Jennifer McRobert,
Acadia University
Wolfville, NS, Canada
The Transcendental Analytic of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason ends with a little appendix on what he calls the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection. Why Kant relegated this discussion to an appendix is far from clear. True, the point that Kant eventually gets around to defending, that we are aware only of appearances not things as they are in themselves, is familiar. But the argument that Kant now gives for it is entirely new. In addition, the passage introduces a new form of transcendental thinking, Transcendental Deliberation(1), that would appear to have some real promise. Neither would seem to be the stuff of an appendix. The passage is curious in other ways, too. The immediate target of the new argument is Leibniz. First, why does Kant launch an attack on Leibniz here at the end of the Analytic when much of the Transcendental Dialectic is, among other things, a critique of Leibniz?(2) (The Dialectic begins immediately the Amphiboly ends.) Second, the actual Appendix is less than six pages long--but the Note to it is more than twice that long. Altogether, a strange little passage.
Nonetheless, the passage holds real interest. For one thing, it contains the fullest treatment of two major issues to found anywhere in the first Critique. One of them is identity, specifically, numerical identity. Indeed, the appendix discusses numerical identity for the first time in the Critique. Kant has used the concept earlier, of course, indeed a number of times, but this is the first time he singles it out for separate discussion.(3) In the Table of Categories where Kant urges that concepts of quantity, quality, relationship, and modality are required if we are to represent objects, he does not so much as mention identity, for example, and its omission is surprising. The concepts of numerical identity and the related notions of individuation and re-identification would seem to be at least as necessary for representing objects as, say, modality.Why does Kant not take them up until this little appendix?
The second is this. In the Amphiboly Kant offers his first real argument for the claim that knowledge requires sensible content as well as conceptual judgment. He has of course asserted this earlier--many, many times, in fact--but just try to find an argument to back the assertion (we will provide textual support for this audacious claim below). Here he offers one.
In addition, there is the striking new form of transcendental argument that Kant calls Transcendental Deliberation. Transcendental Deliberation, Kant says, is one route to synthetic a priori knowledge. Yet it plays no role in the first Critique prior to the Amphibology and it disappears from his thought again-and disappears for good, not just for the remainder of the first Critique-immediately thereafter.
In short, the little Appendix on the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection is extremely interesting. Yet it has not, to say the least, fired the imagination of Kant's readers. With the possible exception of the Transcendental Doctrine of Method, no part of the first Critique has received less attention. This neglect is not warranted.
The Attack on Locke and Leibniz
One possible reason why Kant may have relegated his attack on the Amphiboly to an appendix is that he may have viewed the issues arising in it as a parochial side show, not an integral part of the critical philosophy. And on the surface, indeed, it does look like little more than simply a refutation a couple of mistakes made by Leibniz and Locke. That is the way it has struck most of his readers. Equally, Transcendental Deliberation, whatever exactly it is, has not struck commentators as having much more interest. So what is this amphiboly that Leibniz and Locke both commit in their different ways and how do interesting things arise in the course of Kant's discussion of it?
An amphiboly of the concepts of reflection, Kant tells us, is "a confounding of an object of pure understanding with appearance" (A270=B326)(4) This confounding can happen in two ways. One is to take an appearance to be an object solely of the understanding. Here one takes something that has in fact been delivered through the senses or sensible imagination to be purely conceptual. This is the form that Leibniz' amphiboly took. The other is to take something that acquired nonsensibly (a priori categories) to be a deliverance purely of the senses. This is the form that Locke's amphiboly took.
In a word, Leibniz intellectualized appearances, just as Locke... sensualised all concepts of the understanding, i.e., interpreted them as nothing more than empirical or abstracted concepts ... [A271=B327, italics in original]
For Kant, any amphiboly is serious mistake but Leibniz' evidently worried him a good deal more than Locke's. Were Leibniz right, all knowledge-containing representation would be merely conceptual judgment, acts of the understanding. Sensible experience would have no essential role to play in determining the truth or falsity of beliefs. Kant thought this to be dead wrong. Moreover, were Leibniz right, we would or at least could have knowledge of things as they are in themselves; if the objects of which we have knowledge are objects purely of the understanding, then they are internal to us and thus accessible to us. Kant flatly denied this, too. Locke's amphibole makes the opposite mistake. On Kant's view, he maintains that all the elements of knowledge come from the senses. This would be a serious mistake because it would psychologize knowledge; mathematics and physics would not have the necessity and universality that Kant took to be self-evident in the case of mathematics and true of physics (and everything else that counts as science) (B20-21). However, from Kant's perspective, i.e., the perspective of a philosopher working his way out of the Leibniz-Wolff tradition, Locke's error may well have appeared to be a less important than Leibniz'. At any rate, in the rest of the passage, Leibniz is the target and Locke hardly appears again.
