The Development of Kantian Thought

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Author: Herman-J. de Vleeschauwer

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THOMAS NELSON AND SONS LTD Parkside Works Edinburgh 9 36 Park Street London WI I 17 Latrobe Street Melbourne Cl 302-304 Barclays Bank Building Commissioner and Kruis Streets Johannesburg THOMAS NELSON AND SONS (CANADA) LTD

91-93 Wellington Street West

Toronto

THOMAS l"~ELSON AND SONS

18 East 41st Street New York 17, N.Y. SOCIETE FRANQAISE n'EnITIONS NELSON

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Originally published as L'Evolution de fa pensee Kantienne Presses Universitaires de France, 1939 English translation

© A. R. C. Duncan 1962

I

Author's Preface This book is not an original work in the strict sense of that term. Between 1934 and 1937 I published an extensive study of the Critical philosophy under the general title of La Diduction transcendantale dans l' CEuvre de Kant. This threevolume work had a dual purpose. First, it was intended to offer a textual commentary on that part of the Critique ofPure Reason known as the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. Secondly, it sought to trace the development of the whole Critical problem which comes to a central point in the Transcendental Deduction. The kind reception accorded to this work made it impossible for me to ignore the suggestion made by several colleagues that I should give a general account of the evolution of Kantian thought. The use of the historical method makes an author cautious about a priori schemas in any attempt to determine historical reality; it also forbids him to be guided in his researches by any preconceived idea of the nature of the Critical philosophy. An almost religious respect for the documentary evidence is for the historian a matter of professional duty. Twelve years devoted to the study of the Kantian corpus, to the comparison of Kant's letters with his published works, to cautious use of his Nachlass, to inquiry into the cultural state of Germany in the eighteenth century, constituted a powerful defence against any temptation to a priorism. Close personal study of the facts led the writer to pay attention to the lesson of the facts themselves. From my willing acceptance of the demands of tIle historical method has come a new conception of some aspects of Kant's intellectual career, and consequently I have been forced to contradict some of the critical cliches to be found in many of the textbooks. The interest in the exact sciel1ces shown by Kant at the beginning of his career no longer appears to have the mysterious and revealing cllaracter commonly attributed to it. The recognition of the admirable unity which can be traced in Kant's thought, in spite of vii

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

frequent deviations in the solution of special problems, springs directly from a rutWess rejection of the Hegelian kind of interpretation typified by Kuna Fischer. My emphasis on the importance of the psychology of Tetens in the structure ofth.e Critical philosopllY may also be attributed to my use of the historical method. The same method led me to the paradoxical, but none the less true, view that the second edition of the Critique is not a reaction against idealism itself, but a reaction against the subjectivity inherent in some forms of idealism, which led Kant to a gradual reinforcement of his own idealism by a more and more pronounced constructivism. My atten1pt to deal with the varied fortunes of the Kantian systen1, its reception both by ]1is disciples and his opponents, and my inclusion of a consideration of the Opus Postumum in the story of his development, are the natural outcome of my adoption of the :historical method. I am personally convinced that the account of Kant's intellectual life, which I offer in this book, owes what accuracy it has to the methodological principles employed in it. The reader must judge for himself to what extent I am correct in this opinion. For myself I can only express my personal conviction. I certainly do not claim to have said the last \vord in this matter-very far from it. My earlier work, despite its size and the austere nature of the argument, was given a favourable reception by the philosophical public. This leads me to believe that, after a period of Kantian philology which has been the source of a multitude of special studies, my commentary served a useful purpose and indeed came at an opportune moment. The present work is a gesture of gratitude in response to this sympathetic reception of my commentary and is intended to give my readers wllat they themselves have asked for. No one need look in tIlese pages for a close exposition of the Critical teaching or for any detailed explanation of obscure passages. I am not writing as a philosopher. My purpose is more modest. I should like to be considered as the historian of a great system and the biographer of a great mind. I have deliberately refrai:r;.~d from any attempt to turn Vlli

AUTHOR'S

PREFACE

this historical sketch into a scholarly treatise. The reader is expected to be familiar with the problems of the subject and with the general structure of the Critical synthesis. Hence the usual scholarly apparatus of notes, references, and quotations has been ruthlessly omitted. I must reassure the reader's professional conscience, however, by pointing out that in tIle earlier work, of which this is an abbreviated version, will be found everything which scientific integrity demands of a writer. To Illake access to the sources easier, I indicate at the l1ead of each chapter the relevant pages in the earlier work, where the documents are quoted. I have adopted the following abbreviations:

La Deduction (followed by volume and page number) refers to La Deduction transcendantale dans l' (Euvre de Kant (Anvers-ParisLa flaye). Volume I The Deduction before the Critique (1934), pp. 332 Volume II The Deductionfrom I78I -7 (193 6), pp. 597 'Volume III The Deductionfrom 1787 up to the Opus Postumunt (1937), pp. 70 9· Revue BeIge refers to an article entitled ' L'Annee 177 I dans l'histoire de la pensee de Kant' in the Revue Beige de Philologie et d'Histoire, Vol. XIII, nos. 3-4, pp. 713-32 and Vol. XIV, no. I, pp. 49-8 3 (1934-5). Mind refers to another article entitled 'Les Alltinomies kantiennes et la Clavis universalis d'Arthur Collier' in Mind, Vol. XLVII, No. 18 7, pp. 3°3-20 (1938). I-I.-J. de Vleeschauwer

IX

Writings by Kant referred to by de Vleeschauwer In his account of the development of Kant's thought, de Vleeschauwer refers to three different classes of writings by Kant: A. PUBLISHED WORI<S In the following list the abbreviation or descriptive phrase usually adopted by de Vleeschauwer is given first in italics: then follow the full German or Latin title, date of publication and English translation of the title. Where an English translation of the book, partial or complete, is available, this is added. The works are listed under the Chapter sections in which they are either first n1entioned or explicitly discussed.

Chapter I

Section

2

Lebendige f(riifte. Gedanken von den wahren Schatzung del' lebendigen Krafte, 1747 (Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces). Selected passages translated by Handyside in Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (Open Court, 1928). Naturgeschichte. Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels, 1755 (Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens). Translated in part by W. Hastie in Kant's Cosmogony (Maclehose & Sons, 1900). This work also contains a translation of the article by Thomas Wright. De Igne. Meditationum quarundam de igne succincta delineatio, 1755 (A Brief Outline of Some Meditations on Fire).

Dilucidatio. Principiorum primorum cognitionis metaphysicae nova dilucidatio, 1755 (A New Exposition of the First Principles of Metaphysical Knowledge). Translated in the Appendix to England's Kant's Conception & Unwin, 1929).

of God

(Allen

Monadologia physica. Metaphysicae cum geometria junctae usus in philosophia naturali cujus specimen I continet Monadologiam physicam, 1756 (The Use of Metaphysics in Combination with Geometry in Natural Philosophy, the first section of which contains the Physical Monadology). Neuer Lehrbegrijf. Neuer Lehrbegriff cler Bewegung und Ruhe und cler damit verknupften Folgerungen in den ersten Grunden cler Naturwissenschaft, 1758 (A New Doctrine of Rest and Motion and its Implications for Natural Science). xu

WRITINGS BY KANT

Chapter I

Section 3

The essay on the syllogism. Die falsche Spitzfindigkeit der vier syllogistischen Figuren erwiesen, 1762 (The Mistaken Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures). Translated by T. K. Abbott in Kant's Introduction to Logic (Longmans, Green & Co., 1885). /vegativen Grossen. Versuch den Begriff der Negativen Grossen in die Weltweisheit einzufuhren, 1763 (An Attempt to Introduce Negative Quantities into Philosophy). Beweisgrund. Der einzig mogliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration fur das Dasein Gottes, 1763 (The only possible Foundation for a Proof of the Existence of God). Beobachtungen. Beobachtungen tiber das Gefuhl des Schonen und Erhabenen, 1764 (Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime). Deutlichkeit or Preisschrift (Prize Essay). Untersuchung tiber die Deutlichkeit der Grundsatze der naturlichen Theologie und der Moral, 1764 (An Inquiry into the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals). Translated by L. W. Beck in Critique of Practical Reason and other writingS in Moral Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 1949). Chapter I Section 4 Nachricht. Nachricht von der Einrichtung seiner Vorlesungen in dem Winterhalbenjahre von 1765-66, 1765 (Programme of Lectures for Winter Semester 1765-6). Triiume. Traume eines Geistersehers erHiutert durch die Traume der Metaphysik, 1766 (Dreams of a Spiritseer explained through the Dreams of Metaphysics). Translated by E. F. Goerwitz (Swan Sonnenschein & Co., London, 1900).

Chapter I Section 6 The little dissertation or essay on space. Von dem ersten Grunde des U nterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume, 1768 (On the First Ground of the Distinction of Regions ~n Space). Sections translated by Handyside (in volume quoted above). Dissertatio. De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis dissertatio, 1770 (Inaugural Dissertation on the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World). Translated by Handyside (in volume quoted above).

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Chapter III Section

I

The theoretical Critique. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. First edition, 1781. Second edition, 1787 (Critique of Pure Reason). Translated by Norman Kemp Smith (Macmillan, 1933). Prolegomena. Prolegomena zu einer jeden kiinftigen Metaphysik die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten kennen, 1783 (Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics) . Translated by Lewis \Vhite Beck (Liberal Arts Press, 1951). Anfangsgrunde. Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde der Naturwissenschaft, 1786 (Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science). Translated by E. B. Bax in Kant's Prolegomena and Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Bell & Sons, 1883) (This includes the important footnote referred to on page I 14) . Chapter III Section

2

Grundlegung. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 1785 (Founda.. tions for the Metaphysics of Morals). Translated by Lewis White Beck (in volume quoted above). The practical Critique. Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Critique of Practical Reason). Translated by Lewis White Beck (in volume quoted above). Chapter III Section 3 The third Critique. Kritik cler Urteilskraft, 1790 (Critique ofJudgment). 1'ranslated by]. C. Meredith (Oxford, 191 I). Chapter IV Section

I

Entdeckung. Ueber eine Entdeckung nach der aIle neue Kritik der reinen Vernunft durch eine altere entbehrlich gemacht werden soIl, 1790 (On a discovery according to which any new critique of pure reason is rendered unnecessary on account of an earlier one). Chapter IV Section

2

Fortschritte. Welches sind die wirklichen Fortschritte die die Metaphysik seit Leibnitz's und Wolff's Zeiten in Deutschland gemacht hat? 1804 (What real progress has been made by metaphysics in Germany since the time of Leibniz and Wolff?). Chapter IV Section 3 The Declaration against Fichte. ErkHirung in Beziehung auf Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, 1799 (Declaration concerning Fichte's Doctrine of Science).

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Chapter IV Section 4 Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, 1793 (Religion within the Limits of Reason alone). Translated by T. M. Greene and H. H. Hudson (Harper and Brothers, New York, 1960).

Perpetual Peace. Zum ewigen Frieden, 1795. Translated by Lewis White Beck (in volume quoted obove). Die Metaphysik der Sitten, 1797 (The Metaphysics of Morals). The first part of this work, the section on law, has been translated by W. Hastie in Kant's Philosophy of Law. (T. and T. Clarke, 1887). Parts of the second half, the section on ethics, have been translated by Lewis White Beck (in the volume quoted above). B. LETTERS These include both letters written by Kant to his friends and letters written to Kant. The page references are to Volumes X and XII of the Prussian Academy edition. The letters are listed under the Chapter sections and in the order in which they are referred to in the text.

Chapter I Section 5

Lambert to Kant

13 November 1765

Prussian Academy Edition Vol. X p. 48

Chapter I Section 6 Kant to Garve

21 September 17g8

Vol. XII p. 254

Chapter I Section 7 Lambert to Kant Sulzer to Kant Mendelssohn to Kant Kant to Herz Kant to Herz

13 October 1770 8 December 1770 25 December 1770 7 June 177 1 21 February 1772

Chapter II Section Kant Kant Kant Kant Kant Kant

to to to to to to

Herz Herz Herz Herz Herz Herz

"

I

end of 1773 24 November 1775 April 1778 28 August 1778 15 December 1778 January 1779 XV

Vol. X p. g8 p.l06 " p.l08 " p. 116 " p. 123

Vol. X p. 136 p. 184 " p. 21 4 " p.224 " p. 228 " p. 230

"

WRITINGS BY KANT

c.

THE NACHLASS

Kant's personal papers not intended for publication are collectively referred to as the Nachlass. These are largely made up of: (a) marginal notes written by Kant either on textbooks which he was using as a basis for his lectures or as corrections on works of his own. (b) various personal papers, never intended for publication, which may contain a mere phrase, a line, or a fairly lengthy argument.

The definitive edition is to be found in Volumes XIV to XIX of the Prussian Academy edition of Kant's collected works. De Vleeschauwer however refers to three in1portant works which appeared before the Academy edition : (i) Erdmann B., Reflexionen Kants, Leipzig, 1884 (2 vols.) (usually

referred to as Reflexionen). (ii) Reicke R., Lose Bliitter aus Kants Nachlass, Konigsberg (3 vols., 1889, 1895, 1899) (usually referred to as Lose Bliitter). (iii) Haering T., Der Duisburg'sche Nachlass und Kants Kritizismus um 1775. Tubingen, 1910. This work contains a special study of some of the more important fragments already published by Reicke, and is usually referred to as the Duisburg'sche Nachlass. Under this general heading may also be included two other important works:

(a) a compilation of notes taken at Kant's lectures between 1775 and 1780, referred to as the Vorlesungen tiber Metaphysik (Lectures on Metaphysics). Two editions of these have been published. The first by Politz in 182 I is incomplete and unreliable: the second is by Heinze and is available in a volume entitled, Konigliche Sachsische Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften. Philosophische Historische Klasse. Abhandlung v. 14. Published in Leipzig in 1894. (b) Kants Opus Postumum dargestellt und beurteilt von Erich Adickes, Berlin, 1920. Referred to as the Opus Postumum.

2,491)

XVI

Chapter I

The Preparation of the Critical Synthesis 1 THE PHILOSOPI-IICAL CLIMATE Praise for the superhuman genius of Kant conjoined with the claim that he changed his mind every decade like a dizzy fool who cannot master the direction of his own thought is surely evidence of a fundamental contradiction. The majority of biographies devoted to him, however, appear content to accept a contradiction of this nature. I-lis numerous publications, the hundreds of letters which are still accessible, the resolutions which he formed throughout an eventful career, make us realise to what extent Kant was hostile to the type of intellectual flirtation which charmed many of his contemporaries, and yet how sensitive he was to signs of spiritual activity in. l1is in1nlediate surroundings. This explains to a great extent the variety of his rn.editations, the breadth of his interests, and the encyclopedic character of his lectures. It is nevertheless possible to detect certain unmistakable converging lines in this disconcerting variety. Kant steadfastly pursued a unique and precise objective which it is essential to clarify before beginning a full study of the history of his thought. Unfortunately this is not to be found where it has been custon1ary to look for it. The nineteenth-century fashion of allowing Cartesianism to take the place of the historical Descartes has been matched by a tendency to substitute the Critical philosophy and its later developments for the real 11istorical Kant. Positivism found it advantageous to claim philosophical patronage for th.e scientific methodology which resulted in a limitation of knowledge to the realm of (2,491)

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phenomena, and it was not unaware that the Critique of Pure Reason could be represented as its own justification avant la lettre. There is indeed no real need to find fault with this choice when it is remembered how Kant never ceased to overwhelm metaphysics with biting sarcasm. It certainly cannot be denied that Kant criticised many things, metaphysics included. 011 the other hand, if we look a little more closely, we see that a constructive effort accompanied the activity of destruction. For fifty years Kant dreamed and planned to establish the future of metaphysics, and for l1im to proclaim its downfall amounted to discrediting it temporarily in order to lay secure foundations for it. His complaints are directed against a particular metaphysics and a particular method. At the same time he himself constructed, at least in rough outline, a different metaphysics and elaborated another method. To discover ultimately the correct philosophical method and by means of it to construct an eternal metaphysics were the aims cherished by Kant. In seeking to achieve both these ends, however, Kant did not follow a straight line. The constant search for the methodological foundation of metaphysics gives his career its unity and overall harmony, and reveals the intellectual stability which continued to characterise him through the vicissitudes of his life. This search, however, demanded the destruction of a particular historical metaphysics as its preliminary condition. The drama of Kant's intellectual life lies in the fact that it was his painful duty to destroy the Wolffian metaphysics so that he could construct an eternal metaphysics. Kant never placed himself under the tutelage of Hume. This is the first conclusion which will be drawn from our investigation. Our second general conclusion will also separate us from our predecessors. Since Kant did not seek either his method or his metaphysics in one uniform direction, we must trace the curve which illustrates the developn1ent of the supreme problem. The great caesura in this evolution is to be found in 178 I with the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason. Nevertheless, when it is realised that this work itself marks a stage on the way to the discovery of a possible foundation 2

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for metaphysics, the caesura is stripped of the revolutionary character which historians have always attached to it. Kant, as we have said, did not change his system with disconcerting mobility. From the beginning he made no attempt to hide his dislike of the compact mass of Wolffian doctrine. The first life-buoy to which he clung consisted of direct criticism of certain leading theses of this system, and his criticism is admirably outlined against the background of current philosophical and scientific discussions. He then sought for a panacea in the Critical philosophy. This was not discovered by a sudden stroke of intuitive genius but allowed slowly and painfully to reach ripe elaboration. Absolute confidence in this critical foundation of metaphysics merged, from 1781 onwards, with his conception of the future of metaphysics itself. If this viewpoint is adopted, a different pattern of the facts ill the intellectual biography of Kant begins to emerge. The twenty years which precede the Critique may be seen to constitute a period of preparation when comparedpostfactum with the Critical synthesis. Kant was seeking to find his way through the labyrinth of the scientific activity of his time and he participated in all its movements. 1'his apprentice period of learning is sustained by waves of optimism and shot through with disappointmellts, but all the while the fundamental Critical principles sort themselves out quietly and steadily. From then on Kant has no other purpose than to establish metaphysics by the thorough working out of the Critical philosophy. This period, which is the least problematic, occupies the years 1781-9°. This is the period which gives us the Critical trilogy. It is therefore essentially constructive. The third period, which begins in 1790, is dominated by a· growing confusion in Kant's mind between the future of metaphysics and the future of his own system. This period is defensive ill character and, although it is the least known and the least studied up to the present, i,t is peculiarly significant for the historian. Kant had to defend the integrity of his patrimony both against the assault of the Wolffians and against that defection of his followers which formed the prelude to tIle rise of the Gernlan romantic philosophy. I have called this period the' clash of two epochs'. 3


This is correct because it is really a matter of the clash between the Aufklarung and Romanticism. Kant bore the brunt of the historical transition. He was too deeply rooted in the past to be able to abandon it without regret, but too committed to the future not to be aware of what was happening. The Opus Postumum allows us to see Kant caught in the meshes and wedged between the two, an easy target of criticism. It was on the first centenary of the death of Descartes that Kant entered the scientific world. This was the age of that majestic development of physics which in all countries of advanced culture was to provoke one of the most profound conflicts in the history of western ideas. Stemming directly from Descartes there was a great flowering of philosophical systems, of ,,yhich those of Spinoza, Malebranche, and Leibniz were the most in1.portant. Their common origin explains how both Jew and Christian, atheist and mystic, were moved by the same pride in the achievement of physics and why they were all excited by the unexpected efficacy of the deductive method. If it is true that Descartes brought a message to Europe, that message can only consist in the illusion of method applied to the conduct of the mind. He intended his method to fortify the mind against its discursive imperfection and against a naIve belief in the information provided by the senses. Starting from one original piece of evidence (datum), the Cartesian method proposed to make the whole deductive chain of knowledge flow with perfect rational coherence from this first datum, after the manner of mathematics which finds in the ratiollal connection of its propositions its supreme certainty and its high intellectual authority. From Descartes to Leibniz the human mind sought to establish, more geometrico, a metaphysical and physical system of the world. Faith in this procedure inculcated a great respect for mathematics which, by means of the Cartesian type of analysis, descended from the ideal heights of pure quantity to the expression of physical values. It was also Descartes who realised that the science of matter and the science of space are so connected that the latter sketches out the main lines of the· former. Possessed of a vivid imagination like all mathematicians, Descartes 4

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projected his dreams and his mathematical boldness into physical reality and reduced it to simple n1athematical elements. The reader is sufficiently aware of the course of history to know that Cartesian physics was not able to stand up to the test offact and to the lessons of experience. Some important investigations by Chr. Huyghens made that clear, and from that time doubt in regard to the certainty of the Cartesian deductions in the domain of weight, in the calculus of forces and of motion, and in the explanation of yet other phenomena, grew steadily until Newton's Principia Mathematica brought to an end the great li11e of physicists who used the Galileo-Baconian method to arrive at a picture of the physical world. The school of Newton, however, like that of Descartes, en1phasised the primacy of method. This is not surprising since the brilliant achievernents of Newtonian physics, including the crowning conception ofgravitation, depended upon the methodological discipline to which Newton insisted on submitting himself. The natural outcome was several substantial corrections in the great Cartesian dream. Furthermore, this method could be applied universally. It could be applied in the inorganic as well as the organic realm, to historical, medical, and chemical research, and in these different domains its application yielded results which could be brought into line with the gravitational physics of the English Galileo. The correct ll1ethod i11 the field of concrete and observable facts was to start from the observation of phenomena, to determine by constant experin1ent the causal nexus which binds them, and in this way to construct a general picture of the behaviour of the things which make up the texture of the whole physical world. This method sought to do more than to describe; it sought to explain by means of causes, and this explanation preserved the element of truth in the mathematical concepti011 of matter, while rejecting the exaggerated mathematicism of Descartes. Newtonian induction, which is the reverse of the Cartesian method, was bound to clash with the Cartesian method, for it forbade men to regard observable nature as a gigantic geometrical system. For it, nature was composed ofsimple 5


elements discoverable only by experience, and was not reducible to purely mathematical elements. Furthermore, Newtonian induction was less audacious and nlore suited to the human condition. Whereas metaphysics explains the visible and observable by reference to the invisible (that is, the fact by reference to its principle, where this principle, if a cause at all, was not a secondary cause), tIle causal regression followed by induction is 1110re modest, finding its causal order in an observable chain of phenomena. The Dutch physicists who set the tone of learned society in Europe at the turn of the eighteenth century (men like '8 Gravesande, Boerhaave, Mussenbroek), the Royal Society of London which ruled the scientific life of the island and the Continent, and all the positive scientists scattered throughout Europe, ranged themselves around Newton and the method which he had given to scientific research. The traditional positions of philosophy were shaken by tIle rising scientific movement; philosophy stood on the defensive and with visibly weakening resistance. The interpenetration of these physical and metaphysical discussions is not surprising in view of the fact that a number of the nl0st important and most widely canvassed problems in physics are also metaphysical problems. It was nevertheless inevitable that competition should develop between the metaphysics which derived its inspiration from Descartes and the physics of Newton. Within the limits of logic, induction is incompatible with the innate ideas of Descartes and with the occasionalism and pre-established harmony substituted by Malebranche and Leibniz. It was only to be expected that from the beginning of his Essay Locke should rally the empiricists against the laziest of the solutions to the problenl of the origin of our ideas. In the field of metaphysics, the whole of Europe was a prey to controversies about the concepts of matter, substance, and cause, and a ceaseless attempt was nlade to reach an agreed account of the nature of space. The debates about the absolutist and relativist conceptions of space were conducted with a ferocity which is well known. These debates were singularly complex and difficult to follow, partly because of the number of protagonists, partly because the 6

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issues were difficult to isolate from other theological and metaphysical questions, and partly because of the large number of distinctions which must be made in the respective positions of the different adversaries if historical reality is not to be seriously misrepresented. TIle conflict broke out in connection with the correspondence between Clarke and Leibniz which was published in England in 1717 and in GerIflany in 1720. When the original authors disappeared from the scene, they were succeeded by numerous partisans who rapidly divided themselves into rival schools. In England Leibniz found allies among the adherents of idealism, while Clarke recruited his from among the mystics and scientists. In Germany the whole Wolffian pack followed its national philosopher in serried battalions, while the scientific world attached itself to the coat-tails of Newton, releasing its grasp of them only very reluctantly. In the face of such extremes it was natural that some writers, and among them not the least important, should attempt to harmonise the views about space held by Newton and Leibniz. Euler, Beguelin, and others made this the main purpose of their lives. The question of metllodology, however, divided philosophers and scientists much more sharply than did these controversial topics. The long-standing antagonism between the Cartesian and Newtonian methods simply developed into a conflict between the sciences which made use of them, namely mathematics and philosophy (the latter including physics according to tIle contemporary use of the term). In an endeavour to interpret th.e simple and irreducible elements of matter ill purely quantitative terms Cartesian physics invested pure thought with a power of investigation by conceptual analysis. Leibnizian philosophy is in the end simply a grandiose specimen of a physics and a metaphysics in which reason discovers the simple constituents of physical reality. Newtonian induction, which became, the instrument of the empiricists, identified the simple element which it also sought with the ultimate, irreducible, and unanalysable empirical element. Henceforward, the relatively simple element found in experience was opposed to the absolutely simple elen1ent of mathe-

