Contents:
- The Function of Mind: Bringing Unity to its Objects
- Transcendental Deduction A
- Unification as the Bridge
- Adequation vs. Assimilation
- Assimilation vs. Association
- In Conclusion…
- A Word on the Term “Transcendental Apperception”
- Application
The Function of Mind: Bringing Unity to its Objects
In a prior post, Kant’s explanation of our power of understanding was discussed in terms of the intentional relationship the mind has to its objects. In this section, it will now be seen that the most fundamental way in which it acts upon those objects is to bring unity to them. The mind’s ability, its native capacity, for bringing unity to a sensory manifold of one sort or another is a necessary condition for our understanding of its objects to emerge.
Transcendental Deduction A
Most of Kant’s discussion in this part of the Critique of Pure Reason builds upon his prior discussion of the conditions necessary for the mind to do its work of unification. Those conditions include space and time as necessary formal “background” conditions of our sensibility, as well as our own ability to make use of certain “a priori” categorical concepts Kant argues are not only necessary conditions for the mind to formulate judgments, but also the basis for our capacity to form any concepts at all (such as unity, plurality, and totality; reality, negation, and limitation). Kant calls these the “pure concepts of synthesis” (B106).
The Three Transcendental Unifying Acts of the Mind
In his introduction to the Transcendental Deduction (b116ff.), he introduces what might be called the “three transcendental acts” of the mind. He has moved on from discussing the basic conditions necessary for synthesis in his chapters on the tables of judgment and categories and presents us with a picture of the cognitive side of the development of knowledge and experience in his “Transcendental Deduction A.”
The three acts of the mind are formulated as follows (see A97-A98 and A115):
- The Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition (sense perception)
- The Synthesis of Reproduction in Imagination (imaginative synthesis)
- The Synthesis of Recognition in a Concept (Apperception of the Identity of Reproduced Concepts)
Each of these “acts” upon our representations has its own special object: (1) Intuition: of our immediate experience of the world; (2) Imagination: of the manifold of our perceptual experiences of the world; and (3) Conceptualization: of the manifold of imaginative representations. In each case, the synthesis carried out is the synthesis of a manifold into a new unity. In each case, the act of synthesis carried out by each higher faculty is enacted according to a priori principles native to our own intellect.
In the case of the understanding, it is the categories that act as principles for the unification of our concepts:
In the understanding there are then pure a priori modes of knowledge which contain the necessary unity of the pure synthesis of imagination in respect of all possible appearances. These are the categories, that is, the pure concept of understanding. The empirical faculty of knowledge in man must therefore contain an understanding which relates to all objects of the senses, although only by means of intuition and of its synthesis through imagination. All appearances, as data, are subject to this understanding”
A119
Ultimately, each act is necessary to the achievement of knowledge. “Intuitions”, as Kant says (going up the ladder of mental acts), “without concepts are blind” and (going down the ladder) “thoughts without content are empty.”
Finally, there are two sides of Kant’s account of our mental activity that echo Aristotle’s active/passive distinction: spontaneity and receptivity (A97). It is this spontaneity that makes possible not only the threefold synthesis that results in knowledge, but also the possibility of synopsis whereby, when the mind has received its objects, it is able to compare them and consider how they are connected (A97). Kant writes that “to such a synopsis a synthesis must always correspond; receptivity can make knowledge possible only when combined with spontaneity” (A97) suggesting that whereas receptivity belongs to the “comprehension” of a manifold, spontaneity is what brings about its synthesis so that it may be considered by a higher faculty. In each case, consciousness necessarily attends our experience so that our experience can become meaningfully connected. It is this underlying unity that makes possible the conversion of our experience into knowledge (A103).
Association According to a Rule
The mind, in its acts of synthesis, acts according to a “rule” of some kind. This rule of association need not be consciously articulated or recognized as such (A100). It may even be the unrecognized cause of associations of which we are unaware. In the Critique, Kant describes the process of forming a rule in terms of association
representations which have often followed or accompanied one another finally become associated, and so are set in a relation whereby, even in the absence of the object, one of these representations can, in accordance with a fixed rule, bring about a transition of the mind to the other.”