Transcendental Deliberation
Kant says that his critique of Leibniz and Locke flows from something called Transcendental Deliberation. Three questions will occupy us for the next few sections: What is this new mode of attack? How do the critiques of Leibniz and Locke fall out of it, Leibniz in particular? And how does all of this lead Kant to discuss numerical identity and sensible content? These are not entirely separable questions.
Deliberation, Kant tells us in the very first paragraph of the appendix, is "the consciousness of the relationship of representations to our different sources of knowledge" (A260=B316). The different sources of knowledge in question are sensibility and understanding and the task for Transcendental Deliberation is to determine whether a given representation requires one or the other or both - or, more strictly, as Kant next tells us, from which faculty a representation of an object has come.
Kant's refutations of Leibniz and Locke fall immediately out of this investigation. Leibniz mistook objects derived from sensibility to be objects requiring only understanding. Says Kant, Leibniz wrongly supposes that if a distinction is not found in the concept of a thing, then it is not to be found in the thing:
Because in the mere concept of a thing in general we abstract from the many necessary conditions of its intuition, the conditions from which we have abstracted are, with strange presumption, treated as not being there at all, and nothing is allowed to the thing beyond what is contained in its concept.[A281=B337]
On the other hand, Locke took objects requiring (and/or derived from) acts of understanding to be derived solely from sensibility.
Transcendental Deliberation involves examining, with the help of Concepts of Reflection, the sensible and intellectual conditions under which concepts are originally formed. The approach is 'transcendental' in that it reflects on the possibility of the concepts under examination; it is 'deliberative' insofar as it compares and contrasts the various contributions to knowledge made by the faculties of sensibility and understanding. In this way Transcendental Deliberation leads us to discover the subjective conditions under which we are able to arrive at concepts.
Kant says that four kinds of relationships among represented objects are relevant--identity(5) and difference, agreement and opposition, inner and outer, and matter and form. Though he never says it in so many words, these four pairs are presumably the Concepts of Reflection.
In his critique of Leibniz, Kant takes up the issue of the conditions under which we make judgments of identity and difference for various kinds of represented object. Leibniz urged that if the objects of two representations are entirely indiscernible, that is to say, qualitatively indistinguishable, then they are in fact identical objects. To illustrate his point about the identity of indiscernables, Leibniz introduced the famous example of the drops of rain: if two drops of rain are indiscernible--have all the same properties-- they are in fact one and the same object.
Kant's Amphiboly exposes an ambiguity in Leibniz' argument. It turns out that Leibniz' argument equivocates on two distinct senses of identity: First, the law of identity implicit in the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, and secondly, the non-trivial sense of numerical identity that applies in the individuation and re-identification of objects. What Kant argues is that objects can be indiscernible only if they are objects of understanding. Raindrops, properly considered, are not objects of understanding - they are objects of sensibility. So the principle of the identity of indiscernibles is out of place in the drops of rain example. As Kant explains, the error in thinking is born of the failure to recognize the difference between the concepts and principles governing noumena (e.g., the law of identity) and those governing phenomena (e.g., identity over time) ( A 270- B 326).
The point of Kant's criticism is that we should not treat raindrops as conceptual objects fit to be examined under the logical law of identity. Experience reveals that two actual raindrops must occupy different places and must be numerically different. Indeed, the only way to become aware of the two raindrops is by use of the senses. And to be empirically distinguishable, the two raindrops must be represented in different locations. Since the two raindrops do not share the same spatial location, they should be considered to be non-identical sensible objects.
The argument in the Amphiboly is aligned with Kant's long-standing criticism of the Leibnizean view that formal logic has direct ontological implications. The notion of identity appears frequently in Kant's pre-critical writings; indeed, it plays an important role in Kant's earliest disputes with Leibnizean metaphysics. In the paper on Negative Magnitudes (1763) and the Prize Essay (1764), Kant begins to formulate his opposition to the logicism of Leibniz and the rationalists, attacking the exclusive place of mathematical method in metaphysics. The early Kant argues that philosophical reflection and mathematical reasoning are distinct activities that Leibniz and his followers mistakenly conflate. The gist of his argument is reminiscent of an even earlier critique of deductive metaphysics due to Hoffmann and Crusius.(6) Like Hoffmann and Crusius, Kant focuses on the limitations of the mathematical method in metaphysics, and on the principle of identity in particular. For Hoffmann and Crusius, as well as for Kant, the crux of the argument against deductive metaphysics comes down to this: principles of formal logic and mathematics cannot supply all that is needed for metaphysical knowledge. Additional non-logical elements, elements required by experience, play a role as necessary determinants of knowledge.
