On Kant’s “The Relation of the Understanding to Objects in General, and the Possibility of Knowing them A Priori”
Contents:
- Unification as the Bridge
- Adequation vs. Assimilation
- Assimilation vs. Association
- In Conclusion…
- A Word on the Term “Transcendental Apperception”
- Application
This commentary will complete the present discussion of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction A. In this section, “The Relation of the Understanding to Objects in General, and the Possibility of Knowing them A Priori,” Kant begins to reap the harvest of concepts he has been developing since the beginning of the first Transcendental Deduction. His aim has been to deduce the necessity of a priori categories within us, prior to our experience of the world, that frame our experience so that it may become intelligible to us. As was pointed out at the end of the last article, the basis for the deduction of the categories was consciousness itself, or to be more precise, the unity of consciousness we experience within ourselves, as illustrated by the counting example in A102-103.
As the title of the present chapter suggests, he is now seeking to reach a general conclusion about the way the mind operates. His starting point is that a priori knowledge is possible, not merely because we might suppose that possibility to be the case, but because we have examples of such knowledge within ourselves. Geometry, logic, and mathematics in general provide the examples Kant discusses in the Transcendental Aesthetic. Given that such knowledge is possible, Kant wants to ask what might make such knowledge possible, i.e. in other terms what is the ground for such a possibility arising within us. His answer is that the act of unifying a manifold provides a clue to understanding the fundamental, characteristic way in which the mind operates in order to work toward understanding its objects.
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. Kant would not disagree. Pleads guilty to having dispensed with the possibility of knowing objects as they are in themselves. 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 some 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.