(A100)
Finally, in A126 Kant clarifies that rule formation is especially the work of the understanding. He writes,
We have already defined the understanding in various different ways: as a spontaneity of knowledge (in distinction from the receptivity of sensibility), as a power of thought, as a faculty of concepts, or again of judgments. All these definitions, when they are adequately understood, are identical. We may now characterize it as the faculty of rules…. Sensibility gives us forms (of intuition), but understanding gives us rules. The latter is always occupied in investigating appearances, in order to detect some rule in them.
A126
Hume’s discussion of association may well arise in the reader’s mind after considering the first quotation and fittingly so, especially where the notion of causality is concerned: i.e., as a rule that simply arises, perhaps even unconsciously in some cases, from our customary habit of attributing such a relationship to events that regularly follow one another. However, as is so often the case, Humean skepticism is Kant’s target. As elsewhere, his strategy is to attempt to overcome skepticism by justifying the introduction of transcendental ideas grounded in our own cognitive processes. In this case, Kant wishes to argue that the notion of causality is one that is native to our intellect rather than one arising from the world of our experience, from which it could never find any true validation.
Consciousness as the Underlying Necessary Condition for Any Unifying Act of the Mind
In A103 Kant introduces the factor that underlies all the acts of unification that lead up to conceptualization and make each act possible: consciousness. He writes,
“If we were not conscious that what we think is the same as what we thought a moment before, all reproduction in the series of representations would be useless…. The manifold of the representation would never…form a whole, since it would lack that unity which only consciousness can impart to it.”
It appears from the quote that consciousness for Kant is a certain activity of the mind that involves both a recognition of personal identity and memory. What follows in the Critique merits particular attention, since it illustrates well the role consciousness plays in relation to concept building. Kant writes,
“If, in counting, I forget that the units, which now hover before me, have been added to one another in succession, I should never know that a total is being produced through this successive addition of unit to unit, and so would remain ignorant of number. For the concept of number is nothing but the consciousness of this unity of synthesis.”
The final sentence illuminates the connection between concept building and consciousness. It shows that consciousness need not be taken to be that which does the unifying itself, but is what must necessarily accompany it, in much the same way that space acts as a necessary background condition for our recognition of the spatial properties of objects, that makes possible the existence of their other attendant attributes (for how could a square object, for example, have a color or weight if it lacked any extension in space?).
Counting as a Paradigm for Understanding Concept Building
Consider the act of counting (discussed in B104/A97 and A102-103) in this same way: unless the individual units in a line (let’s say they are counting beans) could be related to one another in memory and as belonging to the same consciousness, the furthest the mind could reach in its association of them together would be to simply mark each as 1, 1, 1, etc. Only if there is consciousness present of the sort Kant describes can the mind pass from 1 to 1 to the concept of 2 and so make possible the act of counting. Perhaps this passage is also the key to understanding Kant’s statement early on in the Critique, that 7 + 5 = 12 is a synthetic a priori judgment. How could it be otherwise (Kant might argue), if the numbers themselves can only be arrived at by experience, yet experience itself is not sufficient to account for their association together? Something native to the mind itself must be brought in to explain the synthetic aspect of concept formation that cannot be acquired from experience, justifiable only from within the framework of the activity of the mind itself, yet justified whenever our mental activity is assumed as the only framework for our understanding of reality and truth.
The Transcendental Object = x
Lastly, what is Kant Transcendental object=x? Simply put, it is the general idea of objective correlate corresponding to our sensory apprehension. On the one hand, we have representations of the world; on the other there is an unknown something corresponding to those representations. Kant writes that we cannot have any direct intuition, any direct perception of such an object, so we are left with the general idea of a something that in any case ought to correspond to it if it is to be an object at all (A109). Kant writes,
“these appearances are not things in themselves; they are only representations, which in turn have their object–an object that which cannot itself be intuited by us, and which may therefore, be named the non-empirical, that is, transcendental object=x.”