Unlike his predecessors, the early Kant refused to solve the problem by stipulating new laws of thought and simple ideas. Rather, he merely specifies that the principle of identity alone cannot be the ground all positive judgments about natural things:
I understand very well how a consequence can be posited by a ground according to the rule of identity, because it is found contained in it by dissection of the concept ... But how something follows from something else, yet not according to the rule of identity - that is something which I would be glad to be able to make plain. (NM, 202)
It is interesting to note that Kant's argument against Leibniz in the Amphiboly is in fact based on this distinction between logical and real grounds in metaphysics. In the Amphiboly, Kant argues that the numerical identity of sensible objects can only follow from a real ground, and cannot follow from the principle of identity. Here Kant makes a stronger criticism of Leibniz' reliance on the principle of identity than in his pre-critical work: The early Kant concedes that at least some existence claims follow by the rule of identity, explicitly endorsing, for example, rational cosmology (NM, 203). By 1781, Kant has completely abandoned the view that the principle of identity is a sufficient basis for positive judgments about existing things. The principle of identity no longer figures as a basis of positive judgments about appearance; in its place Kant introduces 'the highest principle of synthetic judgments' (A 158= B 197), a principle that affirms the importance of both intellect and sensibility in metaphysical judgement:
... unequivocally presented in the whole Critique, from the chapter on the schematism on, though not in specific formula. It is this: all synthetic judgments of theoretical cognition are possible only by the relating of a given concept to an intuition. (Letter to Reinhold , May 12, 1789, in Zweig, 141).
And thus we see the evolution in Kant's treatment of identity. The early Kant is prepared to defend the principle of identity as a basis for existential judgments. The Kant of the Amphiboly completely rejects this form of logicism in metaphysics, recognizing only numerical identity as the non-trivial concept of identity that applies to appearances. Nonetheless, numerical identity does not come to figure centrally in the critical formalism. The Kant of 1781 bases positive metaphysical judgments on a new critical principle, a principle that stipulates that non-logical elements supplied by the faculties of sensibility and understanding undergird synthetic judgments.
Numerical Identity and Kant's Table of Categories
Kant's remarks about numerical identity in the Amphiboly are striking, not least for their absence from the Critique up to this point. They mark the first time in the whole of the Analytic that Kant has recognized mathematical or numerical identity as a concept of any importance or singled it out for separate attention. He has used the concept of numerical identity, of course; how could he not? It underlies the synthesis of recognition, for example. Indeed, in the A-edition he uses the word 'identity' in that context once (A115). Then there is the numerical identity of consciousness of which he speaks many times (A108 and A113 for example), though it is a special case. He also speaks of the notion of a unit, a quantity of one, in connection with the synthesis of apprehension (B162, for example) and of the "successive apprehension of an object" (A145=B184) in the Schematism section. In the first Analogy he talks of persistence through change and in the second Analogy he lays out some conditions of apprehending an object (A198=B243). Indeed, the argument of the first Analogy uses the concept of numerical identity in the most direct way possible--Kant says that for change to be possible, some unit of something must persist through the change. This something looks very much like a parcel of matter; Kant seems to be arguing that for real change to be possible, such a parcel must persist without addition or deletion through the change. How much more direct an application of the concept of numerical identity could there be? Yet nowhere does Kant so much as notice that the concept of numerical identity is at work in any of these passages.(7) This is more than a little peculiar--what could be more basic to representation of objects than individuation and re-identification? When we get to the chapter on the Paralogisms later, this gap becomes even more striking. Identity at a time is one major theme of the attack on the second Paralogism and identity over time is the whole topic of the attack on the third!(8)
But notice that all of these references show that the concept of identity is basic to the process of forming objectively valid synthetic judgments. One would think that the concept of numerical identity would be front and centre of Kant's theory of synthetic judgment. However, except for the brief remarks we are currently examining in the Appendix on the Amphiboly, Kant has not done anything to introduce the concept of identity over time or back it with theory anywhere earlier in the book. Even here, Kant's treatment is peculiar. Having demonstrated the importance of individuation and re-identification, what does he do? He drops the subject! In particular, he says little about how we perform this crucial task. Without individuation and re-identification, he seems to allow, we could not apply the categories. Yet all Kant does to explain our ability to use the concept is to invoke an apparently native talent for doing so; "the mere fact that they [two presentations of an object] have been intuited simultaneously in different spatial positions is sufficient justification for holding them to be numerically different." (A264=B320) How, we wonder, could Kant treat something so essential to object recognition so sketchily, and with so little acknowledgement of its importance?
