 26.
Cf. A320/B377.
- 27.
What this concept is designed to cover, nevertheless, has not simply become obsolete in the second edition. It should be taken as belonging to the ‘loss’ Kant refers to in the Preface to the second edition concerning which he explicitly refers the reader back to the first edition. Cf. B XLII.
- 28.
Could it be, alternatively, a unity of a merely synoptic complex provided for by the purely receptive “synopsis of sense” (A97) (cf. below Sect. 5.5)? This is also implausible because it would mean a duplication of structures that is superfluous at best and incoherent at worst: we would have synoptically structured complexes embedded as isolated parts in synthetically structured complexes. In this case a meaningful relation between the forms of receptivity and the forms of intuition would be lost: the hypostasis of structured receptive input would amount to rational psychology, which is not in any way transcendentally founded. Moreover, the argument that justifies the introduction of forms of receptivity connects them to forms of intuition and we would not have these forms of intuition unless we had these forms of receptivity (whatever they might be). Without them, this connection would get completely lost, which would be fatal to the overall transcendental justification of the picture. For more on the topic of synopsis cf. below 5.5.
- 29.
When introducing the synthesis of recognition Kant puts this in terms of the synthesis guaranteeing the identity of a synthesized object. He phrases the solution to the problem from A 120 explicitly in terms of the synthesis of recognition in A124. For more on the synthesis of recognition cf. Haag (2007, 220 ff).
Rosenberg claims that the synthesis of apprehension alone could produce image-models, while the synthesis of recognition is only needed to afford us intuitive representations in Sellars’s sense (Rosenberg 2007b, 240). The third aspect of the threefold synthesis, the synthesis of recognition, in his view, is reserved for “perception across time” (ibid.). (Kant indeed does talk about identity through time in this context. But identifying this with the task of recognition amounts to confusing a particular argument for the synthesis of recognition with the description of its contribution to the threefold synthesis.)
Furthermore, Rosenberg’s account seems misguided in a number of other ways: the synthesis of apprehension is nothing more than the taking up into consciousness of the manifold of receptivity; for the construction of image-models the impressions must be reproduced. Otherwise we would have only isolated sense-impressions. (Cf. Kant’s example of the drawing of a line in thought in A102.) The synthesis of recognition likewise cannot be omitted in the generation of image-models. It is needed for executing the recipes for construction, that are not part of the intuition of an object of experience, say, of a dog, though they are part of the corresponding concept of dog. (This last remark refers back to my repudiation of Rosenberg’s claim that the recipe (schema) used in the generation of the image-model should simply be identified with the “demonstrative conceptualization” (Rosenberg 2007a, 273), that is, the intuition.)
- 30.
Cf. the letter to Marcus Herz from May 26, 1789. McDowell quotes this letter in support of his claim that “our sensibility should be something non-rational animals also have” (McDowell 2009, 117). Accordingly, this claim is introduced by McDowell as a constraint for any successful account of sensory consciousness.
- 31.
In brief, I take Kant to argue that representations could not be conscious unless they are associable. For representations can be only conscious through their combination into a complex. Associability, however, is the presupposition of such a combination. Conscious representation, hence, presupposes associability and cannot be thought without it – which must, consequently, be conceived as a condition of the possibility of conscious representation. To this end, however, it has to be provided with an objective, not merely subjective ground. If associability is a purely subjective ground it has to be supplemented by a corresponding ‘affinity of appearances’ (A122) that turns out to be guaranteed by the unity of apperception, i.e., self-consciousness. Cf. Haag (2007, 241–247). The relationship between apperception and (empirical) synthesis of recognition is discussed in ibid., 239 f.
- 32.
I think that this abstraction would have to be very much like what McDowell suggests in 2009, 119–122. What this analysis deliberately leaves out, of course, is the alternative concept of a receptive sensation. If the present account of synthesis of apprehension should turn out to be correct, receptive sensations obviously would not be accessible to a comparable abstractive approach.
- 33.
This should serve as a powerful reminder of the fact that the metaphorical talk about ‘steps’, while sometimes necessary for elucidating the details of the threefold synthesis, is ultimately misleading, since it suggests that each step could take place independently of the following. To call the three parts of this synthesis ‘aspects’ is more adequate.
- 34.
This is meant as a clarification of my assessment of this subject matter in Haag (2007, 231 Fn). If correct, it will count against the use McDowell makes of the continuity between the sensory consciousness of animals and rational beings.
- 35.
Cf. A94.
- 36.
An exception is Waxman (1991, 228–225). Waxman interestingly sees as part of the role of synopsis the purgation from form that I will ascribe to the Synthesis of Apprehension.
- 37.
But compare my attempt in Haag (2007, Ch. 4).
- 38.
Cf. 8:222.
- 39.
The concept of synopsis shares this particular ambiguity with the concept of synthesis that can be used (and is used by Kant) likewise to alternatively represent the process or the product of synthesis.
- 40.
B145.
- 41.
Cf. Sellars (1968, 29). Sellars, of course, criticizes Kant for not paying attention to this very distinction. If my interpretation is correct, however, in this context Sellars fails to do full justice to the subtlety of Kant’s approach.
- 42.
Cf. p. 10 above.
- 43.
Cf. A145/B184, 16:662, 18:268.
- 44.
- 45.
Cf. A266f./B322f.
- 46.
Sellars simply identifies this scientific concept of color as secondary quality with the transcendental concept of “the real which is an object of sensation” (B 207), which, if there is something to my considerations, amounts to a confusion.
- 47.
Sellars, of course, would deny just that, since he sees space and color as inextricably bound up with each other. But Kant has an interesting argument against this to the effect that we only need some matter, but exactly this kind of form. For a discussion compare Haag (2007, 142–150).
- 48.
Cf. B157/8.
- 49.
Since Kant often uses form of intuition for what he calls formal intuition in B160 fn., I have decided not to use his somewhat confusing terminology in this case, but rather to stick to Sellars’s terminological suggestion instead.
- 50.
These (undetermined) intuitive representations of space and time have to be distinguished carefully from the (determined) concepts of space and time based upon them. Cf. e.g. A25/B39.
- 51.
Which could, by the way, help to explain the lapse on Kant’s part in the original characterization of the synthesis of apprehension: he might have been preoccupied with a priori synthesis.
- 52.
- 53.
Cf. Haag (2007, 142–150).
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Haag, J. (2013). Kant on Imagination and the Natural Sources of the Conceptual. In: Lenz, M., Waldow, A. (eds) Contemporary Perspectives on Early Modern Philosophy. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 29. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6241-1_5
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