7


matics. From then on it becan1e imperative to circun1scribe precisely the areas belonging to mathematics and to physics. All the scientists saw the necessity, and all the philosophers saw the danger, of such a demarcation of boundaries, a fact which enables us to understand why this topic should have been of such widespread interest. The clearly conceived objective was to prohibit the philosopher from using the Cartesian method in the science of reality. We shall see that this prohibition was to become one of the constant preoccupations of Kantian thought. It can be said without hesitation that when Kant came upon the scene towards 1750 Newton had won the field. Philosophy and physics adopted the Newtonian canon in England, in France, and in Germany. Furthermore, the success of the new method in physics gave birth to a confidence in its universal applicability, which in turn gave rise to a widespread interest in descriptive research. Ethics, psychology, sociology, and aesthetics benefited greatly by it. This descriptive method, withi11 the competence of everyone and applicable to practical affairs, was in harmony with the democratic tendencies of the age of enlightenment. Culture was to be put within the reach of an enlightened bourgeoisie which expected from this practical and utilitarian culture a future which would be progressive both n10rally and politically. This alliance with the democratic spirit enabled scientific culture to escape more and more from its natural environment, the university, and to flourish beyond the sphere of influence of these backward and musty centres. Knowledge became popular and, in. becoming popular, changed its uniform. Its natural n1edium of expression was no longer the learned treatise, dry and carefully para- . graphed; it sought the newer and more opell forms provided by th.e short essay or the article after the birth of the periodicals. Finally, whole systems of popular philosophy, inspired by the ideas and the needs of this lively bourgeoisie, which was generous in sentiment but thin in ideas, grew up on the virgin soil of this enlightened democratism. Tl~e close alliance between the new scientific methodology and the pre-revolutionary ideology became an accepted fact. 8

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It was in this way that England, France, and Germany came to form a single scientific and cultural community, disciplined by the same method, inspired by the same examples, and moved by the same hopes. For the last time, common themes, methods, solutions, and objectives made science the basis of a genuine international feeling in Europe. The trade in books, the rise of periodicals, and the existence of learned societies created a unified cosmopolitan culture which survived more than one political and military conflict. It is scarcely necessary to add that each of the participating nations manifested peculiarities arising from its own traditions and from its own special situation. TIle peculiarly national note sounded by Germany in this cosmopolitan concert is the existence of a system of metaphysics which was the first truly national metaphysical system in the Germanic countries and the last system of Cartesian inspiration in Europe: this was the metaphysics of Leibniz reduced to handbook form and popularised by the indefatigable activity of Chr. Wolff. The Leibnizian system held all the winning cards quite apart from any question of its philosophical validity. Solidly established in the German system of higher education, it was taught from all the university chairs, without any notable exceptions, to ever-changing generations of students. It was strengthened by the alliance between the official Protestantism, the sobered pietism, and the modified liberalism of its defenders. Moreover, in this period of intellectual uncertainty, spiritual anarchy, and political and moral confusion, it respected the values which formed the very essence of the old regime and thus appeared as a conservative force tending to order and traditionalism. The whole history of eighteenth-century Germany can be epitomised in terms of the rivalry between Leibnizian conservatism and the progressive internationalism adopted by the scientists and abused by the discontented. Frederick the Great, the prince who forged the future greatness of a great nation, furnishes the most astonishing spectacle. In order to achieve his purpose, he became a progressivist and, by means of regulations and patronage, 9


transformed the liberated spirit of the discontented into the national spirit. Almost without his compatriots being aware of what was happening, Leibniz had given his country the first deductive metaphysical system which Germany could claim as her own. Wolff, to whom almost all means of propaganda were available, undertook to publicise it. Reality is completely rational, that is, the clear knowledge which we find in science corresponds exactly to the transcendent order of things. The activity of thought under these conditions consists in the intellectual operation w11ich leads from the obscure awareness found in the realm of the sensible to the clear ideas characteristic of intelligence. Sensibility and understanding are conceived as faculties differing only in degree but not generically distinct. Since the activity of thought manifests itself always in the form of judgment, it is an analytic activity: it explicates the concept of the subject by expressly attributing to it one or more of its constitutive marks with the result that a relation of identity binds subject to predicate. The basis of the necessity of the judgment, or the justification of the objective determinations of the subject, lies always in the formal principles of identity and of contradiction which, on account of the initial postulate of the rationality of the real, immediately acquire ontological significance. Such was Wolff's position. Leibniz too had arrived at similar views but he had made use of the principle of sufficient reason. The relation between our knowledge and its objects is both necessary and a priori, and can be known by pure reason. The formal principles of thought are sufficient to procure for us all the guarantees that we can desire in this connection. The characteristics of this system, which illuminates the history of German thought from 1720 to 1750, may be described as follows. The system of Leibniz is distinguished in the field of epistemology by the .introduction of the principle of sufficient reason and in the field of metaphysics by the monadology. The principle of sufficient reason transforms Cartesian mechanism into a teleological systen1, while the monadology transforms the static Cartesian system into a dynamic one. The points at which the astonishing 10

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imagination of the librarian at Hanover were bound to clash with the solid convictions of the Newtonian scientists can already be seen. The deductive procedure adopted by Wolff in developing the metaphysical system contained in his endless series of manuals was modelled on the Cartesian mathematical method: he applied it without distinction to the realms of the real and the ideal. Newton, and the AngloFrench empiricists who were so set on induction, denied the efficacy of deductioll in the realm of the real. The philosophers who made this question the object of their reflections imitated their foreign colleagues in marking off the areas in which the method of nlathematics could be applied from those in which the methods of philosophy could be applied. This questioll, however, includes two distinct sub-questions: first, the opposition between the methods in the two types of sciences, and secondly, the inevitable interpenetration of mathematics and physics. The solutions which de Maupertuis and d'Alembert presented to the French-speaking public were presented to the Gernlan public by Crusius, Lambert, alld Kant. The principle of sufficient reason, elevated by Leibniz to the rank of leading principle in the science of things, seemed to round off the deductive system of the rationalists and had the good fortune to be adopted by the main body of Wolffians from Bilfinger to Mendelssohn by way of Meier and Baumgarten. This principle, to wllich causality was subordinated as the sufficient reason of becoming, was an absolutely universal principle. It could not be otherwise in a rationalistic systenl which granted to pure thought a power of investigatiOll in the domain of the real or in that of existence. Finally, the monadology transformed the mechanistic idea of substance characteristic of Cartesian thought by attaching to it the notioll of force, while the pre-established harmony, its indispensable adjunct, was to explain communication between substances, first in the human being, and then in tIle universal order of things. Under the empirical Newtonian influence the scientific spirit attacked the whole mass of doctrines characteristic of Wolffianism with the result that these doctrines became subjects of passionate discussion around the year 1750. I I


Along with Keill in England, de Maupertuis and d'Alembert in France, Rudiger, Beguelin, Lambert, and above all Crusius, took part in the discussion of these doctrines. It goes without saying that they anticipated Kant in marking off the boundaries between mathematics and philosophy, and the boundaries which they assigned to these subjects do not differ essentially from those established by Kant. Their common thesis was in effect that conceptual analysis can never attain to existence and that in consequence the synthetic Cartesio-Wolffian method is ineffective in the order of existence. The discussion in which they all shared centred around the detection of the simple and irreducible elen1ent with which the pre-Critical works of Kant have made us familiar. The simple elements of physical reality become, not the residue of a purely logical analysis, but the irreducible and unanalysable element of concrete experience. It was again Crusius who anticipated Kant in his profound discussion of Wolff's extension of the principle of sufficient reason. In the strictly Wolffian school, the focal point of the discussion was the reducibility of the principle of reason to that of contradiction. Its opponents, however, kept on raising objections against the way in which it was related to causality. Crusius distinguished between logical reason and real reason, and denied to logical reason any true efficacy in the order of the real. Logical reasons and real reasons, sufficient reason and causality, principles of reason and principles of causality, are pairs of converging ideal factors. This discussion was further stimulated when Hume's criticism reached Germany, eve11 although it did not bring about the minor revolution wllich the biographers of Kant have written about. The fact that Hume was brought into the discussion caused the Academy in Berlin to take an interest in this quaestio disputata. This is shown by the memoirs sent by Sulzer, Beguelin, and the Frenchman de Maupertuis, in response to a competition set by the Academy. Kant became interested in this general movement of ideas and opinions. He was to find in it his point of departure. He was to borrow from it, first of all his own positions, and then his metl10d of going beyond them. The third Leibnizian theme was the monadology. This 12

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of course revived the great conflict which had arisen towards the end of the seventeenth century about the paradoxes of the infinite. The Frenchman P. Bayle in his Dictionary once again raised the problem of these paradoxes under the heading of his article ZENO. When real existence is attributed to matter, he pointed out, it is necessary to affirm both that matter is infinitely divisible, alld that nevertheless it is composed of sinlple elements which in being simple must therefore be indivisible. He made this difficulty a groulld for rejecting realism in favour of an idealisnl of the Malebranchian type. A violent debate centred around this article both in England and in Germany. The attention of Leibniz had been drawn to the paradoxes of the continuous independently of his personal metaphysics, but as soon as the monadology took shape they thrust themselves more forcibly upon his attention. The monad is indeed a simple element and an indivisible constituent of matter, whereas mathematical considerations force us to believe that space and matter are infinitely divisible. The direct conclusion drawn by Leibniz was tllat space is not absolute. The English idealists, like Collier and Berkeley, deduced from their examination of the same paradoxes the basic soundness of the Malebranchian epistemology and also rejected the absolute character of space. However, the Newtonian school, which fought as one man against the relativity of space, had to be reckoned with, as also had the English Platonists, whose leaders, More, Cudworth, and Clarke, took the side of Newton for metaphysical reasons. It was this topic which stimulated the famous correspondence between Leibniz and Clarke which was published in Germany in 1720 at the instigation of Wolff. In a short time this correspondence became a European affair. Ifwe leave out of account the English writers and the Frenchmen de Maupertuis and d'Alenlbert, it may be said that all the Wolffians in GernlallY followed Leibniz in supporting the relativity of space, while the physicists, like Plouquet and Boscovitch, althougll more or less involved in Wolffianism, were drawn in the opposite direction and dreamed of developing a middle-of-the-road solution to this irritating problem. The Kantian meditations on the problem of 13


space, and his later meditations on the antinomies, must be placed within this historical framework. It is quite evident, furthermore, that Kant was also inspired by the example of Leonard Euler who for the last thirty years had been working at the reconciliation dreamed of by Plouquet and Boscovitch. The related doctrines, the monadological theory of substance and the doctrine of the pre-established harmony in the communication between substances, were doctrines which had not passed with equal ease into the vVolffian system. Wolff attached only a superficial importance to them, and when the Leibnizian harmony became the subject of attack by Foucher and Bayle the more sensible Wolffians capitulated rapidly and replaced the harmony by the system of physical influxion. Furthermore, the adherents of mechanism were opposed to the introduction into physics of a hypothesis which looked so t11eological, and t11is discouraged the Newtonians from adopting it. Konigsberg seems to have been a peculiarly active centre of opposition to the pre-established harmony. It had been attacked by two of Kant's teachers, Schultze and, above all, M. Knutzen who claimed to close the debate by his own special version of the idea of physical influxion. Conflict between induction and deduction, or, in other words, between the analytic and synthetic methods; conflict between mathematics and philosophy; conflict between the principle of sufficient reason and that of causality; conflict between the logical and the real; conflict between monadology and geometry; conflict between the absolute and the relative conceptions of space; conflict between the pre-established harmony and physical influxion: all these conflicts arose from the clash between Newton's Principia Mathematica and the Leibnizo-Wolffian metaphysics. It is indeed· the whole history of German thought which. is summarised in these conflicts. It was in meditating upon and discussing these conflicts over a period of twenty years that Kant was to serve his apprenticesl1ip in philosophy.

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2 THE FIRST PHYSICO-METAPHYSICAL ESSAYS cf. La Deduction I, 87-92, 105-8, 117-22, 130-4, 190-3

When Kant as a young man of sixteen placed himself in the hands of his bellefactor Schultze, the University of Konigsberg was going through a period of relative calm. Schultze had conlbined in his own person elenlents of both W olffianism and Pietism, and Wolffian rationalism had begun to undermine the weak Aristotelianism which had so far reigned there. In 1734 he llad called Martin Knutzen to the chair of philosophy and physics. Kant had the good fortune to find in this young man of twenty-one a daring teacher who was hard-working, well informed, and sympathetic to the enthusiasms of the new generation. In 1735 Knutzen had defended a thesis entitled Systema causarum e.fJicientium which was devoted to the refutation of the doctrine ofpre-established harmony. Leibniz was very nluch attached to this doctrine, Wolff very much less so, and !(nutzen not at all. At Konigsberg he had in any case been anticipated in this field by a man called Marqllardt. Just at the time when Knutzen was attempting to bring the interminable debate to an end, the last blows were directed at the Leibnizian myth by Reuss and by Gottschedt (who sometinles dabbled in philosophy). However, Knutzen not merely refuted it, but developed a new system of physical influxioll which departed considerably from the Aristotelian notion of the efficient cause to which the physicists had already givell the coup de grace. It was not surprising that mechanism, space, and idealism-Foucher had even objected that the external world is unnecessary on the Leibnizian hypothesiswere all to play some part ill the debate. The substance of Knutzen's thesis had no doubt been passed on in his teaching, and in 1756 Kant was to nlake use of it in the Monadologia Physica.


It was th.is far-sighted and liberal Wolffian whose task it was to teach Kant the first principles of Wolffian metaphysics, and to introduce him to the teaching of Newton. Both through personal instruction and the loan of books he accorded Kant the generous support of his own youthful enthusiasm. The teaching of Knutzen prepared Kant for botll a philosophical and a scientific career. The degree of maturity and the breadth of knowledge shown by Kant in this double domain on the occasion of his first published work indicate that his teaching must have been of a very high quality. After following punctiliously a somewhat curious plan of studies under the supervision of Schultze with the willing collaboration of Knutzen, Kant left l'Alber- . tine in 1746 with a dissertation On the Estimation of Living Forces, which he was to publish ill 1749 with the help of benefactors generous enough to ulldertake the cost of printing. There we have Kant at the age oftwenty-two, launched upon the world, burdened by the poverty of his material circumstances yet possessed of great scientific ambitions. In these days ambition could not easily be reconciled with poverty. In order to secure that preliminary easing of his circumstances, which was a condition of independence and liberty, Kant resigned himself to the work of family tutor, spending the years between 1747 and 1755 in several aristocratic and upper-middle-class houses in East Prussia. This self-chosen withdrawal, however, did not have the character of a period of exile. On the contrary, the evidence shows that Kant still maintained his connections with scientific circles in his native town and that he remained in permanent contact witll the scientific life of Germany. However, there is some uncertainty about the kind of occupation which engrossed him and about the objects which attracted his attention during th.ese nine solitary years. If from what we know took place in 1755 it is legitimate to draw any inference about the immediately preceding years, we can form a general, ifvague, idea about what was happening. In all probability Kant followed first and foremost his bent for physical studies. In 1749 he published his doctoral dissertation on living forces, but immediately afterwards decided to develop it in new directions. First, he included 16

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a discussion of the problem of the plurality of worlds, a subject which had been passionately discussed by the European public for about seventy-five years, and added to it a discussion of plurality in types of space. Secondly, he included a reconciliation of his personal views about living forces with the universal harmony. His recollection of the teaching of Knutzen is still clearly to be seen in this project. In 175 I the Hamburger freier Urteilen und Nachrichten published an account of the cosmogony of the Englishman Wright, and in 1752 Kant was able to read, in the Hamburgischen Magazin, an account of a book by Bradley on a sin1ilar subject. Under their stimulus he worked on his Naturgeschichte, which he probably completed in 1754. At the same time he decided to send to the Berlin Academy a memoir on the rotation of the earth about its axis, but instead of addressing it to the Acaden1Y he eventually published his reflections in a weekly magazine in his native city. rrhe same thing was to happen in September of the same year with another memoir in which he discusses the question: does physics allow us to say that the earth grows old? In 1754-5 he decided the time was ripe to come back to Konigsberg and to return to the University. In April 1755 he won the title of Magister by defending a physical thesis composed in Latin and entitled De Igne, but as he wished to qualify himself to give courses in philosophy he was obliged to defend yet another thesis on a philosophical subject. This thesis was entitled Principiorum primorum cognitionis metaphysicae nova Dilucidatio and ,vas published in September 1755. His desire to become a Privat Dozent in philosophy shows that his interest in physical matters was not exclusive. The conflict which he had perceived between his own theory of forces and the universal harmony was in effect a philosophical conflict, and we know in any case, thanks to Reicke, tllat Kant had thought of taking part in a competition organised by the Academy on the optimism of Pope. In general, however, there is no doubt that Knutzen had oriented his pupil towards the exact sciences, and this orientation was to continue for quite some time. After having qualified as Privat Doze11t Kant devoted himself to writing a number of short popular works. In 1756 he discussed the Lisbon (2,491)

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earthquake which had left such a profound impression on the whole of Europe. In the same year he expounded a theory about the winds which was original and not without merit. Again in 1756, with the intention of supporting his candidature for a university chair, he published the Monadologia physica. In 1757 he announced officially in a printed programme his courses on physical geography and on philosophy. Finally in 1758 he was to produce a Neuer Lehrbegrijf der Bewegung und Ruhe. Apart from his scientific work there is little to relate about this period of his life. Kant was received favourably by the student population and by the educated public of the town. There are indications that Kant adapted himself without difficulty to the successive military occupations by the Russians and by the Prussians. In short, the son of the humble couple in the Sattlergasse, despite the existing social barriers, gradually became a public figure of some note. Academic authority was less favourable towards him: flO permanent chair was found for him until 1770. For the rest-all is legend. The stories about the solitary Kant who lived like a hermit and who never left his native city, the Kant whose life was regulated like the mechanism of a clock, the Kant who was stripped of everything and on the verge of starvation, are all very romantic, but they suffer from the disadvantage of being false. Generally no man of sensibility fails to respond to the charm or sadness of circumstances and a man's thought is often coloured by the emotional elements in his environment. No such factors, however, seem to have directly influenced the course of Kant's thought. It has often been alleged that Kant was a physicist before he was a philosopher, and even tl~at he became a philosopher simply through professional duty. This seems to me quite false. The boundaries between physics al~d philosophy were not clearly marked and Kant always treated physics from a philosophical standpoint. A predominating interest in n1ethodology is characteristic of each of the Kantian dissertations of this period. The Lebendige Kriifte discusses principally, not the mathematical estimation of living forces, but the modus cognoscendi of this estimation. The 18

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Naturgeschichtereconciles nlechanical and teleological explanation of the universe. The Monadologia physica bears as its sub-title 'The Use of Metapllysics in conjunction with Geometry in Natural Philosophy'. And although Kant always discusses physics as a philosopher, it is with the clearly avowed intention of showing how, both in physics and metaphysics, everything depends on metllod. In the light of these facts it is clear that far from being an especially chosen field which he had to abandon because of the hard exigencies of life, Kant's physico-mathematical activity is blended with the great, and I should even say the sale, Kantian problem: the method of metaphysics. A rapid glance over the physical writings makes this quite plain. It was at the instigation of IZnutzen that Kant in his doctoral dissertation undertook to reconcile the Cartesian formula (MV) for forces with the Leibnizian formula (MV 2 ). The solution which he gave to his problem is actually false, but that is not what concerns us most. It is more important to notice the ease with which the young man conducts himselfin a physical discussion which had occupied the attention of the whole of Europe, and to see how well informed he is about all the opinions which had been expressed, except, unfortunately, that of d' Alembert, which was the only sound solution. It is important also to trace the ramifications of this pllysical problem through all his thinking. Attributing the false Cartesio-Leibnizian calculations to an error of meth.od, he was led to seek the true modus cognoscendi of these tvvo thinkers. His real objective was the discovery of a more appropriate method, which would take its point of departure from a careful differentiation of scientific domains. Both nlathematics and physics and mathematics and philosophy give answers to different questions and demand different modes of treatment. The confusion between the methods of mathematics and the methods of physics was the real cause of the errors to which deductive physics was exposed. The generalisation of the mathematical method led necessarily to the false Cartesian estimate; the physical method led to the formula of Leibniz. The body of mathematics, alone accessible to Descartes, knew nothing of living force: Leibniz on his 19

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side knew about it through his dynamism, but he measured its value falsely using the method of mathematics. Kant, in establishing the value, saw how important it was to metaphysics to distinguish carefully between two types offorce. It was in the course of generalising the views on method which he expounded on this occasion that he finally arrived at metaphysics. He was not satisfied with the method of the reigning metaphysics which, in its desire to be eine grosse Weltweisheit, neglected to be at tIle same time thorough. An ambition to examine current methods and to put a brake on the tendency of metaphysics to extend its boundaries at the expense of thoroughness is quite rightly selected by Adickes as underlying the demands for thoroughness which Kant directed towards contemporary metaphysics. How very little of this can be called Wolffian ! Further review of his physical works sho,vs how everywhere there is a tendency to bring the methodological problem to the fore. The Naturgeschichte provides the earliest evidence of this tendency. Although in his dissertation Kant had not advocated the Newtonian method as the Inethod which in future would be sure not to lead, to errors similar to those of Descartes and Leibniz, his solitary meditations while acting as family tutor had nevertheless borne their fruits, and he undertook in his cosmogony to give an account of the genesis of the universe by means of the Newtonian method alone. Further, he had prefaced it with a resume of Newtonian principles for the benefit of those who were still unaware of then1. The history of the world as determined by natural laws was therefore to be described mechanistically. In this Kant followed Wright and anticipated Laplace. But-and here the philosopher quarrels with the physicist-physics goes no farther than natural laws. These laws themselves remain unexplained unless they are connected with a teleological principle, a conclusion which makes it possible to reconcile Leibniz and Newton. The theologians, seeing the finger of God everywhere, make nature out to be a perpetual miracle, and the atheists see the operation of chance at the beginning of everything. Kant, plotting a middle course, transcended the Newtonian explanation of the world, which cannot be 20

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applied to the order of laws (or, let it be said in passing, to the organic realm). This transcendence again marks the metaphysical orientation of a cosmogonical essay which is not lacking in greatness. All the other physical writings are also based on Newton. In the De Igne an account of nature is given which is both empirical and geometrical. The Monadologia physica, intended to correct Leibniz by Newton, is perhaps the most remarkable of Kant's smaller writings at this time. He no longer aims sin1ply at a reconciliation of the Cartesian and Newtonian methods in the constitution of physics, but at their intimate collaboration. Their collaboration makes it possible to resolve certain difficulties (I am even tempted to say certain antinomies) resulting fron1 their separate application. The metaphysics of which Kant speaks is the monadology with its simple and indivisible elements as ultimate constituents: geometry on the other hand advocates the infinite divisibility of n1atter. Kant had closely followed the long debate about the paradoxes of the infinite and he was going to offer a solution acceptable to both sides. The spirit which had presided over the solution of the problem offorces showed itself again. In the Critique Kant will find the two sides 011ce again hostile, but he will keep them apart. Here, on the contrary, both win their case on condition that competing sciences and methods ren1ain within their respective fields. In physics experience furnisl1es the point of departure and its data are explained by geoll1etry, from which it follows that in physical construction the experimental and mathen1atical methods are of equal value because they are equally i11dispensable. The role of metaphysics begins at the point where the two methods have exhausted their usefulness. If we refuse to go beyond them, legum originem et causas exponere non possumus. Our little dissertation therefore is noteworthy from more than one point of view. First, in that it furnishes indisputable evidence of Kant's interest in the discussions about the infinite. The antinomies of pure reason go back to this work as to their distant and indirect origin. It is noteworthy also in what it reveals of the significance of Kantian physics which is in effect only a chapter of metaphysics, the value of which is subordinated to the estimation 21


of the methods employed in it. Finally, it is noteworthy because it throws a different light on the subject which he treated in the only philosophical work belonging to this period. This philosophical work, presented in 1755 in order to obtain the right to lecture (venia legendi) , is entitled Principiorum Primorum Cognitionis l\;[elaplzysicae Nova Dilucidatio. In it Kant does not discuss the question ofmethod ex professo, but discusses the foundations of metaphysical knowledge. These foundations, however, are elucidated in the bright light of the methodological debate. In this philosophical discussion Kant found a precursor in Crusius who, along with nlany others before Kant, had rebelled against the metaphysical mathematicism of the Wolffians. Kant, still dazzled by the prestige of this mathematicism, shared most of the convictions which lay at its foundation: the rationality of the real, the clarifying role of understanding (with the consequent distinction of degree, not kind, between the faculties involved in the structure of knowledge), the analytical character of judgment, and the objectifying role of the formal principles of identity and contradiction. His conviction, however, was shaken on two points. He detected the paralogism in the Cartesio-Leibnizian version of the ontological proof, and he saw that existence is not a constitutive part of the essence of a thing. He also saw that the principle of identity is the justifying norm of the rational form of judgment, and tlIat the norm which justifies the content is the principle of sufficient reason. The Dilucidatio is a treatise devoted to the principle of sufficient reason and Crusius is the dominating influence. Like Crusius, Kant distinguishes two senses of sufficient reason, the reason of being which determines the existence of something and the reason of knowing which determines our knowledge of it. Sufficient reason, understood in the sense of a logical necessity, leads to the principle ofidentity. Its objectifying role therefore scarcely goes fartller than that of the formal principles of identity and contradiction. If the relation in question is a relation between existing things the discussion turns quite naturally to the problem of causality, but Kant does not resolve it in the way we might well 22