We earlier suggested that numerical identity is a strong candidate for inclusion in the Table of Categories. What was Kant's attitude? The question must have worried him because he suddenly turns to it in the middle of a discussion of a different point near the beginning of the Note to the Appendix. Interestingly, he positively denies that the Concepts of Reflection are categories--as of course he must if his claims about the completeness of the Table of Categories are to survive. Identity and difference and the other Concepts of Reflection, he tells us,
...are distinguished from the categories by the fact that they do not present the object according to what constitutes its concept (quality, reality), but only serve to describe in all its manifoldness the comparison of the representations which is prior to the concepts of things. [A269=B325]
And again, in the Prolegomena (326), Kant states unequivocally that we are not to confuse the categories and the concepts of reflection; categories alone apply in concept formation, and concepts of reflection are for use only on concepts already so formed. In both passages, Kant seems to be suggesting that we apply the concept of numerical identity and other Concepts of Reflection in a manner quite distinct from the application of categories to intuitions. Concepts such as identity, Kant tells us, reveal something about concept formation after the fact.
Such partial explanations notwithstanding, it is still difficult to see why a concept of reflection such as identity does not rest on a par with the categories. Recall, for example, what Kant has already said about the Synthesis of Recognition in a Concept. There he urged that retaining and re-identifying earlier represented contents is implicit in recognizing them as an object via the application of categorical concepts, though he no more recognizes that it is numerical identity that he is dealing with there than he does anywhere else. There are, of course, a number of moves that could be made to rescue Kant from our charge that he should have included identity in the Table of Categories. Unfortunately, none of them works very well.
1. 'Perhaps Kant saw the concept of identity as already built into the concept of quantity.'
That won't work; the concept of being one of something of a particular kind at and over time goes far beyond the notion of simply being a unit.
2. 'Perhaps numerical identity is supposed to fall out of the schematized extension of the concept of number.'
This proposal seems plausible initially, but then why didn't Kant actually talk about identity in the Schematism section, or somewhere in the Principles at least? As we saw, he does talk about successive apprehensions of the same object in the Schematism, of persistence through change in the first Analogy, and of recognizing an object by its spatio/temporal and causal relations in the Second Analogy--but he never mentions numerical identity, not by name.
3. 'Perhaps Kant considered the concept of numerical identity to be a collective responsibility of some combination of the classes of categories.'
On this proposal, individuation would result from using two or more of the four classes of categories, perhaps quantity (number and quantitative magnitude), quality (degree) and relations. This suggestion is interesting--the attack on the Amphiboly is indeed based on the ways judgments of qualitative identity are compatible with difference of number--but again Kant's failure even to mention identity and individuation in his discussion of the Categories is left unexplained. In short, it is not easy to think of a way to rescue Kant from the problem that identity poses for the completeness of the Table of Categories.
A similar question can be raised about the other concepts of reflection, agreement and opposition, inner and outer, and form and matter. Isn't it necessary that an object of a representation be compatible with some things and in opposition to others? Or that it have inner (nonrelational) and outer (relational) properties? Or that it consists of some kind of informed material? Here, again the relationship between the concepts of reflection and the categories remains something of a puzzle to us. While it is easy to see how the concepts of reflection assist in determining the relations that concepts bear to the cognitive faculties, it is not easy to see why this set of concepts in particular, so central to metaphysical thinking, do not get included in Kant's Table of Categories. Clearly, Kant was adamant in his rejection of this suggestion. What we have difficulty understanding is the apparent arbitrariness with which important concepts such as identity are omitted from Kant's Table of Categories. It has often been claimed that the Table of Categories contains too little, but the omissions we have been discussing seem particularly egregious.
The Sensible Element in Representation
Now the concept of identity at work in Kant's pre-critical thought is the law of identity, and Kant's goal in the Negative Magnitudes paper is to show that the mathematical notion of a negative quantity (itself derived from the law of identity through the law of non-contradiction) can guide us in representing features of experience due to real oppositions in nature. Like Hoffmann and Crusius before him, Kant is willing to concede to the Leibnizeans that the mathematical method has a place in metaphysics; but like his fellow critics, he seeks to drive a wedge that will leave room in metaphysics for necessary non-logical constraints on metaphysical knowledge. For Kant, that wedge is the sensible element in representation.
The Kant of 1763 aims to show that representing features of sensible experience requires more than the old mathematical method has to offer. For example, the concept of motion involves positing 'motive forces of one and the same body in directions opposed to one another, and where the grounds really cancel their mutual results' (NM, 193). Such 'real oppositions', Kant argues, 'posit determinations in one and the same thing one of which is the negative of another'. But not only do the material conditions imposed upon representation by real oppositions require the introduction of new non-logical concepts such as 'real opposition', they also presuppose additional non-logical activities of the soul:
And so it is to be judged that the play of representations, and in general all activities of our souls, presuppose contrary actions insofar as their consequences cease after they have been ... [something which exists] can never be cancelled except by a genuine contrary motive force of another. (NM 191).
In the pre-critical period, Kant fails to elaborate the exact nature of the non-logical cognitive activities and concepts required for metaphysical representation. However, his general point is well taken. Mathematics may be imitated in philosophy, but the representation of existing things requires more than deductive metaphysics can supply. Hence, the early Kant is at least successful in locating a point of divergence between the mathematical and philosophical methods, and in providing an argument to show that the mathematical method is insufficient in metaphysics.
