Contents:
- Location of the Analogies of Experience in the Critique and Orientation
- The First Analogy
- Kant and Skepticism about the Reality of Substance
Location of the Analogies of Experience in the Critique and Orientation
It is a good idea once in a while to check in with the geography of the Critique of Pure Reason as a way of orienting oneself to its content. An old saw for some perhaps, but as we wade deeper into this part of the Critique, this advice can be more justifiably applied toward some benefit. Where are we then? We are in Book II of the Transcendental Analytic, whose content is concerned with explicating the basis for a priori judgments, and especially a priori synthetic judgments. In Book I of the Transcendental Analytic, which provides a basis for the Analogies of Experience, Kant lays categories of understanding that underlie a priori judgments and make them possible.
In Book II, he discusses how the categories can be related to the actual objects of our experience. In doing so, he shows how pure ideas/concepts can be related to objects that exist in space and time. He does this by first discussing the cognitive side of concept formation in “The Schematism of the Pure Principles of the Understanding.” It is only through the schematism of the understanding that the synthetic principles that enable studies such as geometry can have any applicability to experience. They have validity, as Kant emphasizes in B223, “only as principles of the empirical, not of the transcendental employment of the understanding” and writes that “only as such can they be established.” Taking schematism as the cognitive basis for the a priori synthesis of concepts, he moves on to discuss the general empirical principles that enable synthetic a priori judgments in Chapter 2 of the same section.
The Analogies of Experience are related to the categories of Relation and Modality. These headings announce, roughly, their content. Relation is concerned with Inherence and subsistence (substance and accident), Causality and Dependence (cause and effect), and Community (reciprocity of agent and patient); meanwhile, Modality is concerned with Possibility vs. Impossibility, Existence vs. Non-existence, and Necessity vs. Contingency. Whereas Kant’s discussion of the Principles of the Understanding regarding the categories of Quantity and Quality enabled the “application of mathematics to appearances” [B221], the Analogies to be discussed below have a more direct application to dynamic aspects of objects not merely in space, but in time, and therefore have a truer applicability to the physical world as we experience it and our capacity to understand to its principles.
The Analogies
The First Analogy
As mentioned above, the analogies follow the pattern established by the category of relation. Thus, the first analogy concerns substance. Its principle is that substance is the permanent is all appearances. Kant’s proof of the sustainability of this principle as a principle for understanding our experience is based upon his identification of substance with time. Kant’s notion of “Substance” here is clearly meant to pick out its role as the substrate of all change. “All appearances are in time,” he writes. With time as a background against which changes in time can be apprehended, he is able to establish its necessity in terms of the need for a permanent something in our experience in relation to which the impermanent may be understood. Anything that can be comprehended as changing must be understood as manifesting the appearance of change, hence impermanence, in time. On the other hand, all such changes are not changes of time itself. Time itself is understood as that within which such changes occur and that on the basis of which “time” as we experience it manifests itself. On the basis of these characteristics, it can be understood as a permanent substrate of change in our experience in general.
Kant proposes to meet skepticism regarding the reality of substance on a by now familiar ground: while the reality of substance as it applies to things in themselves may certainly be questioned, its necessity as a ground for explaining reality as we experience it is based upon the reality of our inner experience of objects, i.e., of objects as they appear to us, whose reality is conditioned by the forms of space, time, and the categories of our understanding. To understand this point in its fuller breadth, it is important to see that substance is found in the category of relation. Substance as the permanent is that without which change could not be understood as change at all. Without a contrasting background, Kant would seem to say, a particular color cannot appear to us as such. In much the same way, the opposition of change to permanence allows it to become apparent to our understanding. Understood in this way, as a substrate that makes our experience of time possible as such, substance can be comprehended as a necessary feature of the reality of appearances as such.
Kant goes a step further, however. In B230, he writes that substance must not only be understood as relational, but as “the condition of relations.” Considering that he regards it as the substrate of all change, that which makes change as such possible as something we may experience, it makes sense that he should elevate it to that status and doing so helps to clarify his intent. But a further connection may be drawn between substance as a substrate of change and the necessary unity of experience. Unity, it may be recalled, is recognized by Kant as the foundation of our conscious awareness of the world. In B229 Kant connects the permanence of substance as a substrate with the unity of experience as follows:
we have here to deal only with appearances in the field of experience, and the unity of experience would never be possible if we were willing to allow that new things, that is, new substances, could come into existence. For we should then lose that which alone can represent the unity of time, namely, the identity of the substratum, wherein alone all change has thoroughgoing unity.
Notice that Kant’s starting point is the unity of experience, i.e. of a unity of experience that arises within our consciousness of the world as we experience it, the unity of apperception; his terminal point, however, is substance. The following inference appears open to be drawn: since (1) time is one of the formal conditions of consciousness that structures the way in which “reality” as we experience it is manifested and (2) “substance” understood as time is a substrate in this sense, it follows that (3) substance understood as a substrate in this sense is a formal substrate of consciousness itself.
Kant vs. Skepticism about the Reality of Substance
The content of the second and third analogies will be treated in a follow up post. For the present, let it suffice to complete the treatment of the first analogy with a short discussion of the skepticism about substance Kant was trying to overcome.
It might be considered, especially following Kant’s discussion of substance in the first analogy, that substance is an essential conceptual tool for understanding the everyday empirical reality of objects and their interactions. Kant’s understanding of substance as relational might be seen as an insight into how this claim might be justified. Since it is not just one relational determination of the being of things in the world (taller than, older than, to the right of, etc.) but a relation that is a precondition for the existence of all other relations pertaining to objects, including their changing states, substance as time makes our reality as such possible.
Kant is drawing upon the traditional notion of substance in his formulation: substance, going back to Aristotle, was considered the substrate of change and as that which was permanent in objects relative to the “accidents” that might serve to qualify it at any particular time. Socrates with a suntan and Socrates himself are two different concepts that pick out two different kinds of realities: one, something that persists through changes, the other something that not only exists for a moment and furthermore depends for its existence upon a substrate that persists through those changes. The controversial point about substance as a substrate of change was that it could not be perceived by the senses. This objection was perhaps most famously brought forward by John Locke in Essay II.xxiii.2,, where he imagines someone removing the accidents from a substance in an effort to discover it. The result is that since substance appears to be nothing more than a bundle of accidents without a perceptible substrate underlying them (no one has yet found the elusive substratum in question), its reality for the British Empiricists could justifiably be questioned, whatever the results for pursuing an empirically grounded approach to reality might be.
Kant’s move to associate substance-as-substratum with time as a form of our perception is a perfect fit for dealing with this objection. Since the early pages of the Critique he has established that time as a form of perception cannot itself be perceived. What better candidate then for a substrate that underlies change and yet cannot be perceived? All things change within time, including substances (considered as unified objects) themselves, yet time itself is imperceptible. Furthermore, although it is imperceptible its existence as a permanent subsistent subject of change is arguably a necessary condition for our capacity to experience the reality of change and understand it as we do.
The latter point can be amplified by saying that not only our more or less refined conceptual understanding of change, but our capacity to comprehend the notion at all would be beyond our reach without the assumption of a permanent against which the temporary can be understood. One might say, in the form of a motto (a device Kant invokes occasion) that “Without time, change would incomprehensible” as a formula for bringing the necessity of substance into the picture, the caveat being, of course, that he has radically removed the concept to a very different ground of justification by re-interpreting it as time itself.