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anticipate from him. In spite of his assertions that the ratio jiendi and the cause are identical, and that they are both different from the ratio cognoscendi, he blunts the point of this distinction when he claims to know causal relations by means ofidentity. In this matter "\Ive must accept the fact that Kant has a very long way to go before he n1asters this important problem. What in fact led Kant to the examination of causality was a moral discussion about liberty, and a metaphysical discussion about the existence of God. Crusius had denied the universal applicability of the principle of causality since our voluntary actions are not subject to it. Kant, on the contrary, subjects these acts to its domination and consequently maintains the universality of the principle in this domain. The causal factor which determines the will is an internal motive. This alone prevents the will from being arbitrary and yet allows it to escape the natural determinism which necessitates an external constraining factor. Here again the conflict foreshadows, though in quite a different dimension, the third Critical antinomy and signifies on Kant's part a defence of the principle of causality against the objection of Crusius. However, he was to abandon this same universality when faced with the problem of the existence of God, for he held that th.e principle is not applicable to the supreme Being. If therefore it is universal, it is universal only for contingent being. Necessary being escapes it and its universality cannot be saved by saying that God has his reason wit11in himself, because then a being would be the cause of itself, th.at is, would exist before it existed, which is absurd. The same question don1inates the Kantian conception of existence, his distinction between being and thought, between the real and the logical. There is no question here-and it is worth insisting on t11is point-of any problem of realism; Kant never gives it a thought. It is simply a question of the manner in which we know existing reality. He becomes. aware oftwo ways in which this new problem can be attacked. The first is that of the Dilucidatio. Kant discusses the distinction that must be made between logical reason and real reason in the principle of sufficient reason. The other path,

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which he follows only occasionally in this work, is the way of natural theology. The second way is related to a great debate which had occupied European thinking since the Middle Ages. It is again Crusius who precedes Kant in this path. Descartes had rehabilitated the ontological proof of the existence of God: we construct the concept of a being which contains the wl101e of reality, to which in consequence it is necessary to attribute existence. However, since this Ens realissimum is postulated as a concept, that is, ideally, it is ideal existence and not real existence which must be affirmed of it. In order to affirm real existence of it, it would be necessary to prove the reality of the concept of an Ens realissimum. But a concept is valid when its opposite is absolutely impossible. Hence the impossibility of the divine non-existence is equivalent to its necessary existence. But this non-existence is absolutely impossible because there is possibility, and possibility can be conceived only througl1 the real. It is clear that the Kantian proof is also a proof by concept and that he has not yet seen the thesis which was to come, according to which existence cannot be known by way of concepts. The formal subject of the Dilucidatio leads to the same problem. The distinction between logical reason and real reason points towards that between the reason of truth and the reason of existence. The reason of the truth. of a judgment is revealed by the identity of the subject with the predicate. The reason of existence does not determine whether something exists but that by which it exists. The reason of existence becomes confused with the cause. In fact all the problems raised in the Dilucidatio are treated in a confused manner, and all the solutions are equivocal. Let us not forget, however, that this estimate of its value is perhaps the result of a latent confusion of which we ourselves are guilty, in imposing on this period, perhaps unconsciously, the standard oflater solutions which were given to these same problems. Ifwe were permitted to forget all that Kant wrote after 1770, the Dilucidatio would undoubtedly appear to us to be rationalist, but not self-contradictory as is often alleged. The same is true of the problem of space, the last Leibnizian theme bitterly discussed in the first half of the 24

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eighteenth century. The cosmological orientation of his thought led Kant quite naturally to tackle it. For Leibniz, space is an ideal construction consisting in the obscure knowledge of th.e order existing between monads, an order which results from their simple coexistence. Newton, on the contrary, preached the reality and substantiality of space, the condition of all subordinate spatial relations. For Leibniz, space is the consequence of things. For Newton, it is the presupposition of things. It is erroneous to claim that Kant followed J-Aeibniz in the period which we are discussing, simply because like him he professed the relativity of space. Here again !(ant adopts an intermediate position: he follows Leibniz in claiming that the relativity of space is the order realised by substances, but he is no less close to Newton in denying that this order is the consequence of pure coexistence. As an adherent of the doctrine of physical influxion, he conceives the monads to be capable of transitive action and it is their interaction which determines spatial order and relations. Space is therefore the consequence of the dynamical laws of n1atter. This conception is invariably to be found on every occasion that Kant happens to discuss space after the Lebendige Kriifte. Kant never considers space after the manner of l\Tewton, but every day he gets a little closer to him. The problem plays a considerable role, as we have seen, in the Monadologia physica, but !(ant had not yet enrolled himself under the banner of the Englishman. Adickes says quite rightly that Kant is for Leibniz and against Newton in so far as relativity is concerned, but for Newton and against Leibniz in so far as the reality of space is concerned. On the same occasion he tackles the antinomy, or the paradoxes of the infinite, about which vve spoke above. Kant does 110t choose between the metaphysical body composed of simple monads and geometrical space which is infinitely divisible. He declares that between these two conceptions there is no real contradiction because the division of space does not necessarily imply the separation of parts. In reality therefore Kant finds himself half-way between Leibniz and Newton in the problem of space as in many

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other problen1s which he discussed. This is the general tone of Kant's first scientific efforts. It cannot be said that he is a Wolffian; on the contrary, he is generally aware, even if only vaguely, of the defects of rationalism. He approaches Newton, not by any clear and indisputable act of submission, but by reconciling theses which try to overcome the sharp divergencies between the two schools, of which Newton and Leibniz were the acknowledged leaders. But in spite of these uncertainties, these equivocations, these incomplete and provisional solutions, and despite the physical subjects which he prefers to discuss, it is undeniably true that Kant's activity is philosophical in character.

3 A METAPHYSICS IN GESTATION cf. La Deduction I, 92-100, 108-16, 119-30, 135-6, 139-4 1 , 142-6, 193-201

After qualifying in 1755 as a university teacher, Kant took no part in philosophical discussion until 1763. Here we have a first period of silence, lasting for eight or nine years, about which we know almost nothing. The only pointer which we have, and it is vague enough, is to be found in the Beweisgrund: 'I give here the outcome of long meditations but their exposition is still imperfect and incomplete because other preoccupations have not left me enough time'. If this text is to be trusted-and there is no reason why we should not trust it-Kant must have ruminated in silence over the subject-matter of the Beweisgrund where, it is true, we see coming to the surface all the problems which had been left in suspense in the Dilucidatio of 1755. Hence it seems pointless to search for foreign influences on his thought. Having discovered, after Crusius, the error of Cartesian ontolagism, Kant owes to his continued reflection on this problem what it is customary to call his empiricism. There is no question then of revolution, but there is rather a slow and in some ways even painful evolution. But the silence and

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prolonged isolation bore fruit: oriented towards cosmology in 1755, Kant's thought began to turn towards epistemology. Slowly Kant extricated himselffrom the discussion of specialised problems in philosophy. He became preoccupied with a much more decisive problem: the possibility of metaphysics. The commentators have treated all the writings which Kant published between 1762 and 1769 as belonging to one single amorphous group. If the usual fault in this type of discussion is an excess of separatism, the contrary has been the case here. It is quite essential to distinguish between three groups of writings in this decade. To the first group there belong the essay on the syllogism, the essay on negat~ve magnitudes, the essay on the foundation of a den10nstratio11 of the existence of God and the Prize Essay on the clearness of the principles of metaphysics. These are evidence of considerable work done between 1762 and 1764, and they are oriented towards the past both in the presentation of the problems and in the general terms of their solution. A second group contains only one actual publication, the Triiume eines Geistersehers, and otherwise consists of a programme of his lectures, commonly referred to as the Nachricht seiner Vorlesungen, and the correspondence with Mendelssohn. Finally, a third group is made up of the correspondence with Lambert, the essay on the distinction of regions within space, the Dissertatio, and the letters to Marcus Herz up to 21 February 1772. In tb.e first group Kant resolved the problem of the possibility of metaphysics by means of the Newtonian meth.od. Th.e second group seems at first sight to question the possibility of metaphysics, but from 1766 onwards it is once again indubitably foremost in Kant's mind. In tl1e present section only the first group will be discussed. The burning question of influences, which always arises in any discussion of the evolution of Kant's thought, is partly resolved by means of this grouping. It is astonishing that in this connection no-one has ever invoked a text which could give an accurate picture of the actual state of affairs. Herder attended Kant's lectures from 1762 to 1764. Thirty years later, in 1795, he described the teaching which he had

27


received in terms which are perhaps more exact than is commonly believed. In any case they seem to be eminently descriptive: 'Mit ebendem Geist, mit dem er Leibniz, Wolf, Baumgarten, Crusius, Burne prtifte und die Naturgesetze Keplers, Nevvtons, der Physiker verfolgte, nahm er auch die/ damals erscheinenden Schriften Rousseaus, seinen Emil und sein Heloise, sowie jede ihm bekannt gewordene Naturentdeckung auf, wurdigte sie und kam immer zurtick auf unbefangene Kenntnis der Natur und auf moralischen Wert des Menschen.'l Three verbs, priifte, verfolgte, wiirdigte. He critically examines the Wolffians, Crusius, al~d Hume; he expounds Newton and the physicists as one of their followers; he praises Rousseau. The reference to criticism and to the intellectual acceptance of Newton's views expresses exactly the spirit of the first group of writings. In the second group we are going to encounter the intellectual legacy of his enthusiasm for Rousseau. There is no question ofscepticism, or ofI-Iume. Kant knows the writings ofHume, because he critiCIses them, but they do not exercise any perceptible influence on him. On the contrary, tl~e problems discussed in 1755 are again brought to the fore; the solutions which will be given are more unequivocal and are more clearly freed from Wolffian influence. The solutions which they receive are those which Newton would have given if metaphysics had tempted him. They are in fact the solutions given by Newtonians such as de Maupertuis, d'Alembert, Euler, or Lambert and Beguelin. On th.e other hand, the philosophical attitude which inspires the solutions is not new either for Kant or for his contemporaries, for, if we exclude the link with Newton, the problems and their solutions are already anticipated in the Crusian criticism of Wolffian rationalism. The quaestiones, disputatae are the same as those engendered by the metaphysics of Leibniz described above: the problem of method discussed by Kant 1 'In the same spirit in which he examined Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten, Crusius, 'and Hume, and expounded the natural laws of the physicists Kepler and Newton, he .?llso took up the works of Rousseau which. were then appearing, his Emile and his HelOise, and any new natural discovery known to him, and gave his appraisal of them, always coming back to disinterested knowledge of nature and to the moral worth of man.'

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in the Preisschrijt, the distinction between being and thought established in the Beweisgrund, the discussion of causality to which the essay on negative magnitudes is devoted, the conflict about th.e conception of space indicated in the Preisschrijt or Deutlichkeit. Let us examine the nature ofthese soiutions, bearing in nlind the logical order governing them. The years 1755 to 1764 mark a general tendency on Kant's part to align himself with Newton. The method of metaphysics is not the synthetic, n1athematical, Cartesian method of Wolff, but the analytic method of Newtonian physics. This tendency is already evident in the little essay on the syllogism, especially in the conclusion which alone is of interest to us. Judgment analyses the concept given in the subject. The analysis of the concept into its constituent notes is intended to clarify it. This is the classical conception- ofjudgment which as yet shows nothing of the construc-tive operation of 1787. Judgment does 110t enlarge the field of knowledge; it is limited to clarifying knowledge which has been acquired, and is therefore invariably the same operation. However, judgment does not seem to be the . whole of knowledge, for in knowing we add to our information, we discover truths hitherto unknown. Because of its analytical structure judgment does not fulfil this function. Consequently a conflict arises betwee11 the analytical (:haracter of the judging function and the real aims of science. In the second place, all judgments are made in the realm of concepts and have no transcendent import. Judgment is not the organ which is capable of grasping existing things. Knowing things therefore does not consist in clarifying and developing a material content, but in the recognition both of the nature of things and of the reaspn for their existence. It is therefore indispensable to distinguish clearly between the judgment about a thing and the thing itself. There is between these two the same distinction which exists between the real and the logical, between being and thought. It is in the Beweisgrund then that Kant is going to establish the distinction in question with all the consequences which it carries with it. Kant warns us that he meditated eight or

29


nine years on the problem of the existence of God and on the problems which this mode of existence raises. This problem had already been raised, accidentally and hence imperfectly, in 1755, but in the present work the discussion is firmer and more close-knit and the solution is one of principle and definitive. It makes little difference whether the causal problem led Kant to our distinction or whether the very distinction between being and thougl1t gave rise to a further treatment of the causal problem. The ontological proof of tIle existence of God furnishes the occasion and the theme of the debate which Kant is going to institute. The concept of being includes two distinct elements: first, the concept of an essence or a purely ideal existence; secondly, the position of this essence in the realm of the transcendent or real existence. Transcendence adds nothing to essence. It is therefore not a property of a thing and cannot constitute a predicate which can be attributed in a judgment. The analysis of the subject, the proper function ofjudgment, makes explicit the essence from which existence is formally excluded. Affirmation of real existence therefore never has the analysis of the subject as a foundation. This amounts to saying that real existence cannot be determined by pure reason. The existence postulated in judgment will always be relative existence, while transcendent existence is absolute. The assertion' God is all-powerful' is equivalent to the assertion , If God exists, he is all-powerful'. On the other hand, the assertion' God exists' states that some existing thing is God, and we have there the absolute positing of God. This at once raises the problem: how mayan absolute existence be known? It appears to be soluble in only one way. If thought, that is, judgment, cannot grasp it, then we must turn to experience and determine it empirically. An exception must certainly be made for one absolute existent, namely God. Kant does not conclude to it from experience, but from the concept of the possible. If we ignore the exceptional character of divine existence, we can easily see that the Kantian suggestion can be extended without difficulty to the whole domain of metaphysics. If existence is a fact of experience, can any validity still be 3°

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attributed to this science which deliberately deprives itself of the guarantee of experience? A question of this kind will underlie the whole Kantian activity from this n1.oment on. In the essay on the syllogism he tells us that only what is included in the subject can be demonstrated. As the subject does not include real existence, the latter cannot be analytically demonstrated. A distinction between the nlethods of the sciences dealing with the real and tIle ideal was therefore inevitable. Here both the striking unity and single-mindedness of Kantian thought and also his personal character are evident. The empirical elenlent in his thought has led his interpreters to connect him with Hume. This interpretation seems to be false. Crusius furnished the problem and Newton the solution. Although Kant confessed much -later that he had been awakened from his dogmatic slumber by Hume, his retrospective glance was certainly riot fixed on this moment in his thought. In any case, the problem of existence is not an isolated problem but is closely connected with the problem of causality. There Kant takes up again the theme of sufficient reason which had been hotly debated ever since the metaphysics of Leibniz disturbed the habits of thought of the physicists. As early as 1755, we have seen, Kant made a distinction between real reason and logical reason, but he identified real reason with causality. In 1763 he saw that the \'Volffiano-Crusian real reason is not synonymous with causality. Hence the discussiol1. is not concerned with the principle of causality but with tl1.e idea of causation and with particular causal relations. The Kantian argument takes first a plainly negative line, especially in the essay on negative magnitudes. He wants to establish a radical distinction between logical opposition and real opposition. In the first we affirm and deny something of the same subject. There is therefore no substitution of one predicate for another, but simply the negatio11 of the first predicate by the second. The result of contradiction will in this case be a nihil repraesentabile. Real opposition, on the other hand, is not simple contradiction, but involves replacing one predicate by another just as positive. Thus simultaneous and equally intense movement in opposite directions does

31


not produce absolute zero, but a real state, namely, rest. In logical opposition the result is nothing because in it the formal principles of tll0ught are violated and this violation can only produce something inconceivable. In real opposition no principle is violated since ,these principles govern only the connections between representations. Under these conditions the result will be something real which only . experience allows us to determine. It was not difficult to apply this distinction between types of opposition to the special case of the opposition between logical reason and real reason, and the one opposition clarifies the other. The logical relation between ground and consequence is understood and explained by identity; thus divisibility is conceived to be a consequence of composition. But we cannot understand or explain by way of identity how one thing can be derived from another. There we have the real notion of causation: how is it that one thing exists because another thing exists? The negative solution is already included in what has preceded; it cannot be understood by means of the principles of identity or contradiction. The positive solution which Kant sketches is barely articulated; it cannot be understood by means ofjudgment, he says, but only by means of a concept. This is a really enigmatic reply and a veritable crux for the commentators. Judgment is the analysis of an indistinct concept with the purpose ofnlaking it clear. Well, says Kant, it seems impossible to clarify the concept of cause, and every causal relation must therefore be deemed inexplicable. Causality seems to take the shape of a datum, unanalysable and not capable of clarification, which we meet in experience. Kant was deluded about the novelty of his solution. He thinks he invented the whole thing himself, but in fact it is to be found complete in Leibniz. However that may be, the formula for the causal problem is not borrowed from Runle even although the solution given agrees with his views in more than one respect. Kant owes the setting of the problem to Crusius and his criticislll of sufficient reason, but the solution which he gives has been greatly enriched by his discussion of existence and of the ontological proof of God. We have now before us two remarkable achievements

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which show Kant's thought breaking out of the Wolffian circle; real existence is not demonstrable by means of judgment, by conceptual analysis, by pure thought, nor can causality in its turn be demonstrated by these means. It is experience which assures us of both existence and causality. In the two cases we have data which, raised to the level of knowledge, are ultimate unanalysable concepts. It follows that metaphysics, the science of existing things, cannot be constructed on the Wolffian pattern, which is based on the synthetic mathematical method. This will be the result at which Kant arrives in the (i Preisschrift or the Deutlichkeit, the real treatise on method belonging to the pre-Critical period. Up to the present, the writings of Kant falling between 1762 and 1764 have told us in connection with certain particular problems how metaphysics cannot be constructed. In the Deutlichkeit he informs us how it must be constructed and what is the true method which governs it. Kant establishes the metaphysical method by opposing it, like many of his colleagues at this time, to the method of mathematics, and deals with this methodological problem without any reference to physical considerations. Here Kant is uniquely and definitively a philosopher. Mathematics is the science of pure thought. Its objects are ideal existences and its leading principle is that of ground and consequence. Metaphysics is not a science of the ideal; its objects are real absolute existences and its principle is that of causality. Mathematics is the model of a notional science. The function of a notional science is to clarify a concept, to establish its objective content, in a word, to define it. The first necessity is therefore definition. Everything may then be demonstrated because demonstration is simply the attempt to bring out the necessity of a predicative determination of the subject. Notional science knows only one unanalysable element, identity. Did not Wolff try to demonstrate the principle of contradiction? Philosophy, on the other hand, starts from data, analyses them faithfully by a work of reflection, and leads if possible '. to a definition. The empirical point ofdepartu' determination in the order of transcende lo£ll.dJg)4i.e ; into contact with existing things. Thi ~r given, but thei ...,~ (2,491) 33 • '-''''1''"\,4 li.


are given raw and indistinct, and experience gives no information about the metasensible relations with which they are invested. They must be clarified before they can be assin1ilated by the understanding. This is the role of reflection which proceeds by the same rationalistic method of analysis. The work of reflection always takes the form of ajudgment. The analysis however ends in a large number of unanalysable elements. None of these elements has a rational Begrundung because they are not susceptible of treatment by identity. Descartes sought their Begrundung in innate ideas. Kant, who was never at any time an adherent of the t11eory of innate ideas, wanted to compensate for the absence of a rational Begrundung by an appeal to determination in experience. Instead of beginning with the simple and the clear, metaphysics has the indistinct and the complex as its point of departure. Hence, it is out of the question to proceed synthetically after the pattern of mathematicians, or, in other words, it is forbidden to begin with a definition of the given. On the contrary, that is precisely the end to be attained and is in consequence the completion of the demonstrative process characteristic of philosophy. The only admissible point of departure is empirical determination and immediate judgment about the given. All synthetic deduction is forbidden to metaphysics. However, metaphysics, like other sciences, aims at clarifying what is given indistinctly by breaking it up into simple elements, following the procedure of the analytic method which seeks the constitutive notes of any essence, an activity which is an intellectual reflection on the given of experience. This analysis corresponds to the Newtonian method; the true method of metaphysics is the~;a.me method which Newton introduced into physics. The/'final outcome of a faithful application of this method is the simple elements of which the given is composed. These simple elements are not further analysable; they are the Elementarbegrijfe or Grundbegrijfe. There are few of these in mathematics, but in metaphysics they are very numerous and there will be just as many immediate judgments as there are elementary concepts. The ideal end set by the mind is a complete list of these material indemonstrable judgments. The mind would find in this list 34

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the complete plan of the real world just as later the table of categories will constitute the con1plete schema of our thinking activity. There is no pOil1t in searching for the key to this change of attitude in some foreign influence to be detected in the Preisschrift. It should simply be noted that Kant once again follows the line adopted by German thought in the international conflict between Descartes and Newton. With praiseworthy perspicacity Crusius had per.. ceived the role of definition in the structure of the different sciences; he had posed the problen1 of the Elementarbegrijfe ; he had seen the inevitability of some measure of empiricism in any factual science with any claims to realism. It is he vvho inspired K.. ant. And Crusius was not alone in this. In 1755 the memoir of Beguelin on the first principles of metaphysics (the very subject of the Kantian treatise) distinguished the method of mathematics from that of philosophy in a manner very similar to that of Kant. The Neues Organon of Lambert (1764) discussed exactly the same problems which Crusius had left to the meditations of his successors, and his Architectonik of 1772 proceeds a little farther along the same path just at the time when Kant was preparing to exchange Newtonianism for Critical idealism. There is really no need to invoke I-Iume in all this. The whole affair would be simple and straightforward if an embarrassing remark by Kant had not once again made it necessary to reopen the whole problem. On the basis of the indications in the Deutlichkeit we understand the distinction between the methods of mathematics and metaphysics as well as the domain which circumscribes their application, and we should reasonably conclude that they cannot be assimilated nor in any way interchanged. But Kant takes the ground from under our feet by adding that the analytic method is provisional in character because the moment has not yet arrived when we can proceed synthetically in metaphysics. This means, if the words have any sense, that the synthetic method will once again reclaim its rights when analysis has completed its clarificatory work. The scientific ideals envisaged by mathematicians and philosophers fuse together and their destinies are common. The distinction between them depends simply on the stage which they 35


happen to have reached. This amounts to saying that despite the empiricism which is evident in Kant at this moment, the ideal of an a priori construction of universal science retains for him all its attraction and force. In spite of everything, the ideal of Descartes and of Hegel remains the Kantian ideal. And this dream, great both in hopes and in disappointments, renloves Kant from the Newtonian and positivist orbit. If we set aside this distant ideal, however, the actual condition of the science, and perhaps even of man, demands that metaphysics should follow the path of Newton. Kant is not an empiricist. For an empiricist, experience is not only the point of departure but also forms part of the very texture of science. Kant sees in experience a point of departure but claims that science goes beyond experience after the manner of a rational science. The concepts of science do have objective validity owing to the fact that they are given to us in experience. Their objective character is indissolubly linked to the given character of their objects. It is quite understandable then that Kant is going to get closer and closer to Newton in the last problem which formed part of the Descartes-Newton dispute, namely, the problem of space. In 1755, we have already pointed out, Kant was exactly midway between. t11e two antagonists. In the writings which constitute our first group, space is not explicitly discussed but Kant studies its nature and its principal properties, using them as examples to illustrate his researches in the field of methodology. He based the ideas which he was forming about space on his epistemological ideas. The orientation of his epistemological ideas does not lead him to any radical modification of the positions which he had earlier adopted. In fact, the space discussed is geometrical space, therefore mathematical space, and consequently not necessarily affected by the movement towards experience characteristic of this period. Despite that, his hesitation is pronounced. In the Beweisgrund he forbids himself to give a definition of it, and there is in its pages a powerful Ahnung of its absolute character. Although in the treatise about God no final position is sketched, it is quite different in the treatise on method. Kant comes closer to Newtonian space. 36

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He forbids mathematicians to define it or to give any account of it. As early as the essay on negative magnitudes, he had denied to mathematicians the right to concern themselves with space, while granting that right to philosophers. But philosophers are obliged to consider it as a given, as one of those elementary and unanalysable concepts. The mathematical mind is not equipped to seize its essence. The philosopher in general and Kant in particular study space without considering the substances which fill it. Therefore it is separable from these substances, and, since it is separable, it represents something other than the simple relation of their coexistence or their co-operation. Without doubt space is a concept, not yet an intuition, although the definitive conception is already anticipated in two lines of the text where Kant expresses himself in the following manner. , Dergleichen Satze lassen sich wohl erHiutern indem man sie in concreto betrachtet, urn sie anschauend zu erkennen.' 1 The question is about three-dimensional space. We can say therefore by way of resume that Kant has finally broken with Wolffianism. The silence of the years 1755-62 has been beneficial. It allowed Kant, once he had emerged from it, to sketch the contours of a philosophy quite unlike the academic philosophy of the day, but adequate as a philosophy for thinkers-scientists and philosophers-who had been influenced by the progressive spirit of Newton.