Kant's eventual resting place is well known. By 1770 and the Inaugural Dissertation, he had come to realize that, in addition to the law of identity, metaphysics also requires the forms of sensible intuition and the categories. Nonetheless, it is important to realize that Kant has already begun to drive the wedge that he would continue to use to mark the separation of the mathematical and philosophical methods as early as 1763. For he had already realized that material existence places an added conceptual burden on metaphysics, one that goes unacknowledged in Leibniz's system of metaphysical laws and deductive consequences. The domain of philosophical objects cannot be exhaustively represented using Leibniz's method; Rather, philosophy has its own proper subjects, and its explanations require that non-logical concepts also be taken as primary to metaphysical thinking.
What seems apparent is that Kant's interest in the problem of how to represent the sensible component in experience continued to grow as the critical period approached. It was Leibniz's misuse of the principle of identity that first led Kant to formulate the argument for the necessity of a material component in representation, and Kant never completely abandons his early arguments. However, what begins with a discussion of real opposition in 1763 takes on a radical new emphasis as a discussion of formal aspects of sensibility in the 1770 Inaugural Dissertation. Moreover, the arguments supplied for the necessity of representing the material component given in experience that follow in the coming years are by no means systematic.
In the first Critique, Kant articulates the view as early as the Introduction (A15=B29, A19=B33), indeed as early as the Preface in the B-edition (Bxxiii-iv), repeats it in the very first paragraphs of the Analytic of Concepts, and then asserts it over and over and over again through the Analytic. As he says, "without sensibility no objects would be given to us, ... thoughts without content are empty" (A51=B74). The trouble is, he never gets around to arguing the point--not till he gets to the Appendix on the Amphiboly. He mounts an argument that we need concepts, indeed very specific concepts, and he mounts an argument that we need the forms of intuition, space and time. But he never mounts an argument that we need sensations, empirical intuitions, what he calls the matter of knowledge (A86=B118; A166=B207; A267=B323). Nothing like the drop of water argument is to be found anywhere else in the Analytic!
Though Kant argues the point in other works, the discussion of incongruent counterparts being one example, the closest to an argument anywhere in the Analytic prior to the Appendix are two quite obscure anticipations of the strategy of the Appendix in the two sections immediately preceding it, the General Note to the Principles added in the B-edition (B288) and the chapter on Phenomena and Noumena (A240=B299). The only place early in the Analytic where there is something like an argument for the need for sensible intuition is in the argument to have more than analytic truths, to know anything synthetic, we need, in addition to the two linked terms, some third element connecting them (B15-16; A89=B121; A151=B196). This argument does not quite do the job, however; it does not argue that this third element has to be sensible, derived from sensations.
What exactly is Kant claiming about sensible intuition? It would be easy to think that he is claiming only that without sensible intuition, we would have no way to adjudicate beliefs, sift the true from the false. However, the claim is much stronger than that. As he says repeatedly, without sensible intuitions our thoughts would have no objects: "... in no other way can an object be given to us" (A19=B33). In sharp contrast to the rest of the Analytic, the Appendix on the Amphiboly contains an argument for the claim.
Most commentators focus on the drops of water argument. As an argument for the necessity of a sensible component in empirical representation, it appears at first glance to be decisive. In fact, it is not. All Kant claims in it is that spatial location plays a role in some judgments of identity. But spatial location is purely formal, something derived from the forms of intuition. If so, the drops of water example is no argument that we need the particular, contingent contents of sensible intuition at all.
There is something better in the argument from agreement and opposition. Without particular sensible intuitions, it really would be hard to represent the opposition of forces, pain counter-balancing pleasure, etc., in the way that we do. In a passage reminiscent of his 1763 paper on Negative Magnitudes, the older Kant of the Amphiboly appeals to real oppositions and how they are combined in representation
When such realities are combined in the same subject, one may wholly or partially destroy the consequences of another, as in the case of two moving forces in the same straight line, in so far as they either attract or impel a point in opposite directions, or again in the case of a pleasure couterbalancing pain. (A 265 = B 321)
Representations of real opposition then, correspond to the real in appearance (realitas phaenomenon), that is, they correspond to the matter in an appearance (A 20= B 34). Since the matter in appearance is given to us a posteriori, a sensible faculty is required in order to represent such real oppositions. This is Kant's simple, yet powerful argument to show that a sensible faculty is required for representation of existing things. It is just as effective in demonstrating the need for a sensible element in representation as his arguments in the Transcendental Aesthetic, although it lacks the appeal of the universality and necessity attributed to the a priori forms of intuition. Even so, at the end of the section, Kant hints at the importance of the real in appearance - the very topic that he too often overlooked in favour of a detailed elaboration on the forms of intuition. Here he writes that
"The mere form of intuition, without substance, is in itself no object, but the merely formal condition of an object (as appearance), as pure space and pure time. These are indeed something, as forms of intuition, but they are not themselves objects which are intuited." (A 291= B 347)
It is clear that Kant has a unique and powerful argument here for the necessity of sensible intuition - an argument that the matter in appearance corresponding to sensation could only be represented through a sensible faculty. In some respects the argument from real opposition for the necessity of a sensible element in representation is even more compelling than Kant's appeals to forms of intuition in the Transcendental Aesthetic. One wonders why did Kant not think of these arguments when he introduced his claims for sensible intuitions much earlier.(9)
Transcendental Deliberation and The Concepts of Reflection
We have already seen how reflection on the relations of identity and difference and agreement and opposition in our concepts leads to an awareness of the sensible element in representation. In the first instance, sensible differences between represented objects such as raindrops are made apparent through reflection using the concepts of identity and difference. In the second instance, the correct representation of real oppositions such as the opposition between attractive and repulsive forces is discovered through reflection using the concepts of agreement and opposition.