A109
This yields us the “pure concept” of an object. Because it carries with it the conditions for any object to be an object (inasmuch as it corresponds to the idea of “an object in general”) that do not themselves arise from experience, the pure concept of an object may be considered transcendental.
A final point: the outstanding characteristic of this object is its necessary unity (A109), which provides a link to Kant’s understanding of consciousness as a unity. Kant expresses the nature of the link between the object=x and consciousness as follows:
This relation is nothing but the necessary unity of consciousness, and therefore also of the synthesis of the manifold, through a common function of the mind, which combines it in one representation. Since this unity must be necessary a priori…the relation to a transcendental object, that is, the objective reality of our empirical knowledge, rests on the transcendental law, that all appearances, in so far as through them objects are to be given to us, must stand under those a priori rules of synthetical unity whereby the interrelating of these appearances in empirical intuition is alone possible.
(A109-A110)
The unity of consciousness is the prior condition as the first sentence in the quotation above indicates. From this point follows the set of synthesizing activities that belong to an object whenever it is contemplated by the mind.
The Basis for a “Deduction”
Kant argues that the empirical fact of the unity of consciousness must logically precede any further unifying acts of the mind. He adds to this the thesis that there is for us a “transcendental law” that in order for any object to be unified out of the manifold of the representations that present themselves to us, it must fall under, be susceptible of being determined by, the a priori principles according to which the mind is able to do its work of unifying and synthesizing its objects. As discussed above in the context of the counting example, the empirical fact of the unity of consciousness necessitates that the mind’s intentional objects present themselves as unified since the unity of consciousness itself implies the unification of the manifold presented to us in experience. If that were not the case, our experience of the world would be as discontinuous as the series of 1’s discussed above. As such, the unity of consciousness provides a basis for a “deduction” (i.e. a deductive proof) of the necessity of further transcendental concepts that may become the basis for the unification of the mind’s objects. As was seen above, these objects are unified according to a rule of association that may even be “unconscious” in the modern sense of the term.
Unification as the Bridge
Unification might be considered the “bridge” between what is given us in experience, the content sensation provides us for our thought, and what belongs strictly to the mind as its way of acting upon objects. In the Thomistic tradition of realist thinking about our mental processes, the suggestion that the mind operates upon its objects at all would be to depart from the possibility of knowing objects as they really are; it would be to suggest that we cannot, because of the very way in which the mind interacts with the world, experience reality as such. The light of the mind simply illuminates the forms of objects that are already present within them; the receptive intellect merely perceives these forms and in its mode of intellectual perception, understands them. For Kant, such an account would amount to an attempt to understand objects as they are in themselves, which he regards as being impossible. He does, however, wish to make genuine knowledge possible, knowledge Humean skepticism left in doubt and does so by now suggesting that the mind not only acts upon its objects, it forms them, in a sense, into intelligible objects out of otherwise unintelligible masses of what we might call “raw data” in a colloquial sense of the term.
Terra Firma: Adequation vs. Assimilation
The mind does its work, in other words, through a process of assimilation to its own way of understanding the world rather than by way of adequation to the world of objects as they really are, or as they are in themselves. The text of the deduction, considered by many readers to be quite diffcult, may achieve a greater measure of intelligibility by returning to this point as a place to stand apart from the sea of Kant’s attempts to carry forward his point. The entire question of how to overcome the barrier our perception poses to reality as it is in itself is resolved (or dissolved) once it is admitted that the mind has no access to such a world, nor can such a world even be speculated upon. We perceive and understand through a process of assimilation that makes the world we encounter both the only world we may know and a world that is subject to certain governing conditions imposed upon it by the mind itself. Such conditions are the basis for a the possiblity of a priori knowledge in us, inasmuch as they are the general conditions for the acts of perception or understanding to occur in us at all.