4

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101-4, 200-2

It is indisputable that with the first group of writings belonging to the period under review Kant seems to have reached a stage which allowed him to call a halt. A rumour was also circulating in Konigsberg (perhaps Kant himselfwas responsible for it) that he was going to reduce his ideas to treatise 1 'Propositions of this kind can be explained by looking at them in concreto in order to grasp them intuitively.'

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form. He certainly found hin1self obliged to give the lie to this rumour while writing to Lambert. Furthermore, his teaching had undergone considerable development and the Nachricht seiner Vorlesungen indicates not only its extent but also the pedagogical method whicll he proposed to follow. Kant began with a resume of the content of the Preissehrift in brief and precise propositions which allow us to appreciate how assured was his methodology. The analytic method definitely overshadows the synthetic method. He assures his public that in conformity with his theoretical attitude it is no part of his intelltion in his philosophical teaching to furnish a finished philosophy as if he were unwinding a skein of thread, but rather to imitate Socrates in his scientific and zetetic maieutic so that the teaching of philosophy will follow the heuristic path by which it is built up. His purpose is not to furnish the minds of his auditors with a finished doctrine, but to give them a discipline and a method of thought. This heuristic path begins in the order of knowledge by an appeal to experience so that from this point of departure it can move from the simple to the composite. The programme of lectures for the winter term of 1765-6 consequently confirms the Newtonianism of this period. It becomes all the more difficult to appreciate the significance of tIle Triiume eines Geistersehers erliiutert durek die Triiume der Metaphysik. This work had not been commissioned but was an occasional piece more or less forced out of hinl, as he confessed to Mendelssohn, by the enthusiasm aroused by Swedenborg and his mysticism. It is a pamphlet which very quickly goes beyond its original purpose in order to pour sarcasm on metaphysics itself. K. Fischer wanted to see a sceptical Kant in this pamphlet and interpreted the sarcastic tone of its pages as a sign of sceptical detachment on Kant's part towards metaphysics. It is unnecessary to say that we refuse to subscribe to this opinion. To put it briefly: Kant bears witness here to his absolute certainty that the Wolffian metaphysics is false, and at the same time, while professing his love for metaphysics, he confesses to a certain hesitation about its possibility as a science.

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Kant recognised two things in the course of his meditations: first, that knowledge of the real has experience as its sole origin and that in consequence only ll1athematics can claim the title of a pure a priori science; secondly, tl1at theoretical metaphysics is not indispensable as a foundation for morality. The first thesis is the outcome of the researches undertaken between 1762 and 1764, the results of which appear in the writings of that period. Kant owed the second thesis to the influence of J. J. Rousseau. It must not be forgotte11 that the spiritual life of Germany was violently disturbed when the Sturm und Drang noisily announced the advent of a new generation which was to be the precursor of romanticism. Kant ventured into teaching with the purpose of assuring a solid material foundation for his future career, and in a text addressed to Lindner in 1759 he confessed that he was naturally curious, a professor by nature, the living incarnation of the rationalist mentality of the Aufkliirung. During the summer of 1762 the Kanter bookshop had brought to Konigsberg the Social Contract which had been thrown to the flames in Paris. Emile followed in the course of the same year. It was at this moment, according to the testimony of Herder, that Kant acquired an enthusiasm for Rousseau, that he developed a veritable cult of nature and of the idea of the moral value of man. The consequences of this new infatuation are discernible in all Kant's work up to 1766. Kant corroborates the story of his pupil in an indisputable piece of evidence. He had added a series of extremely important marginal notes to his working copy of the Beobachtungen aber das Schiine und das Erhabene (1764). These give a broad general idea of the sort of influence exercised by Rousseau. 'I am a seeker by nature', we read there, , avid for knowledge. I sincerely thought that the greatness of man lies there and that in this way the cultivated man is to be distinguished from the plebs. Rousseau put me back on the right road. Rousseau is another Newton. Newton completed the science of external nature, Rousseau that of the i11ternal universe or of man. Just as Newton laid bare the order and regularity of the external world, so Rousseau discovered the hidden nature of man. It was 39


imperative to recover a true conception of the nature of man. Philosophy is nothing but the practical knowledge of man'. When IZant, after 1770, recovered his spiritual equilibrium, he was to criticise the sentimentalism and the method of Rousseau. By that time the crisis was over. But at its height, as in the Triiume, it is acute. A metaphysical Newtonianism suggested by Crusius and by contemporary physics~~that is the state of mind revealed by the writings of 1762-4. The fusion of this thesis with the views of Rousseau was bound to perpetuate such distinctive features as the sovereign contempt for the kind of speculation which has no effect on the conduct of life. It is certainly tempting to believe that his dislike for metaphysical speculation was accentuated by his reading of Hume. To limit science to experience is to admit the uselessness of metaphysics. Its moral neutrality marks its evil character. It is indisputable that references to Hume and his doctrine become more numerous -and more precise from 1762 onwards. However, if the Triiume is read with the attention which it demands, scarcely any traces will be found of a scepticism which would suggest the influence of the Scottish thinker. In fact, in the diatribe against Inetaphysics all the indications are that we must distinguish its method from its spirit. The main object of metap11ysics is to show that its errors spring directly from a vicious method. There is nothing new in this because the vice of method noted by Kant is the one which he had already brought to light in the Preisschrift, namely the indiscriminate application of the synthetic method of mathen1atics to a science of facts. It follows that it is not metaphysics itself which is rejected, but a special type of metaphysics, namely, that which rests on the faulty methodology referred to. The method advocated by Kant as the only acceptable one is always the analytic method of Newtonian physics. If the methodological position of the Triiume raises scarcely any difficulties, it is a different matter when it comes to determining the object of metaphysics, an object which immediately becomes twofold. The classical object of metaphysics was to know things by pure reason. On

4°

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this definition, said Kant, we can know nothing and every alleged science can be nothing better tllan a doxa since we cannot proceed synthetically (synthetisch verfahren) when we wish to know an existing thing. Once again this global condemnation does not touch metaphysics, but only synthetic metaphysics. Having condenlned the classical conception of metaphysics, Kant proceeds to assign it a new object. It is the function of metaphysics to study what nlan can know on the basis of the concepts of experience, the only fOllndation of our real judgments. This amounts to saying that the task of metaphysics is to determine the area which can be explored by a reason which is organically connected with experience or, in other words, to limit reason to empirical knowledge. It follows that Kant has clearly seen that reason, although formally unlimited as a cognitive faculty, is materially limited by the given of experience. Basically this does not differ from ,,,,hat he had said in 1762-4, but no very keen observation is required in order to discern a change in tonality in Kant's thinking since that tinle. The Triiume is dominated by a scarcely hidden exasperation and in it Kant gives free rein to his feelings. To what should this change in his attitude be attributed? To nothing else, it seems to me, than his perception of the uselessness of all metaphysical speculation in the moral conduct of life. It is therefore much more Rousseau than Hume who is responsible for Kant's alleged scepticism, which is in the end notlling but a passing bout of pessimism. When Kant sent hinl a complimentary copy of the Traume, Mendelssohn claimed to be offended by the contemptuous tone which dominated the book. Kant none the less continued to proclaim his hatred and contempt for the reigning metaphysics. Objectively considered (objectiv erwogen) , he nevertheless added, metapllysics is neither useless nor contemptible, but, as long as it proceeds by the deductive method, it can only go on accumulating errors. If the analytic method is employed, its proper object shifts; it consists in determining the limits which the given of experiellce imposes on our reason. It may be seen that, materially considered, his teaching lias suffered little change since the Preisschrift. The Triiume may be inserted without

41


difficulty into the methodological reflections of the preCritical period. If we now leave method and consider the doctrine of causality, we reach an identical conclusion. Kant repeats that no causal relations can be discerned by pure reason but that all are to be found in experience. Reason is based on the principles of identity and contradiction. The formal principles, however, are not applicable in the case ofcausality because there the question concerns how the existence of one thing makes necessary the existence of another. Therefore the notion of causality cannot be reduced to simpler rational concepts: it is one of the Grundbegriffe which have to be found, like those of force and action, in experience. After showing the impossibility of a rational deduction of any causal relation, Kant illustrates his thesis by the example of 'voluntary action exercised on our bodily organs. This is the same example which Hume had used to support his thesis. The origin of the Kantian doctrine has naturally been seen in Hume's Enquiry, but it is none the less curious to note that Kant had known of this work before 1762, although it had no apparent influence. I do not think that the awakening from dogmatic slumber, which Kant speaks of later, can be referred to this period. Th.e account of causality is an exact replica of that given by Hume, but it is none the less curious to find it in the Negativen Griissen. It may therefore be taken as established, let us say by way of conclusion, that in 'I 763 Kant read the work of Hume without his doctrine becoming the focal point of a striking revolution in Kant's ideas. Newton and Crusius contributed much more effectively to the breakdown of the Wolffianism in his mind. It is nevertheless true that the noticeable change of tone can be explained by one or the other method. I believe that Rousseau must be held responsible for this change of tone, for he revealed to Kant the superiority of morality to knowledge. It would undoubtedly be going too far to follow Cassirer in holding that Kant's metaphysical work up to this point had no other raison d'etre than its bearing on morality. No, metaphysics has a value in itself. 'I was an investigator', confessed Kant. However, he never lost contact with ethics. The little work of 1759 on

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optimism finds its place within the solid framework of bourgeois optimism characteristic of enlightened Woffianisn1. The Preisschrift studied metaphysical principles in theodicy and ethics; the theoretical part was consequently a preparation for the metaphysics of morals. The future formalism is already evident, for Kant attempts to distinguish the formal principles of morality: act in the most perfect way you can. In the letter to Formey, which accompanied his memoir, he is uncertain whether it is reason or feeling which rules in the field of morality. According to the Nachricht, Hutcheson, Shaftesbury, Hume, and Burke are his models ill 1765. The Beobachtungen is more of a moral psychological treatise than an essay in aesthetics. The consciousness of moral feeling is the foundation of ethics. In the Triiume metaphysics is impossible as a science as long as it studies objects beyond the realm ofexperience; scientific evidence gives way to moral faith. The blending of Newtonianism and the sentimentalism of Rousseau therefore affords some explanation of the difficulties which faced Kant at this time.

5 INTIMATIONS OF SYSTEMATISATION cf. La Deduction I, 100-4, I 16-17, 145-6

While the analytic method remained Kant's panacea, a profound modification of the object of metaphysics may be discerned in the Triiume. The object ofWolffian speculation is mercilessly condemned, and the metaphysics which, objectiv erwogen, retains its value, according to Kant, is that which examines the limits inlposed on reason by the experiential character of the given. The problem of the limitation of reason is coming into view and for Newtonianism there is imperceptibly substituted the theme which heralds phenomenalism. A kind of inventory of the pre-Critical period can now be made under the three following heads: (I) Things reveal their presence and their nature in the

43


given of experience; there is therefore no real knowledge without such a given. (2) Real knowledge is limited to the content of experience. (3) Reason is 110t lin'lited in itself, but it is limited in its content by experience. A science with any transcendent import is limited to the content furnished by experience. It follows that there is no ground for considering metaphysics as a source of real or transcendent knowledge. In so far as it is a priori, it is pure analysis of concepts. Can it have any object other than the transcendent? If it does not discover the external world, it can discover the conditions which a real science must satisfy. These are reached as the result of an analysis of the conditions imposed on reason by the demand that it be limited to experience. Hence there is no a priori knowledge of things; such knowledge is always a posteriori. This raises a very grave problem. The true foundation of objective science is a posteriori. But this does not satisfy the demands of science, which only becomes science when the necessity and universality of its constituent elements is made clear. But experience is not the organ of the necessary and the universal. On the other h.and, the rationalist solution is also deficient. It takes account of necessity but it cannot claim any validity in reality. Kant did not know how to get out of this difficulty. He did not even see it as clearly as we might desire. '!\Then he did eventually see this difficulty, it was going to be necessary for him to surmount it by distinguishing in the datum of knowledge both a rational and an irrational element. But we have not yet reached that point. The Critical philosophy connects phenomenalism with the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic judgment. It was consequently tempting to locate the discovery of this distinction at just this point in Kant's development. Adickes, followed by Cassirer, appealed to an impressive number of Reflexionen to show that in his thinking about causality Kant was converted to the equation: empirical equals synthetic. I cannot accept this makeshift solution because the texts and fragments are positively undatable. In any case, in the Traurae, despite the opportunity it

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afforded for such a discussion, there is no question of synthetic judgment. It must not be forgotten th.at tIle terms , analytic' and' synthetic' have quite a different meaning when applied to judgments and to meth.ods. Furth.ermore, we must not allow ourselves to be led astray. The change of front which these scholars wish to locate at this moment was more difficult than might be imagined. The work in the domain of methodology to which Kant had devoted himself from the beginning of his career converged towards a radical distinction between mathematics and philosophy. But the division of judgments into analytic and synthetic amounts to a new classification under quite a different principle. It was Lambert and Leibniz who started Kant along the new line of development which ended in the distinction between judgments. Between I765 and I767 there was an exchange of letters between Lambert and Kant, two men with minds of a similar cast. In a letter expounding his ideas, Lambert told Kant that in his view the future of metaphysics depended on the distinction between form and matter: matter cannot be deduced from form, and any talk of form which is not applied to an objective content of knowledge is empty verbalism. This was the basis of the Neues Organon which he had published in I764. 'In all knowledge', he said, 'it is necessary to consider both the content or matter which is supplied by perception and the form which is nothing but the thought to be found in the laws of logic and mathematics.' It must be noted that Lambert was a lone wolf amid the philosophical movements of his time. It is all the more significant that Kant immediately declared himself in agreement with Lambert when the substance of his method was condensed into one pregnant sentence. The point of view adopted by Lambert was not perhaps completely novel to Kant. In I765 Raspe had unearthed the Nouveaux Essais of Leibniz. Windelband rightly insisted, though possibly with some exaggeration, on the numerous points of contact between the doctrine of the Dissertatio of 1770 and the Leibnizian work. In this posthumous work, Leibniz defended a method analogous to that of Lambert : the concepts and principles by which we represent the 45

THE DEVELOPMENT OF KANTIAN TROUGHT

material content of experience are the consciousness of intellectuallaws or functions. There is therefore for Leibniz an a priori knowledge of the laws of understanding and an a posteriori knowledge of the content of experience. This content is represented by the sensible manifestations of things. The intellectual operations; of which we become aware as they take place, pass into Leibniz's doctrine in the shape of cognitive forms. But let no-one misunderstand our intentions. We want to take note of a simple coincidence rather than to attribute to the Nouveaux Essais a determining influence in the years 1765-7. It may very well be that this influence must be placed later, provided that it be placed before 1770. However that may be, his alleged scepticism did little to prevent Kant from pursuing his purpose of assuring the future of metaphysics. On the contrary, the new object which he assigned to it gave him new confidence. At least that is what he says to Herder in 1767. From the moment when Herder left l'Albertine (1764), a great change took place in tIle thought of the master. Instead of directing his attention on Newtonian empiricism as a means of saving metaphysics, he began to think about the knowledge of the limits of human faculties and propensities. In this way the problem oflimitation spread to the domain of knowledge and of morality. Even his confidence in ethics seems greater; he believed that he had found the true principles of this discipline as well as the fruitful lnethod, and this allowed him to predict that in the course of the year he would be able to work out the Metaphysics of Morals. In the same way, the letters to Lambert open a perspective from which to view the first intimations of an integral systematisation of philosophy. This project contains a division comparable to that of the Critical project: one part is to pursue the Hauptziel and discuss the method of metaphysics, and the other part is to contain the metaphysics. The first part had to be postponed because Kant, on his own admission, had worked out the theory, but had not yet found examples which would enable him to make it intelligible. He undertook instead the second part which was to include the Anfangsgriinde of the metaphysics of nature and the metaphysics of morals. 46

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Unfortunately even this limited purpose remained a mere project although the materials were ready.

6

FIRST SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM OF METAPHYSICS cf. La Deduction I, 147-64,

202-10;

Mind, 303-20

In 1766 a second period of silence began which lasted up to 178 I, since the little essay on space is only a journal article and the Dissertatio of 1770 owes its birth to a purely professionalobligation. We do not know what made Kant give to a local weekly the article on the distinction of regions in space. In the Triiume there had indeed been a discussion of the relation of God to space, and another discussion about the localisation of the soul; there is also the declaration to Mendelssohn, according to which the object of metaphysics is to know how the soul is present in the world; those two problems certainly deal with the relations between material and spiritual substances and space. But neither the one nor the other seems to have led to the little meditation about space. On the other hand, the Newton-Leibniz dispute started again in the course of the years 1760-70 and the problem of space-time became again the centre of the quarrel. The Theoria philosophiae naturalis of Boscovitch and its supplement De Spatio et Tempore (1763), the Melanges de Litterature et de Philosophie of de Maupertuis (I 763-70), the De Substantiis et Phaenomenis by Plouquet (1764), the Theoria motus corporum solidorum (1765) and the Lettres a une Princesse allemande (1768) by Euler, the Anfangsgriinde der hiiheren Meckanik by Kaestner (1776), and L'Essai d'une Conciliation de la Metaphysique de Leibniz avec la Physique de Newton by Beguelin (1776) provide unequivocal evidence of this fact. The little dissertation on space informs the mathematicians that absolute space in the Newtonian sense is the necessary

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condition of the possibility of their science. Space is therefore independent of the existence of matter, but at the same time it is the condition of the possibility of the order which is to be found in the material world. Kant illustrates his total conversion to Newtonian space by demonstrating that things possess spatial characteristics which are not contained in their concept as constitutive marks and which on the other hand are not explicable in terms of relative space. He invokes first of all the Raumgefiihl, that is, the fact that the position of a body does not depend on the reciprocal relations of its parts but on its relation to our own body. Relative space cannot account for this fact. Secondly, he invokes the case of symmetrical objects such as a spherical triangle, our image reflected in a mirror, the two hands, etc. This symmetry cannot be explained by the simple reciprocal relation of the parts but only by means of the relation of these objects to absolute space in so far as they occupy different sections of this absolute space. It is clear that this discovery was to reinforce Kant in his Newtonianism. Euler had anticipated him on this point. For Euler, absolute space is the absolute condition of the principles of 111echanics. Kant, on the contrary, addresses himself only to the geometers and points out to them that this same space is the condition of geometry. However, from this he goes on to draw epistemological conclusions which go considerably beyond what Euler could have taught him. Kant agrees with Euler in concluding t11at space cannot be considered as a purely ideal being or as a being of reason in the manner of Leibniz. Space is something transcendent and for that reason is the condition of the possibility of outer experience. The doctrine of the transcendent nature of space was once again to throw doubt on the rationalist hypothesis of the a priori necessity of mathematics. If space is a real existent, and if geometry is the real science of space, then, in keeping with the Newtonian tone of this whole period, geometry had to be an empirical science. This is a conclusion to which Kant never subscribed and to which he could not have subscribed. But the conclusion to which he did come was that absolute space is not an object of experience and that the relation of things to 48

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absolute space is not directly perceptible. Since space is not an object of experience, the science of space cannot be empirical, even although space makes possible all experience and all outer sensation. So, in the end, we see that Kant recognised in space a real being, absolute but unique, the knowledge of which contains the explanatory basis of all sensatioll. It must be considered one of the Grundbegriffe, but one of a special type because it does not seem to be abstracted fronl experience. It is intuitive. We are therefore faced with two theses of a very different order: the Triiulne made the limitation of reason by experience the very object of metaphysics: the article on space leads us towards a space which is absolute, substantial, and concrete, thus having the character of an intuition. The Dissertatio of 1770, which is a first exposition of the Critical philosophy, must now be explained by means of these two theses. It was undoubtedly the problem of space which set the powder on fire. We read in Reflexio 5°37: 'Wenn ich nur so viel erreiche dass ich tiberzeuge, man mtisse die Bearbeitung dieser Wissenschaft so lange aussetzen, bis man diesen Punkt ausgemacht hat, so hat diese Schrift ihren Zweck erreicht. Ich sahe anfenglich diesen Lehrbegriff wie in einer Danlmerung. Ich versuchte es gantz ernstlich, Satze zu beweisen und ihr Gegenteil, nicht urn eine Zweifellehre zu errichten, sondern weiI ich eine Illusion des Verstandes vermuthete, zu entdecken, worin sie stacke. Das Jahr 6g gab nlir grosses Licht.' 1 A further decisive piece of evidence, a letter to Garve in 17g8, confirms this account. 'Nicht die Untersuchung worn Daseyn Gottes, der Unsterblichkeit, etc. ist der Punck gewesen von clem ich ausgegangen bin, sonclern die Antinomie der reinen Vernunft.' 2 The Prolegomena informs us that the antinomies are the 1 , If I only succeed in persuading [readers] that work in the science must be given up until this point has been settled, this work will have served its purpose. At first I grasped this doctrine only obscurely. I attempted quite seriously to prove both propositions and their opposites, not in order to establish a doctrine of doubt, but, as I suspected that there was an illusion of the understanding, in order to discover what this illusion actually was. The year 1769 gave me great light.' 2 'It was not from any inquiry into the existence of God or the immortality of the soul that I started, but from the antinomies of pure reason.'