The remaining examples of Transcendental Deliberation in the Amphiboly go like this. First, the concepts of inner and outer may be used to critically examine metaphysical concepts such as Leibniz' monad. The monad is the concept of an object of pure understanding (A 265=B 321), and has no sensible counterpart. It bears inner properties, but not outer ones. By way of contrast, when we consider the concept of an object that exists in space, a substantia phaenomenon, we consider the concept of an object that bears outer relations to things. It is through Transcendental Deliberation that we are able to determine that outer things are given through both sensibility and pure understanding, and that the monad is not a possible object of experience.
Finally, Transcendental Deliberation involving the concepts of matter and form shows that concepts of individual substances are partially comprised of the sensible forms of space and time and the matter of appearance(10). Formal features of sensibility do not lie in the objects themselves, awaiting our discovery -- rather, they are originally contributed by us, in the process of concept formation. In contrast to this the material component in sensible representation is first given, and then determined by the forms of intuition. Hence, Transcendental Deliberation shows that 'space and time precede all appearances and all data of experience' (A 267= B 323). This flies in the face of the traditional notion of individual substance (dating back to Aristotle) that makes space derivative, rather than constitutive, of substance.
In general, Transcendental Deliberation reveals the role that the sensible and intellectual faculties play in concept formation. Indeed, although Kant does not give the method a central role in the critical philosophy, he relies on it frequently, particularly in elucidating the fallacies to which dogmatists and empiricists have fallen prey. Not only does Transcendental Deliberation figure in the Amphiboly, the same method is clearly being invoked in the Antinomies and Paralogisms Chapters.
In one sense, Kant's use of Transcendental Deliberation in the Paralogisms and Antinomies Chapters is not that surprising, since the fallacies examined in all cases stem from a confusion over what belongs to sensibility and what belongs to understanding. In another sense, it is surprising, since Kant did not acknowledge a central place for the method in his exposition of the critical system. In the remainder of this paper we reconstruct some historical evidence that may shed light on why Kant downplayed Transcendental Deliberation in his critical system. But before we do so, let's briefly turn to Kant's use of Transcendental Deliberation in the Paralogisms and the Antinomies, in order to establish that the method does indeed figure centrally in these arguments.
Kant describes four paralogisms resting on the following mistakes: Taking the self to be a substance, taking the self to be a simple thing, taking the self to be identical with itself over time, and taking the self to stand in relation to representations of outer objects. According to Kant, the difficulty with all of these claims is that they make the assumption that the self is known to us as an unconditioned object of the intellect (noumenon). However, the self that we discover through introspection is no object at all, and is subject only to the conditions of inner intuition (time). This self is essentially indeterminate (A362, B 407) and cannot be cognized (B 422).
Hence the rational psychologist is wrong to suppose that the non-spatial and essentially indeterminate self we discover in introspection may be treated as 'an intuition of the subject as object' (B 421). It is this mistaken treatment of the self as if it were a determinate object of experience that leads to the fallacious conclusions that the self is a persisting substance, retains its identity over time, and stands in relation to possible objects in space. Hume was equally wrong, however, to suppose that introspection leads us to a disorganized bundle of impressions and ideas, and not to a unified self. Kant argues is that we can indeed transcendentally locate the self in introspection, and that the self so discovered is conditioned by and ordered by temporal intuition. Both of these criticisms turn on an analysis of concept formation using the using the method of Transcendental Deliberation i.e., by considering the sensible and intellectual conditions under which the concept of 'self' is formed.
Kant's use of Transcendental Deliberation in the Antinomies is even more vivid. There, Kant shows that a conflict of reason arises when pure reason is applied in rational cosmology. As with the paralogisms, the antinomies arise when the unconditioned object is treated as if it were subject to the conditions of sensible intuition. In the Antinomies, mistaken and apparently contradictory conclusions arise concerning whether the world has a beginning in time, whether the world is made up of simple parts, whether the world is determined by laws of nature, and whether the world is caused by a necessary being.