Assimilation and Association
In more concrete terms, its assimilation of its objects arises first of all in the way our perception imposes certain conditions upon the possibility of representing its objects to us (their representation in space and time); and later, by the acts of association carried out initially by the imagination and then by the understanding. In the prior article on this topic, it was said that association, as well as the unification that comes with it, arises according to a rule of some sort. In the immediately following fourth section of Transcendental Deduction A, Kant makes explicit that the rules he has in mind when it comes to our capacity to understand its objects are none other than the categories of the understanding discussed earlier:
The a priori conditions of a possible experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of objects of experience. Now I maintain that the categories, above cited, are nothing but the conditions of thought in a possible experience, just as space and time are the conditions of intuition for that same experience. They are fundamental concepts by which we think objects in general for appearances and therefore have a priori objective validity. This is exactly what we desired to prove.”
A111
The fact that the mind perceives, imagines, and understands not by adequation to the world about us, but by assimilation to principles latent within us is what Kant is trying to prove. He believes he can make his case by pointing out that the a priori knowledge we do in fact possess and experience within ourselves is only possible if such principles are latent within the mind itself rather than somehow present in objects as they are “in reality.”
In Conclusion…
Not only do we not have any access to such a reality, but reality as we do perceive it, being a reality of manifolds not themselves associated in any way, must be assimilated by some principle of association that only the mind itself may be considered to provide. For Kant, this latter point follows from the fact that while it is manifestly capable of associating its ideas, the world of sensations without the work of the mind would be just that: simply a bare manifold of unassociated and uncomprehended presentations of the senses.
But of course, all this work of unification and synthesis for the purpose of understanding would itself have no underlying basis if there were not something in us that was not itself the underlying ground of all unification. That ground, as discussed at the end of the prior article, is consciousness itself. The unified character of consciousness is a fundamental fact for Kant, a point whose evidence appears in the bare fact that we are able to string any of our individual experiences together into associations of any sort.
A Word on the Term “Transcendental Apperception”
The additional point should now be made clear that Kant regards this consciousness as something that persists unchanging through time in a way that recalls Aristotelian substance (A109). It is not something unified by experience, or only following upon a train of experiences through which its unity is eventually discovered, but is a fact of its very existence. Kant writes,
There can be in us no modes of knowledge, no connection of unity of one mode of knowledge with another, without that unity of consciousness which precedes all data of intuitions, and by relation to which representation of objects is alone possible. This pure original unchangeable consciousness I shall name transcendental apperception.”
A107
So it is that Kant introduces the term “transcendental apperception,” a buzzword for readers of Kant both great and small. What I personally regard as noteworthy is the link between the term and its true object, something like the substance of the self, which closely resembles Locke’s description of it (a topic that seems better discussed elsewhere). That substance-self-soul-consciousness is a unity, or better, an already-unified substantial something, whose unity is the basis for the unity of its objects. Kant himself makes the same point (albeit somewhat less expansively) as follows:
“The numerical unity of this apperception is thus the a priori ground of all concepts, just as the manifoldness of space and time is the a priori ground of the intuitions of sensibility.”
A107
As such, in terms of its unbounded potentiality, its potentiality to act as the basis for the unification of any objects it encounters, it may recall the Platonic receptacle of the Timaeus. In any case, it may be seen that the term “transcendental apperception” is a descriptive one referring to this state of potentiality belonging to the Kantian self-soul-substance. As above, it is a potentiality that comes with its own terms of fulfillment, which the other faculties of the mind, its imagination and sensibility, are capable of producing.
The “oneness” of consciousness is the necessary basis for any unity of perceptions into associated unities of their own.
The counting example again suggests itself and perhaps a bit more expansiveness for the sake of greater comprehension will not be out of order if it fulfills that end. Consider the oneness of consciousness as the one that underlies any association of numbers. For example, the association of 1’s into a 2 or 2’s or 10’s. Just as the basis for the assimilation or synthesis of numbers into further unities (2’s or 10’s as the case may be) is 1, so consciousness is the basis for the assimilation of concepts of any sort into further conceptual unities. The analogy works as far as consciousness may be considered the necessary ground for assimilation and must attend the recognition of any further unities.
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