(2,491)

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proper means of awakening the philosopher· fronl his dogmatic slumber and we are told that this awakening coincided with the discovery of the Critical problem. The problem referred to by both these texts is that of the antinomies. The antinomies are divided in 1781 into two classes: a mathematical and a dynamical class. The first concerns space, the second metaphysics. The first class dealing with space was the only one recognised in 1769. The fourfold division of the categories which governs the grouping of the antinonlies did not exist at this moment. On tIle basis of our texts it might be concluded that the problem of the antinomies was the cradle of the Critical philosophy. Let us note however the remarkable prudence shown by the texts. 'The year 1769 gave me great· light " says Kant. Although that could certainly mean tllat the Critical philosophy found the reason for its existence in the antinomies, there is nothing yet to prevent us from reading these texts as meaning that the finding of the Critical philosophy furnished the solution to the antinomies. In this case the light would consist in the fact th.at the Critical philosophy permits the resolution of the paradoxes of continuity and the antinomies of infinity. However that may be, it is certainly the adoption of a belief in absolute space that brought the problem of antinomies to the fore. As long as Kant had not openly taken part in the Leibniz-Clarke duel about the nature of space, there was no reason for him to get upset about the paradoxes of the infinite. But with the adoption of the absolute view of space the question becanleurgent. On the one hand absolute geometrical space is infinitely divisible, while on the other the substances which fill it are composed of simple, indivisible, atomic, or monadological elements. In an article in Mind (1938) I have already explained how the problem posed by Pierre Bayle had excited passionate discussion throughout the whole Europe. This was not the only problem for Kant. In addition to the endless discussions about the paradoxes which had lasted for at least three-quarters of a century, there were also the difficulties inherent in the part played by space in his general philosophical position. Since our representation l--

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of space is not empirical, it is not an intuition: on the other hand, being unique it is not a concept, and yet it is the condition of the possibility of mathematics, and therefore absolutely necessary. This means that we know prior to all experience an absolute being which really exists. Such a conception is scarcely reconcilable with the extreme Newtonianism advocated in the Triiume and there is nothing in Kant's past thinking which would permit the solution of the enigma presented by absolute space. It is worth noting here, I think, that the texts we have quoted in order to sl1.oW the contribution of the antinomies to Kant's thinking do not give us any assurance that they were the only elements in and the only objects of Kant's meditations. On the contrary, I have already shown how Kant found the true Leibnizian epistemology in the Nouveaux Essais brought to light in 1767. This discovery of Leibniz becomes very important from this time on. How are the difficulties inherent in the nature of space to be resolved? In general, the Critical solution consists in denying to space the character of an object, that is, in considering it not as a substantial being, but as an a priori form ofknowledge. The ideality ofspace is the elld to be attained. Kant is aware of the distinction between fornl and matter, but he has just begun to envisage space as an existent being. Was it going to be necessary to return to the relativist conception of Leibniz? The Nouveaux Essais make space a pure idea originating in the understarlding, which constructs this concept out of sensible perceptions. Kant could have found there the ideality of space as the form of knowledge of perceptions, but a serious obstacle prevented him from simply adopting the Leibnizian thesis. The difficulty is that space, however it may be represented, is not a concept or an abstract idea; its concrete unity makes it near neighbour to intuition. If it is a concept, it is not an abstract concept, but a peculiar kind of concept. In the eyes of Leibniz the question of origin was not primary. Intuition and concept, sensibility and understanding only indicated differences in degrees of clearness : intuition was the obscure representation while the concept was the clear representation of the object. This view is, of 51


course, quite incompatible with Kant's recent ideas about space. Space is not a concept, and geometry, which is founded on it, consists of theorems which are infinitely clearer than those of metaphysics. The distinction between representations and faculties therefore resides elsewhere. It must be located in the very nature of those orders of knowledge which differ, not in degree of clearness, but in kind and origin. Two orders are going to find themselves side by side because two faculties, sensibility and understanding, each sui generis, are going to be side by side, and both originate types of knowledge which are not interchangeable. Each of these orders has its own forms or laws and its own matter. Sensibility therefore has its own matter and an independent form. This latter is necessarily a priori. Space, along with time, will be tIle a priori form of sensible intuition. The sanle will be true of understanding: Kant looks for the a priori form of understanding and, since it is too soon to think of the categories, he takes up again the old idea of unanalysable concepts which he now regards, it should be noted, after the fashion of Leibniz, as laws or intellectual principles. The problem was solved as soon as Kant had determined the nature of space with all the consequences that follow from it. There remained the second problem, namely, the object of metaphysics which, since the Triiume, consisted in the limitation of reason by the immediately given of experience. I-Iowever, the situation was now completely reversed by the distinction in kind between sensibility and understanding. Sensibility and its intuitions are made possible by the a priori forms of space and time, the basis of mathematics; understanding and its concepts are made possible by the a priori forms of unanalysable concepts, the basis of metaphysics. In the Nouveaux Essais perception was the sensible manifestation of things, hence the representation of their appearances, and to this Kant added that they are received in space and time. Intuition tllerefore knows things in their sensible appearances. 'The understanding', said Leibniz, 'knows things as they are'. Therefore, by the intellectual forms we know things as they are in themselves, in a manner beyond any sensible mode of reception.

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Metaphysics therefore is given an infinitely more importallt role than before. It is no longer the analytic science which limits reason to experience, but it becomes the science of things as they are in themselves. TIle object no longer lleeds to be given to our senses in order to be known. It is undoubtedly given to our senses, and the sensible reception is real, but it is given as a manifestation of a manifold of sensible phenomena. Beyond that, the object is still thought by pure understanding in so far as its internal essence and its metasensible properties escape the reach of sensibility. Kant did not ask himself the question how we can know things in their pure essence by means of pure understanding. It looks as if the pleasure he took in the discovery of ideality clouded for a moment his perspicacity. Just at this moment, Kant, who was already known throughout all Gernlany, saw the possibility of obtaining a professorship. A chair of theology had become vacant. In this connection he had to defend a thesis. Thus it was that in 1770 he reduced to writing his epistemological ideas in the De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis dissertatio, a work whicll is always knOWll by the last word in its title. This work, whose meaning has been violently discussed, has a dual structure as the reference to the sensible world and the intelligible world indicates. In connection with the sensible world Kant expounds the Critical theory of the a priori forms of sensibility which are purely receptive: space and time are possible in so far as they are a priori forms of intuition, which knows only the appearances of things. With regard to the theory of the intelligible world Kant could only expound provisional and epllemeral ideas. He had solved the problem of objectivity by limiting reason to experience. The limiting condition has just been removed through the influence of Leibniz; metaphysics is not the formal science of reason, but a material science of things. However, in formal opposition to Leibniz, Kant bases the difference between the two worlds on the generic distinction between the two opposing faculties and their fornls and principles. The distinction in degree between clear and obscure is replaced by a difference in kind 53


between receptivity and spontaneity. To one faculty things are given, while the other thinks thenl in its own right. Metaphysics is going to be rooted in understanding and its power of spontaneity. From this point of view it is necessary to distinguish the double use which we can make of our intellectual power according to tIle origin of the matter which it invests with an a priori form. There is first a logical llse, which originates sensible appearances and universalises its object by submitting the material percept to the natural law which governs it. The result is the empirical concept whicll can never claim tIle dignity of a pure idea because of the indelible imprint left on it by the sensible origin of its nlatter. The outcome of the logical or analytic use of understanding is the concept of experience or of the empirical object, which is therefore made up of material perceptions ordered by the laws originating in intuition (space and time) and brought to the concept. This use guarantees the knowledge of empirical things but only so far as they are known as sensible appearances. On this provisional construction of empirical data in space and time it confers the character of an empirical object. This part of Kant's thought is definitive and will not be subject to further modification. In the second or real use, understanding creates the matter and form of its own concepts. Kant still holds that behind all its sensible determinations tIle thing hides an internal ontological essence which eludes all en1.pirical investigation. Kant's rationalist temperament is clearly revealed in this type of affirmation. Knowledge of the essence of things must be attained by reason and in an a priori manner. There we have the real use of reason. Through it Kant claims to know things in their own essence by the use of a priori concepts. Where do these concepts come from? rrhey are not derived from the sensible like abstract concepts, but they represent rational activity itself. On the other hand they are not innate. They express the general relations established by reason through the exercise of its fundamental laws on the occasion of experience. What are these laws? Kant does not tell us. They are 54

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the concepts which constitute the matter of metaphysics and of morality. From now on these epistemological prolegomena will allow Kant to elaborate a positive method for metaphysics. In metaphysics we have the science of the principles which govern the real use of understanding by means of which we know the ontological essence of existing things. The general principle of the method which n'lllst be followed consists in freeing the understanding from any taint of sensible conditioning. Is this to be interpreted then as contrary to the teaching of the Triiunle and of l\Jewton? Undoubtedly it must be. How is such a methodological principle to be justified? In physics, the object is given, and the work of intelligence consists in transforming the given phenomena into experience by the logical use of understanding, through which we subordinate them to a law and convert them into an empirical object. In this operation the phenomenon acquires greater clarity and perfection. In metaphysics, the concept of things in themselves is given by understanding. Ifin physics the method was imposed by the given character of its matter, here the method necessarily precedes metaphysics itself, because it expounds its intellectual laws and in so doing determines the real use of understanding. The principle of the metaphysical method consists in the autonomy of reason understood in such a way that the sensible forms do not constitute its necessary limits. The absolute condition of the possibility of metaphysics lies in the recognition that understanding has a wider domain than sensibility. Metaphysics acquires its rational purity by carefully avoiding all contamination by sensibility or, what amounts to the same thing, by confining the sensible principles and forms to their proper field of application. If understanding is indeed automatically freed from the conditions under which the sensible and en1.pirical is received, then there is no reason why the schematism of rational forms should not be ipso facto the schematisn1 of the ontological forms of a world of transcendent things. The formal principle of the sel1.sible is the principle of the subjective reception of the given; its validity is subjective. If the pure concept were subordinated to it, the subjectivity inherent in the sensible 55


would inevitably contaminate the concept. It is therefore highly important for the validity of metaphysics that the subjective conditions of its intuition should not be held to be a condition of the object in itself. Admittedly this is still limitation, but the nature of the limitation has beell completely changed. In the Traume, sensibility was the beneficiary of the limiting imperative; in the Dissertatio, it is pure understanding. Intuition is subjective; understanding is objective. Kant here adopts a standpoint clearly opposed to the general conclusion of his pre-Critical reflection and equally opposed to the Critical standpoint which is to come. If, now as later, he employs the same elements, he will keep changing the roles assigned to them. These considerations must determine the meaning of the Dissertatio and its position in the history of Kantian thought. If the essence of the Critical philosophy is held to be the subjective ideality of tIle forms of cognition, the Dissertatio clearly anticipates the Critical philosophy. If, on the contrary, its essence is held to lie in objectivity, the Dissertatio is less important. I personally believe that the problem of objectivity is the specifically Critical problem. We see that Kant in 1770 came to believe unhesitatingly in the objectivity ofa transcendent metaphysics because th.epure concepts themselves have transcendent validity. Fronl this it may be concluded that the genuinely Critical problem has not yet been perceived. But it will not be long before it is. All its constitutive elements are present, since all the factors which determine the objectivity of transcendent metaphysics in the Dissertatio are soon going to be used as grounds for denying such objectivity. The fate which his colleagues were preparing for the Dissertatio is going to open Kant's eyes and annihilate in one blow all this fine but fruitless attempt at dognlatic metaphysics.

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7

THE POSING OF THE CRITICAL

PROBI~EM

cf. La Deduction I, 164-72, 250-6; Revue BeIge, 7 1 3-3 2, 49-83

Proud of his discovery, Kant sent a copy of his work to three distinguished contemporaries, Lambert, Sulzer, and Mendelssohn. In tIle accompanying letter Kant maintained in all their rigour the methodological principles of the Dissertatio even although he was aware that his doctoral thesis had to be corrected and added to. He had to clinlb down a little when the replies reached him. Lambert accepted the distinction of kind between the faculties but objected to the idealism of the forms of sensibility. The subjective ideality of time necessarily implied that change itself is ideal, and even an idealist cannot deny the reality of change. The qualifications brought forward by Sulzer and Mendelssohn happened to be of the sanle kind and the unanimity of their criticism must have upset the author, and indeed with some justification. Kant devoted a great deal of thought to their criticisms, as he was to admit in 1772. Six months after the three replies reached llim, he had not yet found a satisfactory reply to the objection that his doctrine was a version of subjective idealism, an objection which was based on the a priori character and subjectivity of the forms of sensibility. Kant himself thought that the objection was due to simple misunderstanding, since he considered himself an empirical realist in the logical use of pure reason, and a transcendent realist in the pure use. The misapprehension, however, was 11011e the easier to dissipate. These preoccupations oriented his meditations in another direction. He turned away from the study of the forms of knowledge with their troublesome subjective implications and from the pursuit of the apriori. This change of direction enabled him to concentrate his attention on that aspect of knowledge by which it represents an object. This object is a real being, a being in itself. 'It is very important', Kant

57


says to Herz in 177 I, ' to make a distinction between all that rests on the subjective principles of mind, both sensible and intellectual, and that which belongs to objects'. Kant is moving slowly but surely towards the problem of objectivity and a new methodological principle: he abandons the effort to avoid contamination of the intellectual by the sensible and adopts the principle of distinguishing between formal principles and the object of knowledge, or between the subjective and the objective aspect of knowledge. This principle, which represents an intermediate stage between the Dissertatio (1770) and the Critique (178 I), was to dominate his thinking while ""rorking out the con1plete system of philosophy which he planned at this time. This was to include metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics, in accordance with the programme conceived in 1766, by-passed in the Dissertatio, and, in spite of the satisfactory progress n1ade in the .preparatory works, postponed in its execution for fifteen to twenty years. The next document bears the date 2 I February 1772. This second letter to Herz has very often been misunderstood. It has generally been read as putting forward a programme, whereas all the evidence suggests that it is the balance-sheet of a past. It details exactly the course of Kant's thought since the Dissertatio and especially since the preceding letter of 177 I. It presents two peculiarities: first, Kant's attention has been drawn to understanding; secondly, objectivity occupies his attention to the exclusion of· everything else. The document begins with a retrospective account starting from the Dissertatio: Kant reviews the plan of the Dissertatio and finds the practical part of the plan which he had outlined so satisfactory that he allows himself to elaborate an even wider plan, the complete plan of his philosophy. In the theoretical part, however, which comprises a general phenomenology and the study of metaphysics from the point of view of the method employed in it, there was a very unfortunate omission which demanded urgent attention. This omission was extremely awkward since it is the key to the whole problem of metaphysics. The essential point which he had omitted was to inquire how our representations can represent an object. Two kinds of representation can 58

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be explained without difficulty: (I) sensible representation, where the object affects the subject; this is limited to the object of the senses and the representation only indicates the manner in which the subject has been affected by the object; (2) the opposite type, where understanding creates objects as in mathematics. Neither the one nor the other, 110wever, satisfies the conditions of the problem. Our ideas or concepts are pure, and sensible representation is not pure in this sense; on the other hand, we do not create objects by means of our concepts. The Dissertatio had committed two errors or was guilty of two omissions in this respect: first, affirming at th.e outset that the pure concept is not produced by th.e object, it did not add to this negative account any positive indication of its origin; secondly, it neglected to inquire how our representations can relate to an object when we are not affected by the object. The proof that Kant meditated for a long time on these weaknesses is again to be found in the document itself. Kant adopts a position which is opposed both to the empiricism of sensible affection and to the confusion of the present metaphysical problem with the constructive nature of mathematics. He also reacts against the ontolog-ism which is hidden in idealism, in occasionalism, and in the preestablished harmony between concept and object attributed to Crusius. In spite of its novelty, the problem does not mark a real break in the continuity of Kant's thinking. It extends the line of thought adopted in the Dissertatio and once again brings into question the solution which had been given to the problem of intellectual knowledge. Kant in no way doubts the conformity of concept to object, but he asks for its rational justification. The concepts in question are the laws of understanding; the object is the essence of things in themselves. It is here that the full force of the problem makes itself felt: an a priori idea which represents something in itself! The masked Cartesianism, as it survives in Wolffianism after the impact of Newtonianism, is once again threatened by the new state of the problem. Since the letter of 1772 is a balance-sheet and not a programme, we should like to be correctly informed about the solution which Kant himself was prepared to give. On 59


.~

this point, however, he hedges, although he must have had a rough idea of this solution since he promises the first part of a work intended to expound it. The solution about which we do have information is partial because it is negative. Kant knew very well that the problem which he was posing could not be solved and he refutes opposing theories. Many commentators are of the opinion that our letter proves that Kant had settled the fate of the transcendental deduction. It states its problem indeed, but that is all. On the other hand, one of the actual conditions of the problem is incompatible with the future deduction, namely, the thing in itself. If a positive solution was taking shape in Kant's mind, it does not appear as yet to have become the limitation ofpure understanding to experience in Hume's sense, despite what Erdmann and Paulsen say. It shows sufficiently, I believe, that this time !(ant did not experience any outside influence, whether from Hume or from anyone else, in order to arrive at the central problem of the deduction and of the Critical philosophy. The avatars of the Dissertatio put him on the track. Two characteristics of this positio quaestionis confirm the view that he reached the problem on his ovvn. These characteristics are the antiidealisnl and the anti-psychologism revealed in the very conditions of the problem. There Kant maintains the thing in itself and rejects all self-creation of the object. On the otller hand, his problem is not directed at the question of the origin of knowledge. In the Newtonian period the origin decided the objectivity. Experience was tIle origin of the objective determination of things. The intellectual a priori origin of concepts was without doubt one of the conditions of tIle problem, but not part of the problenl itself. The problem poses the question of validity and presupposes the question of origin. Although the solution of the future transcendental deduction is not anticipated in the letter of 1772, Riehl and Paulsen nevertheless concluded that Kant had nothing further to look for concerning the metaphysical deduction, that is, concerning the complete list of pure concepts with respect to which the problem of validity had been posed. It cannot be denied that Kant did indeed have this deduction

60

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in mind. He rejected the categorial system of Aristotle because of the arbitrary character and empirical nature of its heuristic principle, and he asserted that he possessed another system of categories, discovered by means of certain principles, but he did not tell us what kind of principles he had in mind. TIle only thing we know is that in the Critique a single principle is invoked, namely, the correspondence of the pure concept with the form of judgment. The multiplicity of principles mentioned in our letter therefore rules out any elaboration of the deduction in the course of the year 1771. In short, the letter of 1772 is an admirable positio quaestionis, admirable because of the retrospective account which it offers of its discovery. To see anything more in it is to strain the interpretation of the document. We know exactly what Kant proposed to look for, but we do not know what he found-if indeed he did find anything.

61

Chapter II

The Structure of the

Critical Synthesis

SYNOPSIS cf. La Deduction I, 164-87

The problem which Kant proposed to solve by Critical idealism had just been formulated in the celebrated letter to Herz of 21 February 1772. We must now concentrate our attention on studying the development and the solution of the problem. Unfortunately, our information becomes more and more scanty just at the point where our curiosity begins to grow. As inevitably happens when documentary evidence is lacking, speculative hypotheses luxuriate on all sides. The state of our documentation is notoriously insufficient and does not allow us to retrace the progressive development of the Critical standpoint with absolute confidence and certainly not with anything like completeness. In a case of this kind it is preferable to reduce to a minimum all recourse to hypotheses, and I think that the reader will be grateful if I reject all hypotheses which are not themselves founded on some indubitable piece of evidence. The sources consist of a series of letters, most of which are more enigmatic than instructive, thereby multiplying rather than solving the problems. In addition to these we are fortunate in having in the Duisburg'sche Nachlass a document of the first importance, which is an excellent source of information about the stage which the Critical synthesis had reached towards 1775. We have also the Vorlesungen uber Metaphysik (not the course published by Politz, but the manuscripts studied by M. Heinze), which throw a vivid light on the period which comes immediately after the

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Nachlass. That is all. We have already explained why we rej ect the Reflexionen in a piece of research where chronology is of the utmost importance. In consequence we are for the most part short of documentary evidence just at the point where we want to penetrate more deeply into Kant's thought at a time when he was struggling with the new problem which faced him after twenty years of preliminary studies. We can reconstruct the first step in his thinking by meallS of a source which at first it may seem strange to cite. Section 14 of the Critique offers us, as an introduction to the deduction, a positio quaestionis and a provisional reply which come close to tIle very terms employed by Kant in the letter of 1772 and which. give us an approximate idea of the probable direction of his first meditations. We find in this paragraph the identical disjunction between the two cases where the conformity of tIle concept and of the object is directly intelligible: the enlpirical case and the case of self-creation. Both of them are rejected because the first contradicts the origin of the concept in question and the second surpasses the capacity of the human intellect. Despite this faithful repetition, Section 14 goes beyond the contents of the letter of 1772 since Kant has now discovered that the earlier disjunction is not complete and that the possibility of a third case must be envisaged. This is the case where the concept does not produce the object dem Dasein nach, but where it none the less produces it when it is found to be the necessary condition of its recognition as an object. In this eventuality it is not cOllstitutive of the object (in itself) but it is constitutive of the object of knowledge. Ifwe are not overestimating the value of our hypothesis, we nlust conclude that Kant was directing his thougllt towards the object and that cOllsequently he was conlpletely changing the meaning of this epistemological factor. In 1772 the object manifestly meant a thing in itself or a transcendent existent. In Section 14 it means no less clearly the object of knowledge. Now, such all object necessarily COllforms to the conditions of knowledge, because if it did not, it would not be known and it would not be an object of knowledge. This object of knowledge is known under the 63


double condition of intuition and concept, and it is perfectly consistent with the logical use of understanding found in the Dissertatio. The necessity of a contribution from intuition therefore leads Kant back to a point of view which he thought he llad left behind in I770: objectivity is unavoidably bound to an object of experience, that is, to a unified body of empirical data which, according to the thesis which he held since 1770, are subjected to the forms of space and time and therefore correspond to the notion of the objectphenomenon. The letter of I77 2 a parte ante and the Duisburg'sche Nachlass a parte post reinforce the validity of our hypothesis in this respect. How are we to explain this sudden return to theses, such as the phenomenalism ofthe Triiume, which we h.ad presumed to have been superseded? It is at this point that we must call to our assistance a confession made by Kant in the Prolegomena. We must remind ourselves that Kant llad placed Hume at the very forefront of the Critical philosophy. In a passage which is no doubt somewhat stylised, but none the less in keeping with the facts and trustworthy in its essence, Kant describes ill I783 the line followed by his thinking. He was aware of the criticism which Hume directed against the notion of causality. He agreed with it in its negative aspects but did not admit the validity of the positive psychological explanation offered by Hume. He then tried to generalise tIle criticism of Hume and found that causality is not the only concept in which understanding thinks in an a priori manner the connection between things, but that, on the contrary, metaphysics is full of such concepts. He wanted to make sure of their number by means of a reliable principle of investigation which lay to his hand at this moment. Pursuing this line of argument, he then grappled with the problem of justifying their objective validity and this allowed him to give form to a project conceived quite a llumber of years earlier. The stage we are discussing is the only point in all Kant's career which fits this account. TIle first general solution for the problem of objectivity was discovered through the stimulus provided by Hume. Kant was certainly not ignorant of Hume's criticism before this time, but its disintegrating effect 64

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on metaphysics could only appear with such urgency at the moment when Kant, having lost confidence in the dogmatism of the real use of understanding, had clearly stated the Critical problem of objectivity. The first letter which tells us about what was happening dates from the end of 1773. We l~ave seen that in 1771 Kant had elaborated the plan of a complete system of philosophy. This plan had just been upset by the form assumed by the problem in 1772 which, by once again bringing everything into question, proved fatal to the system which had barely been conceived. In the letter of 1773 he announced to his friend Herz that he was obliged to postpone the execution of his plans, at least in so far as these concerned metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics, because the state of the Critical problem made it necessary to suspend all otb.er work. By way of compensation he worked feverishly at the Critique, which was to be the propaedeutic to the three disciplines included in tIle plan as a whole. He was now in possessiol1 of the general principle, which without doubt n~erged with the principle of the general deduction where the problem of 1772 is solved, and which is perhaps the Ol~e which we have just borrowed from Section 14. We say' perhaps' because nothing is to be found in the letter about the nature of the principle. With the next document we find ourselves transported to the year 1775. This time the document, the Duisburg'sche Nachlass, is of considerable importance. This Nachlass is composed of a number of loose pages (Lose Blatter). One of these is carefully dated, and the similarity between it and others is so striking that we are forced to group all of them around the year 1775. These pages show us tl~at Kant has brought the essential point of his theory of experience into clear focus. He shows us, partly by his silence and partly by his use of his theory of experience, that the doctrine of sensibility (or the Aesthetic) forms no part of the new problematic and that he has mastered the doctrine of understanding, which is divided in the Critique into the Analytic of Concepts and the Analytic of Principles. Although he does not insist on the detail, he makes it clear that, with respect to the Critical problem, the (2,491) 65 6


principle of the solution has been completely reversed since the Dissertatio. He no longer finds it an imperative necessity to avoid any contamination of understanding by sensibility. On the contrary, the solution consists precisely in considering these two faculties as complementary one to another in the objectivisation of knowledge. Separatism has therefore made way for an almost absolute unIonIsm. Furthermore, the same pages tell us about the profound modification which the notion of the object has just undergone. From being an object in itself it has been transmuted into a transcendental object, that is, into synthetic unity as a trans-subjective element capable of avoiding the charge of idealism. The solution of Section 14 seems from one angle to have been superseded, from another to have becon1e even more detailed. The real use of pure reason maintained in 1770 is counterbalanced by the transcendental use. The connection of the concept with the object is made very clear since the object, according to the Critical conception, is constituted on the formal side by the transcendental subject through the function of apperception of which the pure concept is one of the determinate forms. We shall see in the following section how !(ant succeeded in organising this into a perfectly coherent doctrine. The date of the manuscripts belonging to the course on metaphysics studied by Heinze falls between 1775 and 1780. These documents have the great advantage over the Nachlass that they form an organised whole and are therefore the systematic exposition of a doctrine. The part entitled Ontology is the first brief and precise exposition of the Critical philosophy. The other part contains a discussion of metaphysics in the strict sense. Certain details force us to date this course nearer 1775 than 178o: the constant use of the term' exposition', which is common in the Duisburg'sche Nachlass but always replaced in the Critique by the term , experience', and also the complete absence of themes which we are ourselves going to place at a later date would be enough to justify this. This course marks, furthermore, a sensible degree of progress in the business of editing the material. The divisions of the future Critique into the