What Kant shows in these cases is that the conflicting claims produced in rational cosmology depend on the assumption that we can make ontological claims about unconditioned objects, e.g., a boundary of space, an indestructible unity, an uncaused event, God. But understanding is not in fact equipped to make such claims. Hence, each argument entertains an idea that can never in fact be a possible object of experience, an idea that is not subject to the sensible conditions of thought: The First Antinomy assumes that the understanding can entertain ideas of an eternity of elapsed times, a time empty of all succession, an infinite given whole of co-existing parts, and a space empty of all limitation and parts. In the Second Antinomy, it is assumed that the ideas of simple atoms and monads can be cognized. In the Third and Fourth antinomies the ideas of a world completely determined by laws of nature, a world in which some uncaused event(s) are possible, a world caused by God, and a world existing independent of God are supposed.
What Kant's exposition of the antinomies show is that the apparently contradictory conclusions arise because each concept considered transcends the conditioned use of our cognitive faculties, and corresponds to no object given in intuition. Similarly, the paralogisms show that the concepts of self employed by both dogmatists and skeptics are void of sensible content and meaning. Both expositions of fallacious thinking in metaphysics turn on the sort of method described earlier in the Amphiboly as Transcendental Deliberation. And yet, despite Kant's preference for Transcendental Deliberation in exposing the wide range of fallacies infecting the metaphysics of his day, and the ease with which Transcendental Deliberation lays bare the foundations of his critical system, Kant does not showcase the method in his first Critique. In the concluding section of this paper, we would like to call attention to some historical evidence that may shed light on why Kant downplayed Transcendental Deliberation and the Amphiboly in his critical system.
Conclusion : Transcendental Deliberation and the first Critique
We will close with an historical question: Why did Transcendental Deliberation come to play so small a role in Kant's work? The activity of Transcendental Deliberation, the activity of examining the sources of knowledge implicit in representations, could have been a whole additional way of explaining the critical inquiry. The first move of the critical project that Kant did pursue, the critical project of the Analytic, is to ask, What are the necessary conditions of experience (A96)? Put a bit more precisely, this question becomes, What are the necessary conditions of being able to represent objects? (This is the form in which Kant pursued the question in the A-edition Transcendental Deduction [A96-7], and, less obviously, in Section §15 of the B-edition Deduction [B130].) Now notice--the question at the heart of Transcendental Deliberation is precisely analogous: What necessary conditions are implicit in our representations? This would appear to be a promising transcendental question, yet the only place in which Kant explicitly pursued the method of Transcendental Deliberation in the whole critical philosophy seems to have been in the little appendix before us.
One of the reasons we find this to be surprising, is that up until 1781, Kant appears to focus on the development of just such a method for metaphysical inquiry. As Butts has documented in his introductory remarks to Kant's Philosophy of Physical Science, this development begins in the Prize Essay (1764) with two characteristics or rules of metaphysics(11), but is more fully explored in the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770. There Kant invokes his new doctrine that space and time are the subjective conditions of sensibility in order to expose several subreptic fallacies. Fallacies of subreption involve predicating spatial and temporal properties to intellectual concepts in a manner very similar to that already seen in the Amphiboly, Paralogism and Antinomy Chapters. In Section V of the Inaugural Dissertation, Kant identifies 4 'surreptitious axioms' and specifies the mistake implicit in each:
Whatever is, is somewhere at some time.(12)
Every actual manifold can be given numerically.(13)
What is impossible contradicts itself.(14)
Whatever exists contingently, at some time did not exist.(15)
As Butts notes, the central theme of Kant's Amphiboly, the methodological recommendations designed to eliminate basic confusions in metaphysics, is already nascent in the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770: 'What Kant discusses in the Amphiboly is exactly the set of ideas put forth in ID'.(16) Butts goes on to suggest that Kant's plans for a general phenomenology, announced shortly after completion of the Inaugural Dissertation, were ultimately worked out in the Transcendental Aesthetic and in the method of reflective deliberation in the Amphiboly. In a letter to Lambert dated September 2, 1770, Kant writes:
…A quite special although purely negative science, general phenomenology (phaenomenologia generalis), seems to me to be presupposed by metaphysics. In it the principles of sensibility, their validity and their limitations, would be determined, so that these principles could not be confusedly applied to objects of pure reason, as has heretofore almost always happened…For space and time…and all objects of sense, [are] very real; they are actually the conditions of all appearances and of all empirical judgments. But extremely mistaken conclusions emerge if we apply the basic concepts of sensibility to something that is not at all an object of sense, that is, something thought through a universal or pure concept of the understanding as a thing or a substance in general, and so on.(17) [in Zweig, 1967, pp. 59-60].