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Aesthetic and the Logic, divided in its turn into an Analytic and a Dialectic, are already fully settled. The Analytic itself is subdivided into an Analytic of Concepts and an Analytic of Principles. Furthermore, Kant has discovered the clue for the metaphysical deduction which is to be found in its entirety, even to details, in this course. The general principle of the transcelldental deduction has not been changed. Kant is aware of the possibility of a transcendent use of reason but he recognises its illusory character except in the field of morality. Objectivity can be explained only for the object of experience. We can therefore say that the theory of objectivity has hardly undergone any further modifications. The subjective conditions of the knowledge of the object are the objectivising conditions of this object. Experience figures in these manuscripts as the Inbegriff of objects and as the condition of the possibility of empirical knowledge. There is even question of synthetic a priori judgments, and this problem already exercises its wellknown and disastrous influence on the uniformity of the problem and of the Critical solution. We can conclude that Kant did not have very much more to learn about this aspect of his subject. And yet the Critique is still postponed as if some obstacle stood in the way of its completion. We have some information about this from some letters by Kant, one of 1776 and four others from 1778 to 1779. The first tells us that in his work at the Critique he has arrived at the last part, the Methodology, but he is careful to add that he has just managed to evade the obstacle which was holding everything up and that henceforth there was nothing to prevent him from going on to the writing of his work. The four letters confirm his decision to proceed with the writing. This information would raise no difficulty ifit was not surrounded by details which are far from reassuring. The work he has in mind is to be brief; it is to take the form of a convenient manual, and Kant is clearly concerned to preserve the popular character of the text. These suggestions bear little resemblance to the Critique. Accepting these indications Adickes put forward a very tempting hypothesis to the effect that Kant actually compiled in the course of these years a 67


handbook or outline which kept on growing with the continual introduction of new material from different sources. The four letters of 1778 to 1779 do indeed suggest that something of this kind must have taken place, although I have considerable reservations about the edition of the Critique which Adickes produced on the basis of this hypothesis. The completion of the Critique was held up for long years yet, despite the degree of progress which is sl10wn by the Duisburg'sche Nachlass. However, as far as the internal structure of the deduction is concerned, the Duisburg'sche Nachlass and the Vorlesungen iiber Metaphysik are silent on the subject of the imagination and the psychological deduction in three syntheses, and Kant still expresses himselfin a very confused manner with regard to the conception of reason. The first two n1issing parts are those which Kant almost completely cut out in the second edition of his work in 1787. It is advisable to determine the approximate date at which !(ant clearly perceived the use which he could make of these doctrines (or his theory of objectivity. The Lose Blatter edited by Reicke set us on the path. The sheet BI2, dated in 1780, constitutes an outline of the theory of imaginatioll as it was incorporated in the definitive deduction. The sheet numbered E67 contains the first indication of the deduction in three syntheses. It must also be placed in the year 1780. The last problem which is imperfectly present in the earlier sources concerns the distinction between understanding and reason. In several of the Lose Blatter this distinction is elaborated. They must be assigned to the years 1779-80. The concillsion must therefore be drawn that these discussions were added fairly late when the Critical philosophy had been completely thought through, and that perhaps its codification in writing had already been begun by this time. On the other hand, the origin of these additions can be completely determined. It will have been noticed that they are all intimately related to psychology. It can be taken as authentic fact, on the basis of his own statement as well as on that of his compatriot Hamann, that Kant had made a long and careful study of the Philosophische Versuche iiber die Menschliche Natur und ihre Entwicklung (Philosophical Essays on

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Human Nature and its Development) by N. Tetens. This work appeared in two large volumes from 1776 to 1777; it was intended to expound the psychological genesis of knowledge and to analyse it into its constitutive factors. The problems of Kant and of Tetens certainly do not cover exactly the same ground but they are none the less related, and a brief glance through the two large volumes of the German empiricist is sufficient to reveal at once the close affinity between their inquiries. Tetens distinguishes between matter and form in knowledge. He is ahead of Kant in his thesis that the subjective, through its formal character, is the determining reason of the objective. He foreshadows the phenomenalism which Kant was going to found on reason. He is in agreement with Kant about the attitude to be adopted with regard to the criticism of Hume. Tetens develops themes analogous to those of Kant: even in the least favourable case little change is required before Kant can combine the psychological teaching of his contemporary with his own transcendental inquiries. There is therefore little difficulty in admitting that Kant's reading of Tetens, and the consequences which this had for the growing Critical philosophy, held up the vvriting of the Critique before furnishing it with necessary complements. Finally the Critique was written (or revised) in great haste and launched upon an indifferent public at the Easter Fair in the year 1781.

2 THE STRUCTURE OF THE THEORY OF

EXPERIENCE cf. La Deduction I, 173-80, 257-84

In the light of Section 14 of the Critique we have seen how the problem of objectivity led to the following twofold thesis: first, the transcendental object is from now on to replace the transcendent object; secondly, the logical use is the sole employment of pure reason which is objectively valid. The

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Duisburg'sche Nachlass is entirely devoted to setting this double thesis on a solid foundation. In expounding this we can make use of the edition published by Haering. The outline of the two theses, which we have endeavoured to construct in accordance with Section 14, has given us only the general theme which Kant was to develop in the solution of the Critical problem of 1772, but the detail of the solution is not to be found there. It is precisely the detailed discussion to be found in the Nachlass which is peculiarly enlightening concerning the Kantian positions towards 1775. The doctrine of sensibility and understanding seems to be completely elaborated, though the disorganised state of the fragments prevents us from seeing how Kant intended to develop it systematically. We have already mentioned the missing parts which we shall return to in the last section of this chapter. The problem, how does a concept represent an object, is solved in the pages of the Nachlass by a special conception of the object. The object is no longer the actually existing thing with. ontological claims, which henceforth is called the Ding an sich, but it is a pure mental construction which has two characteristics; first, the relation of the understanding to the extra-subjective given, and secondly, the intrasubjective compulsion of thinking its unity. The whole question is to find the source of the compulsion to unity, the dominating character of the object. It comes, asserts the Nachlass, from the exposition of the given by means of the subjective functions of the understanding. Hence we reach a result which at first sight is paradoxical, namely that the subjective is the foundation of the objective because the objective coincides precisely with the necessary unity of phenomena. By n1eans of this unity, ,primitive perception is transforn1.ed into experience. Since the object is in this way the resultant of subjective functions, the sources of these functions must be sought in the cognitive faculties. What then is the situation with t'regard to these? Objectivity is conceived only through the interpenetration ofsensibility and understanding: sensibility presents the given, but is incapable of furnishing the form of its necessary unity, while understanding provides this form

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without being able to produce on its own the given or the matter. Although the nature and role of sensibility have been definitely established-I(ant has not returned to this theme since I77o-it is very different with understanding which is as yet only very imperfectly distinguished from reason in its functions. However, Kant anticipates to some extent this distinction by a radical separation between the analytic and the synthetic judgment, a distinction which thus appears for the first time on the Critical horizon. Later, reason will be the intellectual a priori function which is exercised not on sensible matter but on a priori and rational matter constituted by concepts. It realises therefore the unity of concepts in allowing itself to be guided in this operation by the principle of identity, and the judgment which effects this unification of concepts by identity will necessarily be a purely analytical operation. Reason ca11 also exercise its functions of unification in a matter of sensible origin or among intuitions, in which case it is called understanding. But i11 this case the judgn1ent which expresses their unity can no longer correspo11d to analytic identity, but must express synthetic functions realising the unity of a given diversity by means of a synthesis. The problem of objectivity arises exclusively with regard to this last class of judgments. In these judgn1ents a given manifold affects tl1e subject and the whole cognitive process is set in motion by this affection from outside the subject. Using the material in the Nachlass, let us now set out this process in detail, starting from the primitive affection and proceeding to its highest conditio11. The object of the affection raises in 1775 as in 1781 grave difficulties. Tl1e most logical manner of conceiving the object of affection is certainly to see in it a thing in itself. In fact it often happens that Kant does conceive it in this way. But there is also the case where the object of affection is constituted by phenomena, that is, by entities already structured by means of our subjective a priori functions. This problem is all the more serious at this time because Kant does not have ready the solution represented by the doctrine of double affection where a double self is affected by a double object. However, the transcendental affection is always invoked to

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account for the initial movement given to our functions of knowledge. These sensible affections reach consciousness in being received by inner sense which, as the Critical synthesis reaches completion, loses its rationalist n1eaning where it is confused with thought, in order to approach more and more the empirical meaning which makes it the receptor organ of our inner states. The influence of Locke is dominant here. The Dissertatio made time its a priori form and internal perceptions its a posteriori matter. In the Nachlass inner sense is al1 intermediate function between the sensible given and the intellectual concept in consequence of its connection with the form of time and its three dimensions of existence, simultaneity, and succession. Tl1e reception of the given into one or other of these dimensions is the condition of its exposition in one of the three concepts of substance, reciprocity, and causality. Inner sense then foreshadows the role which imagination will play in the Critique. It should be noted that inner sense and imagination are· found in the texts in inverse proportion: the one factor tends to replace the other. But il1ner sense plays this part only because time is conceived in the Nachlass in two ways, sometimes co-ordinated with space as the form of inner intuition and sometimes as the form of inner experience, including then external intuition which has become conscious. Received by inner sense, the sensible given is carried to the concept and thus objectivised. Another factor comes on the scene here, for the concept designates the determination of the given by understanding, a determination which carries the name of' exposition of phenomena' . This term is going to disappear in 178 I where it will be replaced by the term , experience'. It consists in the application of the functions of synthetic unity to given perceptions. These functions duplicate themselves into pure concepts and a priori principles. Kant has 110W discovered, contrary to his earlier conviction which was still deeply rooted in 1770, that the intellectual function is not the analysis of a given, but the function of a synthesis of unity on the basis of a given. He has acquired this l1ew conviction, with all its incalculable

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consequences, because of the idea that the given and the phenomena contain no synthetic liaison in themselves, and that in consequence wherever this unity is manifested it must be mind which has furnished it. The synthesis which understanding procures must be called a function in opposition to the form of intuition because the form is that in which the unity of the given takes place while the function is that by which it takes place. The synthesis is not the location, but the act constitutive of synthetic unity. It is in this way tllat the synthetic functions, concepts, and principles are presented in the form of rules which, when followed by perceptions, produce order and connection in the given. Kant repeatedly appeals to the necessity of rules which are tIle absolute condition of the necessary unity and hence of objectivity. This unity and the character of all object which the given acquires are not interchangeable: they are strictly determined and discernible one fron1. the other. The rules of synthesis are therefore applied with discernment and with perfect regularity. Where does this discrimination in the effecting of the synthesis come from? It is here that the constraining influence of the sensible given reveals itself. In the Nachlass the given explains 11.0t only the setting in motion of the functional apparatus of knowledge but also tIle specification of the regulating function in its concrete application. Indeed, the genesis of a rule is subordinated to the observation of three conditions: first of a sensible given, secondly of the aptitude of this given to submit to a rule (is this the affinity of the Critique ?), and lastly the exllibiting of the rule. This exhibiting of the rule is the synthesis considered as a function. Here the Kantian theory conles back to th.e knowing subject or the self as the last substratum of the functional rules. The self in general expresses itself by an ' I think' which by itself is not a rule for perceptions but the condition of the possibility of the submission of perceptions to rules in so far as it represents the absolute unity of the thinking subject. The consciousness of self is indiscriminately called, in 1775, by a deplorable weakness in terminology, apprehension, or apperception. We are conscious of perceptions, said Kant, by their reception by inner sense :

73


this is the consciousness of the empirical self, wavering, diverse, and changing according to passing contents. These perceptions are then fastened and integrated into the unity of the permanent and unvarying self: this is the transcendental ego. This last apperception is defined as the perception of self as thinking subject in general, or again, as consciousness of thought. It is because of this that the transcendental unity of the ego can be the last substratum of the rules or synthetic functions and Kant can say in this way that the ego is really the origin and the archetype of all objects of knowledge. In this "vay the cognitive process attains its completion. Thus we can represent the first form which Critical idealism took in its provisional sketches. It is possible to recognise without difficulty the need for the sensible given, for its reception by formal sensibility, for its entry into inner sense through the double function of time, the moments of which are the three ways of having consciousness of the existence of perceptions in us. In conformity with the relations of empirical consciousness, perceptions are tied to the ego which is identical in all moments of consciousness. By the recognition of the unity of the self in transcendental apperception, perceptions are bound into a single representation by the consciousness of the identity of the synthesis according to which the self is conscious of itself. This single representation coincides with the object. The synthesis which produced it is the rule or a priori function. A synthetic object expresses itself in the concept, that is, in the representation of the necessary unity in the perceptual given. Such is the doctrine which Kant reached in 1775 as an answer to his problem of 1772. It can be seen how the essential elements of the Critique are faithfully reflected. It may be that the impression of similarity comes in part from the reduction to system of the numerous unsorted pages which comprise the Nachlass. But the articulations of the system are none the less present at this period. The Nachlass is made up of Vorarbeiten, all incomplete and subject to all the defects inherent in a provisional outline. This does not however prevent us from concluding that in 1775 the theory of experience or the theory Of

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objectivity has fully achieved the Critical level, including even the weaknesses which exegesis of the Critique meets all along the line. Certain parts of the definitive Critical position are still lacking. But six years still have to elapse before its final writing. The revision of the materials of the Nachlass with a view to publication was still to involve very hard work, the more so as from another side new stresses were about to develop which were going to affect the Critical doctrine which had already been elaborated.

3

THE ELABORATION OF THE CATEGORIAL SYSTEM cf. La Deduction I,

2 10-50

The problen1. of objectivity is identical with the transcendental deduction. The latter is conditioned by the metaphysical deduction, the object of which is to make the necessarily complete list of the original property of pure reason before seeking the conditions of its objective validity by the other deduction. The two problems are thus closely bound together. In the metaphysical deduction what Kant has to do is not to prove the a priori character of the pure concepts (which is not really in question), but to make an exhaustive inventory of them and to arrange this inventory by means of a principle. The principle is to be a guarantee of the necessary completeness of the list. Thus three problen1.s must occupy our attention: the search for the guiding pril1ciple, the establishn1.ent of the table of judgments, and finally the es~ablishment of tl1e table of categories. These problems have here been enumerated in a logical order, but the historical order in which they were worked out is exactly the opposite. Kant first arranged the table of categories, discovered a little later the heuristic principle, and finally co-ordinated the list of judgn1ents with that of the categories. At the stage Kant had now reached, sucl1 a search for a

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complete table of pure concepts could be undertaken in two distinct ways. Fron1 1772 onward the pure ideas of the Dissertatio could have been surreptitiously becoming the categories of logical usage, but on the other hand it is not impossible that the idea of such a search had fused with an old rationalist conviction of Kant. Empirical concepts are innumerable in quantity and only a divine intelligence would be capable of en1bracing their totality. Pure concepts on the other hand are but few in number and can easily be discovered because reason is capable of knowing itself. We do not know which way was actually adopted by Kant. It rerrlains true that the problem itself had been posed in 1772 but it is not necessary to infer from that that it was resolved at that mon1ent. We are going to follow the historical ordo invenienti rather than the order found in the Critique. The first task undertaken by Kant was the establishment of the table of categories. In the Prolegomena he outlined the path which he followed, a retrospective account which though basically correct misleads by suppressing the stages. In the pre-Critical period and in the Dissertatio a project of this nature had always been in Kant's mind as the ideal end of the analytic method, and it may be said in general that he was the only philosopher in the eighteenth century who understood the tren1endous philosophical significance of the problem of tl1e categories. This was generally thought to be merely a survival from an outdated scholasticism. Alone in his appreciation of the problem, Kant derived a first historical inspiration from his recollection of Aristotle, from whom he takes over quality, quantity, and relation, not as categories in the true sense but rather as rubrics for categories. A second inspiration could have come to him from Hume who enumerated in his Enquiry all the possible relations which permit the binding together of the various phenomena. The analogy between the categories of relation and the triad of primary concepts in Newtonian physics (mass, force, and reaction) did not fail to attract Kant's attention, more especially since the coincidence between logic and general physics depends on the solution of the problen1 of the metaphysical deduction.

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Finally, Leibniz had defended the usefulness of a search for categories against the criticism of this procedure made by Locke. All these considerations prompted Kant to carryon with the plan he had made in 1772. However, the problem was greater and the drean1 was bolder than Kant had thought. The documentary nlaterial which survives consists of an unorganised mass of Reflexionen which, to make matters worse, is absolutely undatable. The Duisburg'sche Nachlass, which llelped us to reCOllstruct the original outline of the transcendental deduction, ought to have shown traces of the metaphysical deduction if Kant had already elaborated it. But apart from a reference to relational concepts nothing seems to have been done there on this subject. We are therefore forced in spite of ourselves to have recourse to th.e Reflexionen, taking very good care not to introduce any chronological order. Adickes divides the notes which relate to our problem into three groups. The first group brings the pure concepts close to the abstract concepts of the intellectual laws, an expression identical with that of the Dissertatio. These laws consist of the functions of comparison, connection, and separation of representations. This is doubtless the first attempt which Kant made. The last attempt is naturally founded on the Leitfaden or the --critical principle which COllsists in the absolute parallelism of judgments and categories. Between these two extremes are to be found innumerable fragments which operate, with some variations of secondary importance, with the triad, thesis, antithesis, analysis. Although an acceptance of Adickes's chronology involves the belief that Kant made both successive and simultaneous attempts to solve his problen1, there is undoubtedly much that is sound in Adickes's results. All the information which our sources offer show that Kant's efforts were concentrated around 1772 on the problem of categories, but that when after 1775 the fornls of judgment occupied a dominating position, all the work had to be done again. The historical evolution of the categorial schema may therefore be presented roughly as follows: having had his attention drawn by Leibniz to the usefulness of a doctrine of categories as an introduction to the transcendental deduction, Kant sought

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some principle of organisation among them. In this he was moved not only by his characteristic love of order and system but also by the desire for that necessity which a totality yields when it is guaranteed by a principle. Then Kant tried successively and often even simultaneously several heuristic principles and this explains the multiplicity and the discordance of tIle abortive attempts in the course of the years 1772-6. For the unsuccessful abandoned attempts are not followed beyond 1775, the year when Kant noted the parallelism between certain categories and certainjudgments (the table of relation) without making this parallelism into an absolute principle. But, a short time afterwards, he concluded that the principle which he had sought for so long was no other than the functional identity between logic and science so that the logic of things became at one stroke a transcendental logic. He can be said to have succeeded in his endeavour to set up two parallel tables, since towards 1778 only one case did not seem to have been resolved. The correctness of the preceding sketch is confirn1ed in an absolute fashion by an examination of the Leitfaden or guiding principle of the categories. The necessity of such a principle had never been expressed by Kant before 1772, but from that time it never left his mind. III 1772 Kant hoped to find the abstract concepts of the laws of reason by a few intellectual principles. We do not know what these principles were but we can easily understand why this position was rapidly abandoned as untenable. The derivation of the concepts from the formal laws of reason is without doubt the sufficient criterion of their pure character and of their a priori nature, but no derivation was valid until the problem of their totality, the real problem of the metaphysical deduction, had been solved. On the basis of many Reflexionen we can guess what were the laws which Kant hoped to find at this moment. They are not laws in the true sense of the word, but functions, and in the fragments of the Nachlass these functions are invariably expressed by the verbs vergleichen, verbinden, trennen. If this is the case, it is clear that the functions in question must be inadequate for the task. They really correspond to the other problem which the Critique calls reflection and the concepts of reflection

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are not constitutive of objects but represent the states of mind by which we prepare ourselves to find the subjective conditions in which we can acquire concepts. Instead of a table of categories the result of our first principle would have led to the transcendental topic. It is at this point that Kant turned to another principle. Among the functions cited above was Verbindung, which seemed to be involved in the very constitution of the object. The progress made in the transcendental deduction could even guarantee that liaison (let us not yet speak of synthesis) is the transcendental function par excellence. This function of liaison is the function which resolves the problem of objectivity, that is, which constitutes and brings about the close connection between sensibility and understanding. The categories or pure concepts then represent all the diverse ways in which the combination of the two faculties operate when integrated in our k110wledge of an object. The theme of co-ordination-subordination plays a dominating role in the fragments which can be correlated with this stage, a stage which represents two remarkable advances over the earlier stage: first, Kant has got possession of the indisputable transcendental function, and secondly, the schema which derives from it is more systematic than the earlier scheme which always lacked order. Since he abandoned it, we must c011clude that Kant had seen the insufficiency of his second principle. Once more the Leitfaden did not answer its purpose because ifit expresses the general principle of the transce11dental deduction it cannot be the systen1atising principle of the pure concepts. His repeated failure led Kant to conclude that every effort would be in vain as long as he did not possess a principle from which a whole analytic of reason would flow of itself. He had then to seek in our logical constitution for a principle of which the different mon1ents, determinable a priori, would correspond to the synthetic functions, essential functions revealed by the transcendental deductio11. We do not know what path Kant followed but we do know where he arrived: the identification of the pure concept with the function of judgment. By means of an hypothesis we can perhaps make up for

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our lack of knowledge here. The discovery of the definitive Leitfaden could have followed two different paths. Kant could have borrowed a method as direct as it is systematic. The transcendental deduction revealed the ubiquity of synthesis which is what corresponds to intellectual spontaneity. It is not impossible that Kant reminded himself how in 1762-3 he had already related the whole intellectual function to that of judgment, and he might have concluded that the forms of judgment are at the same time synthetic functions of the constitution of the concepts of an object. Some Reflexionen and the definitive metaphysical deduction seem to be following this path. There is however a second path, this time indirect, which could have been followed by Kant and the Duisburg'sche Nachlass leads us naturally to it. Without making a heuristic principle of it, Kant had noticed the parallelism between the judgments and the categories of relation. It may be assumed then that only chance led him to note the striking analogy between certain judgments and certain synthetic functions already recognised. If he broadened the field of his investigations along these lines and found them successful, he might have erected into a principle what had originally been merely an empirical fact. The Nachlass itselfwould occupy in this case a posito!n exactly interlnediary between the empirical fact and the extension of this fact into a principle. My own preference is undoubtedly for the second path: less systematic than the other, it fits more naturally into the historical process of the elaboration of the Critical philosophy. However that may be, it was a little after 1775 that the true Leitfaden was found and the metaphysical deduction given its definitive form. In the Vorlesungen fiber Metaphysik, which are so close to the Duisburg'sche Nachlass, the die is cast. Our final conclusion then is that the discovery which, according to the Critique, was to open the way to the organisation of the Critical philosophy was a very late contribution. There is one last problem to be dealt with: what is the source of the table of judgments with which Kant coordinated the table of categories? Kant himself gives a very vague reply to this in the Critique when he says, ' In this connection tl1ere was already work done by logicians.'

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As a deduction this reference is a little inadequate, indeed too inadequate to be satisfactory. This straightforward appeal to an already established tradition, more or less correct, resembles an avowal of inability rather than a deduction. As it is posterior to the discovery of the Leitfaden, Kant could not have thougIlt of this last table before 1775. There is therefore no chronological problem. It is a different matter with tIle question: to which logicians did Kant turn to determine the tradition of which he speaks? Opinions differ hopelessly about this and almost all the treatises on logic which appeared ill the eighteenth century have been invoked. It is again Adickes, it seems to me, who takes the right view by exercising a genuine eclecticism. If we compare the table of judgments found in all the manuals (and these are reproduced in my book on the deduction) we see that Kant did not pose as a revolutionary in this field. He could well have had the impression of resting, not on the individual work of some one author but on a collective work definitive in its essentials. Only the modal judgments are taken from a particular work, the Organon by Lambert. It is difficult to determine the manual which was at the basis of the Kantian systematisation because Kant seems to have condensed in one plan all the current classifications of judgments. He no doubt took the liberty of arranging his paradigm of judgments by elements of different origin according as the correspondence with the paradigm of categories seemed to dictate. To cut a long story short, we conclude that while the metaphysical deduction vvas part of Kant's original intentions, it none the less belongs to those parts of his work which demanded from him most time and care. The intention dates from before 1772: the achievement after 1775. The historical path followed in the elaboration of this Critical fragn1.ent is diametrically opposed to the logical development of the problem in the Critique. He had traced out the programme very early: to organise all the categories according to an absolutely necessary Leitfaden. In fact he seen1.S to l1.ave followed his programn1e steadily. Kant always tried to organise the categories according to a Leitfaden, although this was not always the one found in the (2,491)

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Critique. Far from it! The successive attempts to organise the pure concepts are the result of successive new Leitfaden. The evolution of the metaphysical deduction corresponds therefore to the evolution of his changing conception of a Leitfaden. It seen1S important to note in conclusion that the transcendental deduction, logically dependent in the Critique on the metaphysical deduction, is not as dependent on it in its historical elaboration. Kant worked on the two deductions at the same time, and did not await the conclusion of the one before undertaking the other.

4

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TETENS AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY cf. La Deduction I, 284-329

All the early doctrinal or biographical sources outline in 1776 a fairly clear curve of the evolution of the Critical philosophy despite some deficiencies and gaps. They reveal the Critical th.emes which Kal~t had just reached, and comparison of these with the Critique makes it easy to enumerate the themes which are still absent. Among the missing themes is the Dialectic, and no ransacking of the sources yields any trace of it. It was referred to in the lectures on metaphysics, but it may be doubted whether Kant had yet elaborated any firm doctrine. To get the necessary information about this massive criticism directed against metaphysics we must exan1.ine a number .of Lose Blatter dating from the end of the preparatory period. 1'he examination can follow a less haphazard course and can proceed in a more reliable and better-organised fashion than was possible for the Analytic. The silence of our documents can be explained in two ways. The form in which th.e criticism of metaphysics is presented in 1781 depends on the distinction between reason and understanding. A more likely explanation of the silence, however, is that the

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Dialectic scarcely offered any special difficulties to Kant. He had discussed the problems of God and the soul since the beginning of his career and these problems could easily be integrated into the growing Critical philosophy. The antinomies themselves are to be found at the very heart of this criticism. It may well be that Kant's silence is to be interpreted as a sign of acquiescence. Quite apart from the Dialectic, however, a simple examination of the Critique shows that certain articulations of the theory of experience are still not represented in the sources. For example, the part played by imagination in the constitution of objective knowledge, the psychological deduction with its three theses, and the distinction between reason and understanding. It may be said in general that these then1es came to Kant directly from contemporary psychology. Chronological examination forces us to group these tl1emes around the years 1779-80 so that the period of preparation for the Critical philosophy can be clearly divided into two branches: a first branch, with the analysis of which we have finished, in which Kant debates the problem of objectivity with the aid of a Critical conception of the object and of the pure concepts of understanding: a second branch, in which he attacks the same problem in closer relationsh.ip with. the psychology of his day. The first part ends with. the Duisburg'sche Jlachlass; the second appears suddenly in a number of fragments dating from 1780 which certainly contain the rest of Kant's preparatory meditations. The results of the two periods are to be seen in the very structure of the deduction of 178 I where they appear in uneasy juxtaposition. Kant made it his duty in rewriting his work in 1787 to prune away the traces of the second. The first factor which is absent from the sources is imagination. The solution of the problen1 of objectivity was found in 1775 by using simply two elements: the sensible given and the concepts or synthetic rules. Kant complicates the solution, so simple in its dualistic structure, • by introducing imagination as an intermediary and mediating factor. It is the third element between the two original elements. It is capable of adopting this role because its 83


nature is itself uncertain: Kant brings it into relation sometimes with sensibility, sometimes with understanding, and the schematism erects this confusion into a principle by making imagination participate both in sensibility and in understanding. Because of its confused nature the function delegated to it is not everywhere the same and Kant is forced to mark the differentiation between the functions by designating them by corresponding names: it is in this way that the theory of imagination is singularly complicated by . the distinction between empirical and transcendental imagination, between reproductive and productive imagination. The same confusion is to be traced in the result to which these functions give rise. At one time they produce either the analytic or the synthetic unit; at another time it is Gestalten which are produced to which Kant expressly denies the character of unity. All this is to be found with remarkable fidelity in fragment BI2 of 1780, which Kant must have had before him when he was writing the corresponding part of the deduction which operates by preference with the factor of inlagination. The reader knows, in the second place, that Kant placed alongside the solution of the problem of objectivity a deduction which is commonly called psychological, characterised by its arrangement in three synthetic functions. These are known as the synthesis of apprehension, of reproduction, and of recognition. This deduction occupies first place in the text of 178 I where it clearly serves to introduce the objective deduction. The silence of our sources on this subject up to 1775, and the fragment E67, which must be dated as of the same period as BI2, show that this deduction is part of the later additions which the text suffered under the influence of contemporary psychology. The fragment E67 is not as complete as that which treats of the imagination: it includes the beginning of the paragraph devoted to apprehension and a brief account of the three syntheses in question. It has been alleged that Kant attached very little importance to this part because he condemned it in 1787 with the second edition of the Critique and the reorganisation of the deduction. The preface to the Critique states the situation exactly: it grants to this introduction less demonstrative force than to 84

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the objective deduction, but it insists, in spite of that, on the importance which it can clain1. Like imagination, this deduction in three syntheses has its roots deep in contenlporary psychology and it must have been conceived betweel1 1778 and 1780. There is finally the clear distinction between reason and understanding which constitutes the last operative factor at the end of our preparatory period. In the middle of the notes corresponding to the Dialectic, there is a fragnlent C8 dated March 1780, where this distinction is unequivocally brought out. As in the Critique, reason and understanding do not differ organically. They represent the same function but it is applied to different matter. Understanding is this function applied to the matter of empirical sensibility, while reason exercises its function on a matter beyond the limits of sensibility which is represented by concepts. Kant does not fail to point out that the absence of the sensible provokes the many-sided sop:histical use which the Dialectic does its best to expose. Imagination, the psychological deduction, the distinction between understanding and reason are all elelnents which Kant owes to the psychology.of his day. Without being too reckless I believe that an attempt can be made to determine still more precisely the nature of this influence. I have already said above that it must be sought in the Philosophische Versuche of Tetens. In my work on the deduction I devoted fifteen pages to a resume of the ideas of this logician and psychologist who published his psychological summa in 1776-7. Even in this brief resume may be seen all that Kant was able to glean usefully for his own transcendentalism. If we glance through the Versuche of Tetens with our attention fixed on the three factors which Kant had not even suspected before 1776, we reach the same conclusion every tin1e, a fact which gives the general tenor of our thesis a high degree of probability if not of certainty. There can hardly be any doubt that Kant borrowed from him the factor of imagination. It is divided, in Tetells as in Kant, into a reproductive and a productive function which he calls Diclztkrajt. The reproductive function is naturally examined-and this is Tetens's usual method-in its nature 85


and in its psychological exercise, and it is discussed without any allusion to any kind of synthetic power, a fact which marks it off from Kant's manner of treating it. Kant moreover was quite right in pointing out that he was the first to have noticed the role which imagination plays in perception itself. The object of Dichtkraft or productive imagination is the image which has no perceptual correlate and is in consequence a free creation. Tetens relates it to understanding, even although he has no idea of the specifically Kantian synthetic function attributed to productive imagination, which consists in an operation on the a priori spatia-temporal intuitions. The points of contact with the deduction in three syntheses are not quite so numerous but very significant in their material content. In Tetens's work there are three faculties: intuition, imagination, and concept, which he often replaces by their respective functions: apprehension, reproduction, and Auskennung. The latter, like the Kantian term Rekognition, finds itself in the relation of a Germanic term to a foreign. Therefore the correspondence is pushed evel1 to the terminology. The analogies are multiplied when the detail of the discussion devoted to each of these faculties and functions is studied separately. The synthesis of apprehension is characterised in Kant by the phenomenalism of the given and above all by the peculiar and quite personal thesis that perception coincides with the indivisible unity of time. We may note that the phenomenalism is the same as in Tetens and that, to our great astonishment, the second thesis is not at all peculiar to Kant, but is clearly expressed in the Versuche of Tetens. While it is true that Kant describes reproduction as the uninterrupted recall of past perceptions on the basis of association, and that he conceives this possibility by means of a constant Vbergang of mind from one perception to another, it must be admitted that Tetens anticipates Kant on all these points. It is only with regard to Auskennung or recognition that our two authors take different paths. Kant locates the nature of Rekognition in tl1e recognition of the identity of what is reproduced with what is apprehended, while for Tetens it gives the clear view of the object in all its distinctness. The result of this last

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functio11 is, as for Kant, the concept, and when he explains the constitution of the concept he guides reasoning towards the path of apperception whicl1 is the determination of the unity of the self in all the acts which it has posited. Here we recognise one of the great Kantian ideas which serve as a foundation not only for the psychological deduction, but even for his whole theory of objectivity. It can hardly be doubted that Kant profited greatly from his study of the psychological essays of his predecessor in this field. The story is much the same with regard to the distinction between reason and understanding. Tetens makes no attempt to hide the pleasure he takes in discussing reason, but he exhibits a rather cavalier scepticism on this subject. In the first chapter dealing with it he opposes sensible knowledge to rational knowledge. In the following chapter he lays bare all the artifice that is to be found in the characters of universality and necessity which are attached to rational knowledge. Finally a third chapter is devoted to the distinc.. tion between understanding and reasoning reason. The perfect analogy between this doctrine and that of Kant will be 110ted not only in the method of formulating the questions about reason which interest him and in the general solution which. he reserves for them, but also in the dominating thesis that an identical spiritual function is at work in reason and in understanding which are distinguished one from the other by the matter with which they are called on to deal. Tetens suspects, just like !(ant, that an internal conflict menaces reason itself, a point which Kant expounds in great detail in the chapter on the antinomies. We can therefore conclude that the reading of Tetens must have made a very great impression on Kant, struggling with the same problem although from a very different gel1eral standpoint, when he noticed how the researches of Tetens corroborated the ruling thesis of his own transcendental epistemology. The impression was so great that he could not resist the pleasure of making not only his work but his readers benefit from it. He probably saw the support his abstract demonstrations would gain when they could point to the corresponding psychological account. Still under the influence of his reading, Kant attests that Tetens had said

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many profound things even although at this moment he was fully aware of the different perspectives which characterised their work. It is hardly necessary to say that the psychological doctrines of Tetens underwent important modifications during their integration into Kantian transcendentalism and that there must have been an interplay of action and reaction. But these modifications do not prevent us from concluding that Kant made more than one identifiable borrowing from Tetens after the theory of objectivity had acquired its structure and its definitive articulation. This is so striking that it does not seem possible to give an account of the constitution of the Critical philoSOpllY without explicitly referring to the contribution of Tetens. It is gratifying to be able to insist upon this because the part played by Tetens has barely been n'lentioned by commentators and yet it is clearly an indispensable addition to the intellectual biography of Kant which deserves to be stressed. It is all the more importaIlt because Kant's reading of Tetens at this time is no mere historian's hypothesis but a fact attested by Kant hin1self.

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Chapter III

The Completion of the Critical Synthesis

CORRECTIONS TO TI-IE THEORETICAL CRITIQUE cf. La Deduction II, 39 0 -4 15, 4 19-594; III, 13-4 I, 275-9 6

The approach to metaphysics had been cleared by the working out of a propaedeutic which would serve as preface to the metaphysics of nature and of morals. The important problem which, omitted from the Dissertatio, had come to his attention in 1772, had been solved by ten years of continuous effort. Kant now thought that there would be no difficulty in resuscitating his fifteen-year-old plan. He could settle to work on that eternal metaphysics which was the great dream of his career. Circumstances, however, were to decide otherwise. While it is true that from 1781 Kant turned to ethics and that in 1785 the m.etaphysics of nature was at least begun, the ten years which followed the publication of the Critique were largely devoted to reorganising the theoretical aspect of the Critical philosophy and to completing the Critical synthesis by the twofold n10ral and teleological propaedeutic. Let us see first wIlY the Critique required to be revised and what that revision amounted to. It is well known that after the publication of a11Y of his important works Kant was never pleased with what he had done. This was true of his doctoral thesis and also of l1is inaugural dissertation. It was to be the same with the Critique. However, it was never with his doctrine that Kant was displeased, but rather with the manner of exposition or the Vortrag. Kant attributed his strong feelings of dissatisfaction to his hasty writing, to his neglect of minor

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popular touches and to faults in the construction both of the deduction and of the paralogisms. And these feelings could not fail to grow more intense when it became evident to him that these genuine and clearly perceived faults were responsible for the failure of his doctrine. The term' failure' is indeed not too strong. Far from having been a success, the Critique was received with general indifference. Even although Kant himself had not counted on a quick victory it is worth noting that the result greatly exceeded even his most pessimistic expectations. The few readers who did not recoil before the indigestible treatise which he had offered them kept on complaining bitterly. His colleagues found his teaching wellnigh unintelligible, despite the discursive clarity which Kant had pursued with remarkable professional honesty, to which indeed he had sacrificed so much. Things would have been much better if they had been content with a straightforward admission of their lack of understanding. But they kept on talking and they kept on writing. They even went so far as to identify the Critical philosophy with the subjective idealism of Berkeley! As long as only formal corrections occupied his attention, Kant was convinced that he could extricate himselffrom his difficulty by publishing a simple abbreviated version aimed at the general educated public. He had thought of preparing such an abbreviated version as early as the month of May 178 I. When the essential core of his teaching itself was threatened by the superficial thinking of his critics, then to his desire for popularity there was added the urgent duty of defending his doctrine. The Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics was born in 1783 out of the combination of these two motives. It was composed after the appearance of the sensational Garve-Feder review which reminded Kant of the similar reception given to his Dissertatio by Lambert, Mendelssohn, and Sulzer. The explanatory motif in this work is very simple and has scarcely any repercussions on the strict development of Kant's thought. Indeed his teaching itself was not affected either by the attempt to restate it, this time in very short paragraphs, or by his account of the origin of the Critical problem. The change in method, however, does bring new light to bear on the problem in go

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question. The synthetic method adopted in the Critique caused Kant to arrange his demonstration in the following manner: first, analysis of the a priori elements in thought, then by means of them a reconstruction of objective knowledge, and finally a reconstruction through objective knowledge of the objective sciences of the physico-mathematical type. The analytic method of the Prolegomena follows the opposite path: Kant presupposes the existence of the objective sciences, and by analysing them deduces their a priori conditions. By this change in method the author could flatter himself that he had given a more popular turn to his difficult doctrine and one which would be more within the range of the public for which he was writing. Despite all his efforts, events 011ce again showed that in this respect Kant was mistaken. The polemical element, which is to be found combilled with the explanatory element, concerns the subjectivist interpretation of the Critique. The signal for this was given by the Carve-Feder review which claimed that Kant denied all transcendent existence. Kant's reply, in the Prolegomena, which he had hoped would both. persuade the public to read his work and also silence the prejudiced critics, had at first only a very partial success. The explanatory text did not appear to be better understood than the original, but remained just as obscure for the ordinary reader, a judgment which is still valid today despite all that Schopenhauer has said. However, the book did succeed in creating a current of interest in th.e Critical philosophy, which explai11s why from 1785 the Critical philosophy gradually becan1e the quaestio disputata throughout Cern1any. Kant then gathered around himself a certain number ofsympathisers. In general these were men of little note whose mediocrity was to some extent balanced by their indefatigable zeal and vigorous activity. In a comparatively short time they were able to bring about Kant's triumph in spite of all opposition. His fellow-countryman Scl1ultze brought hinl to the atte11tion of the public by his famous Erliiuterungen; Schutz warn1ly and devotedly embraced his cause in his popular review; Biester gained for him the sympathies of the capital in his liberal periodical; and Reinhold won over the general public and 91


the University with his skilful panegyric. His opponents, however, were still much more powerful both in nun'1ber and in quality. They controlled the institutions of higher education and they had the ear of the cultivated public. Certain of them, like the eclectic Feder and the Wolffian Eberhard, proved intransigent from the beginning, but there were others who were more hesitant. Mendelssohn, and especially Professor Ulrich at lena, did not feel themselves hostile to Kant in principle but were not prepared to go so far as to embrace the whole of a doctrine which was the subject of such bitter controversy. Kant, finding himself at the centre of these currents opinion, based his attitude on that of Ulrich who, visibly shaken by the Critical philosophy, showed considerable sympathy towards it. Certain main themes of a similar general tendency appeared in the infinite variety of different criticisms put forward. The Wolffians, dogmatic in general like their master, interpreted the limitation of our knowledge to the world of phenomena as a -mere imitation of the scepticism ofHume. The legend of the ' all-destroying Kant' and of the' Prussian Hume' became magic words which echoed round the four corners of Germany. More annoying to Kant was the tendency to confuse the Critical philosophy with subjective idealism. He refused point-blank to figure as the satellite of Berkeley in the philosophical world. Eclectics and Wolffians both interpreted the thesis of limitation, which had been simply a matter of prudence to its author, as the pure and simple negation of any transcendent world. Kant protested in vain that he had in mind only our knowledge of phenomena, but was unable to persuade his critics to admit the distinction between these two very different points of view. More precise attacks against certain vital theses in the Critical philosophy were beginning to develop. Ulrich, commenting on the general solution to the Critical problem in connection with causality, had just accused it of being a carefully disguised vicious circle whose sophistic character would disappear only by breaking the frame of the limitation itself. His commentary had barely appeared when an anonymous but friendly writer in Schutz's review attributed

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Ulrich's errors to the unintelligibility of the deduction, and pleaded extenuating circumstances for Ulrich on the basis of the invincible obscurity surrounding this central doctrine which, he clain1ed, ought to have been the most clearly expounded. This pressure fronl without, added to his own dissatisfaction with this part of his work, made Kant attribute to the deduction full responsibility for all the misunderstandings to which his doctrine was exposed. In the long rlln it was the deduction which caused his contemporaries to be distrustful of the thesis oflimitation, and it was the deduction also which led naturally to the subjective-idealist interpretation of the Critical philosophy. The explanatory tendency and the defensive tendency, which between 1782 and 1787 were reinforced from day to day by various developments, combined in Kant's mind to bring about some almost unconscious changes which were central to his teaching. First of all, a new formulation of the positio quaestionis was inevitable. In 178 I this centred around the problem of the objectivity of our a priori knowledge, a problem which had arisen in connection with the conformity of the a priori concept to the object of experience. This had been solved ·by the demonstration that the pure concept is objectively valid because it is the condition of experience and consequently also the condition of the objects of experience. Now, in the Prolegomena the problem is altered so that the true nervus probandi is the universal validity of the judgment of experience. It was in 1785, in a note to be found in the Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschajt, that Kant suddenly and completely altered the situation and, by a sharp return to th~ standpoint, of the Triiume, substituted for the problem of objectivity that of the limitation of pure reason to phenomena as the real Critical demonstrandum. An element of the solution in 1781, the limitation became the problem to be solved. In Kant's reorganisation of the~ deduction in 1787, as we shall see, the limitation is treated both as the problem to be solved and as the condition of its solution. It is a condition in Sections 16-21 of the deduction; it is a problem in Sections 22-6. This shows that Kant had reached this positio quaestionis only by stages and that it is the end of a fairly long evolution. It is 93

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consequently a matter of importance to consider the stages in some detail. In 1781 Kant solved the enigma of the objectivity of the pure concepts by showing that they are the conditions of the objects of experience and that it is this which constitutes their objectivity. They are therefore not only the ratio cognoscendi of phenomena but at the same time their ratio fiendi or structural principle. This meant that synthesis was in essence the constructive act around which the wIlole procedure of the deduction rotated. The latter therefore represented a schematic construction of the intuitive world at the moment of experience through the superposition of synthetic operations by the subject upon the diversity of the indeterminate given. Now, the pure concepts are precisely these functions of synthetic unity applied to sensible matter and in consequence the conditions of the intuitive world even· when considered as object of experience. This simple and concise solution forms an integral part of the Kantian conception of experience. To make it acceptable it is certainly essential to distinguish between sensible perception and experience. Experience is formal, and is to be found in the necessary system of perceptions organised by the a priori laws of reason or by the categories which the subject elaborates in a mass of perceptions which, possessing no structure of their own, await their form, their structure, and their determination as representations from the subject. In this way it is the mind which constructs experience .as a necessary and objective process. This shows that perceptions must be submitted to the categories in the synthetic act of tIle subject. This submission can be understood either as a synthetic construction or as a process of logical subsumption. In 1781 Kant preferred the latter procedure: the submission required for the constitution of objective knowledge in most cases takes the form of the subsumption of a particular diversity of perceptions under the universal forms of apperception. Everything considered, such a procedure explains nothing because, if it is really to have any force, it is essential to explain how the subsumptive act takes place, this great secret of the construction of the intuitive

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world or of the object of experience. However that may be, the general result is fairly clear. If the subsumption of matter under the pure concept brings the object of experience into being, matter has neither form nor determinate structure in itself, but owes both the one and the other to the synthetic activity of the subject. In itself matter cannot be represented and therefore does not occur as a factor in the analysis of knowledge in its autonomy and in its ontological independence. Matter can only be represented in the phenomenon, that is, in the structure which emanates from the synthetic act effected by the knowing subject. It is in synthesis therefore that the whole mystery of the mechanism of objectification is to be found. Now, this syn- .. thesis is also the direct cause of the erroneous interpretation of those readers who saw in the Critique an exposition of subjective idealism. Their error was indeed excusable. To 110ld that the subjective is the condition of the objective is to maintain a thesis of a highly paradoxical nature. To assert that synthesis determines the phenomenon surely makes the latter a construction of the knowing subject which has then no relation with the transcendent. The subjectivity of phenomena could mean that the intuitive world has cllanged into a tissue of appearances, and when this thesis is extended to the knowledge of the sel~ this knowledge in its turn becomes deceptive and illusory. Synthesis, the psychological element which constitutes the psychologico-transcendental process of knowledge, seems to result in making the whole system of human knowledge both subjective and relative, since Kant presents it as tIle activity of a psychological subject whose purely logicotranscendental nature has not yet been stressed. Obviously it could only be to Kant's advantage to protect himself fronl such a misconception of his teaching. To; achieve this he made two changes: to avoid having recourse to synthesis he raised judgment to the rank of a fundamental objectifying operation, and then decided to bring into focus the real significance of the deduction. It is not surprising that the Prolegomena, coming immediately after the Critique, should still nlerely hint at these self-corrections, but the 95


Anfangsgriinde of 1785 shows that Kant had already full confidence in the new orientation which the 1787 edition of the Critique was to take. We have already pointed out that the explanatory tendency in the Prolegomena produced changes of a methodological character in the exposition of the Critical philosophy. The Dlaterial changes which owe their origin to the objection based on scepticism, as well as the explicit mention of the necessity for the thing in itself, are faithfully repeated in 1787, and will be discussed later. However, the treatment of the Critical problem in the second edition presents a very special aspect since synthesis has been forced to abandon the role of objectifying principle. Faithful to the analytic method, Kant presupposes, not as an hypothesis but as incontestable fact, the validity of general physics and its object, material nature, that is, the Inbegriff of the objects of experience. This material nature has as condition of its possibility complete submission to formal nature, that is, to the Inbegriff of the a priori laws of experience. For an active as \vell as a substantive sense has returned to the term 'experience'. At first this word undoubtedly denoted not only the totality of the objects of experience but also Erfalzren itself as spiritual act, often called by Kant 'possible experience'. In these circumstances there is a profound difference between perception and experience in the strict sense. Perception is a sensible impression, contingent, particular, and concrete; it represents a simple state of n10mentary consciousness, the validity of which is purely subjective, that is, limited to the subject of the perception itself. Henceforward ·experience is a reality of quite a different nature. It has perceptions as matter. Therefore both conceptions have the same material powers but different formal structure. Experience is necessary and universal. It has its own modality. Hence the connection which it establishes is not limited, in its legitimacy and in its validity, to the subjective consciousness of the individual subject. It establishes a connection with consciousness in general. This corresponds to the consciousness which in 178 I Kant had called transcendental apperception, before his alarm at the charge of idealism caused him to distrust the term. Experience

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consequently presupposes the sensible percept outside the individual and subjective frame of the subject of perception, and this gives to it its ch,aracter of objectivity and its own validity. Perception and experience are both expressed on the plane of discursive thought in the form of judgment. The judgment of perception naturally bears all the characteristics of perception, and the judgment of experience has the universality and necessity appropriate to experience. Only the validity of the latter judgment is questioned in the Critical framework and demands a deduction. The deduction could not be developed from its original starting-point since it was the psychological flavour of the earlier deduction which had prevented readers from correctly understanding the Critical philosophy. Something else must therefore be adopted to raise the judgment of perception to the judgment of experience. This is achieved by again following the method ofsubsumption, but this time it is concrete perceptions which are subsumed under the necessary laws of thought. In this way they become integrated in the necessary order which constitutes thought, and thus acquire universal validity, since thought in general liberates them from the particular concretions of the individual subject and converts them into thoughts instead of mere states of consciousness. The Prolegomena is very cautious about the process of subsumption itself. That is quite understandable because in detailing this process Kant would inevitably have been brought back to the jungle of synthetic functions of the early days. The outcome is marked by a praiseworthy attempt at clarity and shows consummate dialectical skill. From the ideological point of view, however, the position of this exegetical-polemical work could only be provisional and the historical situation makes that easy to prove. Kant had promised himself great things from his popular exposition. Disappointment awaited him, for his efforts were in vain. He fell back on publications which were overdue. He wrote articles on the philosophy of history which are of Iittle importance for our subj ect, and he pursued his project of establishing a twofold luetaphysics of morals and of Ilature. However, deep within himself th.e fate of the tlleo(2,491)