Given the history of the issues involved, it is hard to understand why Kant made so little of Transcendental Deliberation and the Amphiboly. Part of the explanation may lie in this remark made by Kant in a letter to Marcus Hertz dated May 11, 1781
...I would have started with what I have entitled the 'Antinomy of Pure Reason' which could have been done in colourful essays and would have given the reader a desire to get at the sources of this controversy. But the school's rights must first be served; afterward one can also see about appealing to the world.
Why is it the case that Kant could have begun his critical investigation of metaphysics with the Antinomies? The answer likely lies in how the antinomies figure in Kant's revolution in metaphysical thinking. Kant describes his revolution as a revolution that will enable metaphysics to attain a sure scientific method. Without such a method, Kant says that metaphysics will not be able to pursue a common goal, and will enagage only in mock contests. At Bxv, Kant describes the state of the art of dogmatic metaphysics in his day:
We find [too], that those who are engaged in metaphysical pursuits are far from being able to agree among themselves, but that, on the contrary, this sience appears to furnish an arena specially adapted for the display of skill or the exercise of strength in mock contests - a field in which no combatant ever yet succeeded in gaining an inch of ground, in which, at least, no victory was ever yet crowned with permanent possession.
According to Kant then, metaphysics has engaged in 'mock contests' in which no combatants ever gain an inch of ground. At A423=B451, Kant says that his method in the Antinomies is one that provokes a conflict which he hopes will help us to discover whether the object of struggle of each position is not a mere illusion which each strives to reach in vain. It appears then, that Kant's Antinomies expose the 'mock contests' of metaphysics alluded to in the preface, in the hope that the sources of controversy will become apparent to us. And indeed, the true nature of the controversies described in the Antinomies does becomes apparent to us, but only through Transcendental Deliberation upon the sources of knowledge.
A number of interesting points fall out of this historical reconstruction. First, it is clear that the method employed in the Antinomies, like that in the Paralogisms Chapter, is the same method of Transcendental Deliberation we find in the Amphiboly. More importantly, we now have some explanation for why Kant did not base his critical exposition around Transcendental Deliberation, even though it is an easy to grasp and useful method of investigation. Kant was convinced that the demands of the school were such that his text must be laid out like a complete system, with the simplest elements (space, time and the categories) preceding and serving as the foundation for the more complex parts (his account of concept formation and metaphysical judgment). Since the method of Transcendental Deliberation involves a retrospective analysis of metaphysical concepts, such a method would not conform to the existing norms for metaphysical systems. To make Transcendental Deliberation the centerpiece of the Critique then, would have required abandoning the logical ordering from elementary to complex demanded by 'the schools'. In the end, of course, Kant did heed the demands of the school, presenting us first with the elements of knowledge rather than with the method leading to the discovery of these elements. This outcome seems ironic if one considers that the whole enterprise of criticizing deductive metaphysics stemmed from an original desire to extend the methodology of metaphysics beyond the mere logical grounds stipulated by the Leibnizian school. Transcendental Deliberation would appear to be just such a method, a method through which the non-logical sources are shown to be central to our cognition of phenomena.
So even though Kant's polemic against Leibniz in the Amphiboly invokes what he here calls Transcendental Deliberation (A262=B318), we have not been able to find mention of the method anywhere in Kant's work again. Kant goes to the trouble of illustrating the method in the Amphiboly, and he appears to employ it to describe similar fallacies in the Critique, but he never credits the method anywhere except the Amphiboly. And much the same can be said of the other remnants of Kant's earlier thought hidden away in the Amphiboly. The curious relegation of the notion of identity to a minor role in his metaphysical system and the powerful arguments for demonstrating that a sensible element is necessary in representations of nature are also buried there. Given that some of these themes could have been nothing less than the foundation of a new critical strategy, we find that surprising.(18)
Endnotes
Bibliography
Brook, A. Kant and the Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Brook, A. 'Realism and the Refutation of Idealism', Proceedings of the Eighth International Kant Congress, Vol. II.1, pp. 313-20. Marquette University Press, 1995.
Butts, R. (ed). 1986. Kant's Philosophy of Physical Science. Boston: Reidel
Kant, I. 1763. 'Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy'. In Walford, D., ed. Immanuel Kant: Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 203-41.
Kant, I. 1764. An Enquiry into the Distinctness of the Fundamental Principles of Natural Theology and Morals ("The Prize Essay"). In Walford, D., ed. Immanuel Kant: Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 243-86.
Kant, I. 1781/87. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith as Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. London: Macmillan Co. Ltd., 1963. Also trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1996.
Kant, I. The Vienna Logic. In Young, M. J., ed. Immanuel Kant: Lectures on Logic. Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 251-377.
Zweig, A. 1967. Kant: Philosophical Correspondence 1759-99. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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