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retical Critique affected him profoundly. Constantly on the look-out for any signs of discussion of his work, he held himself ready to reply to contradiction and rejoiced in the slightest success. A whole series of mental adjustments of which we know only the result took place in silence. The interest shown by his colleague Ulrich, gifted with quick critical sense and obviously well disposed towards him, moved him to action and probably made him recollect earlier difficulties which were already growing blurred in his memory. The fact that Ulrich singled out the problem of the deduction, which had been considered unintelligible, makes this all the n10re likely. Little by little the desire to present the deduction in a simplified form took possession of him. In the course of carrying out this purpose, his teaching, consciously or unconsciously, inevitably suffered a series of changes. The real advance in this doctrine since the first edition consists in the elevation of judgment to the rank of fundamental objectifying operation. The Prolegomena had posed the problem of objectivity in such a manner as to avoid making synthesis this operation, by making the centre of the Critical problem the universalisation of our perceptions in the judgment of experience. It was in 1785, in a footnote added at the last minute to the Anfangsgrunde, that Kant succeeded in bringing the function of judgment right into the foreground of the deduction. How was this substitution effected? It had been alleged that the Critical system depends upon the deduction. The defects in its actual structure, although frankly admitted by Kant, make it unnecessarily difficult and liable to rejection by the reader. The deduction is therefore the source of a serious threat to the Critical philosophy, especially as the Critical problem is explicitly formulated as the problem of objectivity. Kant's first move to meet this situation was to deflect attention from objectivity as such: the Critical problem no longer coincides with the question of objectivity, but becomes the problem of the limitation of reason to phenomena, a problem which had always haunted Kant's mind since the crisis of the Triiume. What then can be invoked in order to set this limitation on unshakable foundations? Apparently nothing

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but the recognition that space and time are a priori forms of intuition and that the categories are functions of judgment applied to this intuition. It immediately follows that all representations are knowledge of phenomena and that the categories have no other function but to determine a sensible content. The very text of the note indicates why Kant decided on such a change offront. The motive for it was the imperfect state of the deduction. In 178 I he had indeed takell great pains to underline the inlportance of the deduction in which the whole question of Critical objectivity is at stake. But now, by placing the limitation thesis in the foreground, he shows himself ready to modify his teaching and to diminish the importance of the deduction. The problem of tIle limitation really involves two sub-problenls, which he refers to as the problem that and the problem how. In the problem that, the plan was to show that the categories can have no objective use except when limited to phenomena. The problem how concerns the manner or the process according to which the categories make possible the object of experience. In 178 I the whole deduction gave a detailed account of this process. If the Critical philosophy is to be given a solid foundation, this is both necessary and sufficient. To be able to give an account of the second problem would undoubtedly be most desirable, but it is not indispensable to the validation of the Critical philosophy. Kant admits that he would like to be able to solve the second problem, although he does not see how this would be possible. The problem that is easily solved by showing the relations between the categories and the general form of sensible receptivity, nanlely, time. Although the problem how was more complex, Kant had just discovered an equally simple way of solving it through the definition of judgment itself. He does not expatiate at large on this discovery, a general master-key in the discussion of objectivity, but simply substitutes this brief suggestion for the original deduction. Th.is argument is too indeterminate to be clear, and we must await the recasting of the deduction in 1787 before attempting to deal with it. Kant's chief concern at this period, however, is not the deduction. On the contrary, he developed the critique of

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practical reason which we shall discuss in the next section. In 1786 the first edition of the theoretical Critique was rapidly becoming exhausted. The publisher wanted a new edition. This provided an excellent occasion for Kant to effect the changes which he himself wislled to make and also those wllich his readers were pressing on him. The second edition appeared in the course of the year 1787. We are interested only in the additions made to the Critical doctrine. These include the following points:

(I) To meet the charge of scepticism, Kant wrote a new Preface intended to explain the positive value of the Critical philosophy. (2) Against the criticism of idealism he put forward the doctrine of phenomenalism, and protested against any confusion of an appearance with the ph.enomenon. (3) He inserted in the Analytic of Principles a direct refutation of idealism, the origin of which., it seems to me, is sufficiently clear. (4) He introduced in the body of his teaching a complete doctrine of the ego dealing with its existence, with inner sense, and with apperception. (5) Finally, he rewrote the chapter on the deduction. Let us glance briefly at the general tenor of these changes. The Critique was bound to offend th.e empirical spirit of the eclectics and the dogmatism of the Wolffians. As it preached the unknowability of the transcendent world and limited objective knowledge to phenomena, its opponents were scandalised and vigorously opposed the new Pyrrhonism, which seemed even more dangerous as it was presented under the guise of a theory of science. In 1781 Kant had stressed his view that the value of the Critical philosophy was negative, that is, that it lay in the claim that reason cannot transcend experience. Now in 1787, while still maintaining this negative value in the new Preface, Kant added a twofold positive value: namely, that the Critical philosophy is the absolute condition of the metaphysics of morals and the condition of the metaphysics of nature. Let us not forget that by this time the moral Grundlegung 100

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had found its way to the public and that the practical Critique was ready to appear, so that Kant had firm views about the possibility of the metaphysics of morals. In the thesis of the dogmatists the rational a priori is considered to be some kind of representation of the transcendent. The Critical thesis on the other hand rests on the distinction between thinking and knowing. In itself thought is freed frOlll the limiting conditions imposed by experience. Knowledge however must conform to experience. Hence, if the mind does not set itself to know an object, the path of thought is free. Ethics aims not at scientific knowledge, but at the a priori regulation of morality. Hence the condemnation of moral knowledge amounts to saving moral thinking. With regard to the metaphysics of nature, Kant insists on the propaedeutic character of the Critical synthesis. The latter studies the organic conditions of a scientific structure of theoretical metaphysics, the supreme condition of which is the limitation of knowledge to phenomena. Hence, by condemning transcendent and dogmatic metaphysics, the Critical philosophy saves the truly scientific part of metaphysics. The great· Critical lesson seems to be embodied in the phenomenalist empiricism. While in 1781 the transcendent figured most ofte11 as a fundamental unexpressed postulate, the recasting of his teaching is distinguished by direct and frequent reminders of the necessity for the thing in itself as the condition of the intelligibility of phenomena. Furthermore, in view of the claim in the Garve-Feder review, in which Erscheinung is interpreted as Schein, that henceforward knowledge must keep to the pure appearances of things, Kant added a whole section to the Critique in order to eliminate any such lamentable confusion. In a vigorous ad hominem argument he accuses his opponent of committing this same error in holding that space and time are both conditions of things in themselves when considered as forms and also that they are things in themselves when considered as objective realities. He explains again how the Critical philosophy saves the necessity of experimental knowledge. A similar thesis dominates the structure of the reorganised deduction, as we shall see presently. 101


Since phenomenalism was exposed to the danger of being interpreted as a kind of disguised scepticism, the a priori formalism was bound to raise a general cry of indignation from the dogmatic realists who read it as subjective idealism, and we know that Kant's teaching was commonly interpreted in this way. To counteract this unjustified assimilation of his teaching to that of a Berkeley, Kant had to take certain precautions which are evident in the new edition. In the Analytic of Principles he added both an explicit Refutation of Idealism and a General Remark with the same purpose. Suppressing some parts and adding others, he also recast the particularly dangerous passage dealing with noumena and phenomena. In this cOl1nection the anti-idealist reply takes in general two forrns: ( I) the demonstration of the existence of the transcendent, and (2) the delimitation of the use of the categories. The refutation of idealism, which demonstrates the necessity of a transcendent existent, is not an absolutely new section, bllt rather a section which has been moved to a new place. The formal idealism professed by Kant is not aimed at all at the transcendent. The debate must therefore centre around material idealism, within which two separate types must be distinguished: the dogmatic type of Berkeley which denies the existence of the 'in itself' since the very idea of it is false, and the Cartesian or problematic form which simply doubts the existence of an external 'in itself'. The Critical theory of sensibility is itself a sufficient refutation of dogmatic idealism. The Cartesian form Kant finds plausible and worthy of careful treatment. The lines of his argument are well known: he shows that the existence of the self, tll0Ught by Descartes to be privileged, presupposes the existence of an external transcendent. Knowledge of our existence is possible on the basis of a permanent object of perception distinct from the self. The second form of the Kantian reply consists in limiting the employment of the categories to phenomena, an employment which is determined by the distinction between knowing and thinking. The doctrines of sensibility and of understanding, Kant says, converge to a single point: the necessary limitation of the a priori to 102

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experience in the theoretical use of reason. The transcendent use extends the employment of pure concepts to things in themselves and does not therefore correspond to the criteria of objectivity. Any incursion of reason into the domain of the transcendent by n1.eans of the categories is therefore to be condemned, if this is interpreted as a means of knowing and of constructing a science of the transcendent. The science of the a priori cannot be conceived as an ontology: it is a pure analytic of reason, that is, a science which makes a study of understanding in its formal aspects. The united effect of these predominantly restrictive theses was to lead to the denial of the knowability of the selfin itself, a major scandal in the eyes of the Cartesian Wolffians and the enlightened eclectics. All Kant's opponents, Garve, Feder, Ulrich, Mendelssohn, etc., protested against this devaluation of the self which was inevitable within the framework of the Critical philosophy. In 1787 Kant reconstructed the doctrine of the self by first elaborating the doctrine of inner sense and then by restating his teaching about the self in itself. The Critical philosophy in its first form hardly mentioned inner sense because the attempt to incorporate contemporary psychology gave its functions to imagination, but in 1787 the appeal to inner sense was to bring a very serious problem in its train. A phenomenon presupposes a subject of affection and an affecting matter. How can a subject affect itself? Clearly Kant wished to achieve a complete parallel between outer and inner sense despite the important difference between them. He wanted to do so, because the most important content of inner sense is represented by the knowledge of external perceptions, and because external experience has priority over inner experience. Despite everything, it remains true that for inner sense the matter is not foreign to the subject and that the subject is therefore affected by itself. How is auto-affection to be explained? By the distinction not of two subjects but of two moments in the same subject. There is first an active moment: the subject carries out certain activities in positing its representations; there is also a passive moment: the subject is capable of apprehending the material diversity of its acts, which are consequently data in relation to this apprehension. Since 1°3


this apprehension is sensible, the given matter is not matter in itself but phenomenal matter. Hence the deduction submits the knowledge ofthe selfto the normal and customary conditions of objectivity. Moreover, in the 1781 version oftlle Paralogisms of Pure Reason Kant had launched a powerful offensive against rational psychology, refuting one after the other the doctrines of the substantiality, simplicity, and identity of the soul. In 1787 he was less prolix but proved in a single unitary passage that the metaphysics of the soul is a tissue of purely analytic judgments from which no objective knowledge of the self can be deduced. Knowing in fact consists in the determination of intuition by the logical functions of thought. Now, the unity of consciousness, the final analytic reference of representation, is a pure thought with no corresponding intuition. Its analysis therefore furnishes no knowledge of the self as object. The' I think' of apperception does not guarantee the existence of the object-self. It is an intellectual representation given on the occasion of an empirical process, that is, it is only present if all empirical representation furnishes a preliminary matter. The' I think' depends therefore on the exercise of the thinking activity, and guarantees only the existence of the thought and not the existence of the self in itself. The latter must be admitted as the correlative of internal phenomena, but that amounts to a declaration of its unknowability. The doctrine of the self in the two forms just cited may therefore be said to confirm the general thesis of Critical phenomenalism. Thus we come to the most important and decisive change brought about by the recasting of the Critique, the reorganisation of the deduction in which culminate the feelings and resentments which Kant converted into arguments in his successive versions of the Critical problem between I 78 I and 17 8 7. I need make no further reference to the elimination of the subjective part of the deduction which brought about the disappearance of synthesis as the centre of gravity of , the argument. But the changes stimulated by his lack of confidence in synthesis are still more profound. Synthesis, displaced from the centre, had to be replaced, and this was

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achieved by the notion of unity. Synthesis plays the part of a provisional operation belonging to ilnagination, but the true dominating function of understanding is unification. The categories no longer represent synthetic functions, but functions of synthetic unity. The definition of knowledge as the synthetic unity of a sensible diversity gives to the deduction a direction different from that of 178 I. Indeed, this unity is constituted in and by the act of judgment so that the intuitive world presents itself as inevitably drawn together in the functions ofjudicative unity. However, the converse is not true. The function of unity is not organically bound to sensible intuition: a nleta-sensible use always remains possible, although all objective and scientific validity must be denied to it. It follows that the question of validity does not coincide with the question of being. That is what the new deduction is designed to explain. In 178 I the aim of the deduction was to set up the cate- ~ gories as the conditions of experience; in 1787 tIle purpose was to demonstrate that the categories are th.e conditions of the empirical use of reason. The return towards phenomenalism in the Anfangsgriinde has borne fruit. However, there is no formal contradiction between these two objectives. They clearly rest on the same tlleses: the necessity of empirical data, the phenomenal nature of these data, tIle reciprocal determination of the given and of consciousness, objectivity limited to phenomena, the unknowability of the thing in itself, and the absolute rejection of any ontological claim on the part of the sensible and intellectual a priori. Nevertheless, the demonstration of the new thesis is no longer prepared by a psychological-transcendental exposition giving a preliminary analysis of the logical structure of thought in objective knowledge. It goes straight to its purpose with an undeniably objective trend, and it gravitates around a theory ofjudgment. Just as Kant expounded the original objective deduction by beginlling first witll apperception as the highest condition, and then by the given or the lowest condition, the same procedure is found in 1787: in Sections 16-2 I the" deduction is developed from apperception, in Section 26 from the given, while Sections 22-5 limit the objective validity of the categories to their enlpirical use as a preface 105


to Section 26, where the limitation is inserted as one of the conditions of reasoning. The categories, so reasons Kant, are necessarily connected with the object on condition that there is a corresponding intuition: intuition is therefore an indispensable function. Must this intuition be sensible? If so, being and validity coincide; if not, being and validity pose two different problems. Intellectual intuition is possible, but intuition as it appears in the organic constitution of human knowledge is subject to spatio-temporal forms. We can therefore think an object without taking into account the specific nature of the intuition, but in order to kno"" it allowance must be made for tIle fact that intuition is exclusively sensible. Hence, a deduction which determines the use of the categories for intuition in general is no longer sufficient. This use must be determined according to the human given, that is, it must be shown that the categories are the necessary conditions of sensible intuition, or, in other words, that perceptions themselves are constituted only by the categories. This is what Kant proves in Section 26. This brief account of the deduction proves that it is consistent with its predecessor of I 78 I and that Schopen-. hauer, Fischer, and company are wrong in taking exception to it on the ground that there has been contradiction and '" retraction. However, this fundamental unity in his teaching is not inconsistent with the view that Kant's thought has undergone an evolution, and that the deduction of 1 787 represents an independent stage which opens new perspectives on the Critical problem for both Kant and his readers. It was necessary first to modi.fy the classical notion ofjudgment. While in 1781 judgment was a simple unification of concepts, it was now necessary to see in it the unification of concepts which had been categorially determined. Far from finding a flagrant contradiction between these two conceptions, .Kant simply bracketed them together in the deduction. Since unity has been substituted for synthesis, it becanle necessary to make apperception absolutely preeminent as the dominating unity, as the act and the place of unification. The category replaces synthesis in this function. In the third place, it was necessary to provide a third 106

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intermediary between sensible receptivity and objective knowledge. The link was assured in 1781 by imagination in view of the fact that the unifying act was synthesis. Imagination disappeared almost completely with the subjective deduction in which it was the principal element, and was replaced in 1787 by a more logical factor, formal intuition. Space and time are indeed the a priori forms of sensible receptivity, but they are at the same time pure representations of determined spaces and times. For these latter, then, . a spatio-temporal diversity had to be first categorially determined and unified. It is formal intuition as opposed to the form of intuition. Hence Kant finds in this formal intuition a ground of agreement between sensibility and understanding. Formal intuition maintains a connection with receptivity in the sense that the a priori spatio-temporal matter is itself the form of receptivity; on th.e other h.and, it is connected with intellectual unification, since this matter has to be categorially determined in order to become actual. Here again there is no contradiction as the theory of formal intuition is limited to replacing the faculties of 1781 by their products. The obligation to protect his doctrine against false interpretations produced the phenomenalist factor which has been called empiricism. In 1781 the problem was set a11d solved within a rationalist framework: objective knowledge, experience, and nature are possible through pure a priori concepts. In 1787 the problem was set and solved in empirical terms: the pure a priori concepts are objective through their necessary correlation with the sensible factor. This return to phenomenalism is well marked in three theses: in the distinction between thinking and knowing which are similar in their formal structure but different in their material content; in the reduction of intuition in general to sensible hllman intuition, which makes objectivity depend on an intuitive given; in the application of this twofold thesis in all its rigour to the knowledge of the self. We are entitled ,to conclude from this that the deduction of 1787 represents an independent step and at the same time a new achievement on Kant's part in comparison with the results 1°7


previously reached. We believe that tIle independent nature of the new deduction can be based on the view that in 1787 Kant did not wish to react principally against the charge of idealism in general, but above all against the epithet of , subjective' which accompanied the word' idealism'. The new orientation does not, as tradition would have it, aim at a return to realism, but establishes a Critical idealism in which all traces of any affinity with psychological subjectivism have been banished. This thesis is too revolutionary to be put forward without a special attempt on my part to justify it. In 1781 realism appears to be the basic postulate. There is a transcendent in itself, but the co,nstructive character of Critical idealism rests essentially on the intellectual spontaneity which undertakes the setting up of the intuitive world, the sole object of pllysico-mathematical science. Concentrating on his discovery, Kant very carefully analyses the psychological-transcendental mechanism of this construction in the deduction. The constructive act is synthesis which in consequence is the essence of knowledge itself. The organic modes of synthesis or the categories thus represent the fundanlental articulations of the intuitive world itself. By n~eans of the doctrine of affinity, this synthetic construction brings about a first rationalisation among the given in such a way that, tIle thing in itself being presupposed, the synthetic act itself produces the general form of the knowable world. An exposition of this kind, even if correct, contains dangerous elements because of its extreme idealism. Kant could not be offended by the accusation of idealism; he knew perfectly well that his thesis was idealist. He was upset however when his thesis was mistaken for a denial of the transcendent, or rather when it was thought that he granted on the one hand a creative power to mind in the realm of the transcendent while on the other he limited ".., objective science to mere fugitive arbitrary appearances. The nature of Kant's twofold reaction is fully intelligible: he 'emph.asises empirical realism or phenomenalism, and he organises the constructivist theory in a firmer and more intransigent manner, both by the sacrifice of certain themes 108

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discussed in 1781 and by the introduction of new developments. By the suppression of the psychological aspect Kant· wanted to get still closer to the purely logical essence of all intellectual construction. This psychological element had furnished him with the notion of the transcendental object which had increased the danger of confusion with idealism of the Berkleian type. Kant suppressed, or rather concealed, this danger by getting rid of the term. The functions formerly attributed to the transcendental object are firmly passed to apperception in 1787, that is, to the final act constructive of unity. Finally, Kant did away with possible experience as an operativemediull1.. It had been the source of the subsumptive process between matter and form, between the a priori and the a posteriori, and between sensibility and understanding. What the subsumption loses in prestige, syntl1esis, or rather synthetic unity, gains. The sacrifice of these three themes is motivated in each case by a desire to avoid subjectivism by means of a 1110re assured constructive idealism. Exactly the same thing happens "\rvith respect to the alterations in the recast deduction. These are limited to the following four points: (a) the ' I think', (b) the distinction between knowing and thinking, (c) the theory of judgment, and (d) formal intuition. The' I think' takes over the functions of the transcendental object. In 1781 the transcendental object oscillates ceaselessly between the thing in itself and apperception, a fact which was responsible for the mistaken view that apperception is creative in the order of the transcendent. By means of the ' I think' the function of this transcendental object is uniformly determined as apperception. Furthermore, the' I think' replaces the very term' apperception '. The term was not to disappear, but none the less Kant preferred to be careful and to substitute' synthetic unity', a more logical expression for the act of thought which is the ultimate reference for the whole cognitive process. The distinction between thinking and knowing could be interpreted as the revenge of realism, but not necessarily so, because it will be the basis, not of a thesis concerning the 109


existence of transcendent things, but of the empirical construction of the empirical object by the subject. Indeed the necessary convergence of the act of synthetic unification and sensible forms rests on it in the construction of the spatiotemporal framework, where the irrational given is completely stripped of every suggestion of transcendence. Judgment reappears on Kant's horizon as the principle of objectification. This means that Kant is abandoning the subsun1ption of the empirical given under the categories as conditions of experience. Judgment consists in the actual positing of synthetic unity or in the fundamental act of objective thinking, for thought actualises itself in its objectifying moments in the form ofjudgn1.ent. Formal intuition is destined in its turn, and I must repeat this, to replace subsumption. Indeed, the subsumption of the sensible under the intellectual, or of the given under the categories, was a renewal of the modus vivendi concluded between the realism which hinted at things and the idealism which constructed ,. knowledge. Space and time very nearly became categories, that is, modalities of the constructive activity of thought. The opposition between sensibility and understanding was much less sharp because of formal intuition. Time and space certainly maintained themselves as forn1s, but these forms are transcendental potentialities which are actualised and which become representations in the very act of intellectual construction. By formal intuition Kant paves the way to a universal constructivism which is the source of mathematics and general physics. The constructivism of formal intuition will be the basis from which will come the Opus Postumum (the final but unrevised version of the Critical philosophy) and then the objective idealisn1 of romanticism. However, let there be no mistake about the nature of our position. I recognise at once that there is something paradoxical in seeing in the Critical philosophy of 1787 a reinforced idealism. The whole tradition of past Kantian scholarship sees there a more powerful realism, evidenced by empirical realism or phenomenalism and by the incessant t. appeal to the intuitive given. If thought is conceived as the faculty which represents a determinate reality which is ontologically independent, the!l realism is the natural 110

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interpretation. But when thought is conceived as an essentially constructive faculty in such a way that this determinate and ontologically independent reality no longer enters as a determining factor into this construction, realism is no longer so easily understood. And this is assuredly Kant's true position. But this certainly does not mean that Kant denies the existence of the 'in itself', autonomous and ontologically independent. Even Hegel never thought of that. It is undeniable that in 1787, as in 1781, the adoption of the postulate of transcendence surreptitiously conditioned certain analyses and that a kind of silent struggle took place between the transcendent principle and the constructive principle. All organisation and all form are not states of the real in itself, but on the contrary creations of cOllstructive thought. Transcendent realism can only obscure and taillt the purity alld clearness of constructivism. This is clearly what takes place in the autononlOUS stage which the second edition of the Critique represents in the evolution of the Critical philosophy. Thus, in tIle first place, the opposition between the sensible and the intellectual was neither overcome nor reabsorbed, so th.at the constructing subject finds itself divided agail1st itself and th.e union of the two constituents in the intellectual spontaneity scarcely rises above the level of a kind of pre-established harmony with little explanatory value. This reduplication presupposes at one end a matter which can be, but is not yet, ordered. The possibility of ordering this heteronomous matter, the condition ofrationalisation, is not logically derivable from intellectual functions. Only a harmonisation, still too external to explain anything, or the unity of the thinking activity invading the matter, remain possible. Indeed both alternatives are to be found side by side in our texts but are never united into a homogeneous and perfectly intelligible doctrine. The second inconsistency in the constructivism which conflicts with the realist postulate is the unsuppressed opposition between form and function. The purpose of the deduction is to lay bare the a priori conditions which permit a representation to become an object. These conditions can be purely logical, and then we obtain forms. The III


description of these forms will not reveal the origin of the object and in consequence the real problem to be resolved is evaded. A form indeed cannot be considered in isolation from the source vvhich gives it its essence. It must be brought to its principle. But this principle is unquestionably an intellectual act. The form is certainly a reality but it is the product of an act of the subject. Pure formalism is unproductive. While Kant undoubtedly recognises the essential constructivism of thought, it is no less true that more tha11 one thesis supporting this constructivism carries the imprint of hollow formalism. By the side of the intellectual dynamism we often meet the static universal. Instead of constructing the object, the deduction is frequently deflected towards tIle problem of the hierarchisation of knowledge which results from the imposition of forms, and the connection between these two things is not made clear. A similar hesitation before the constructive conception of thought appears in the distinction between thinking and knowing. I have no intention of claiming that the distinction lacks foundation, but it has perhaps been falsely presented. The representation of the object reveals a twofold relation: the relation of the given to the unity of consciousness, and the relation, arising from that, of the representation to the object. This distinction is meaningful only when. a certain conflict continues to exist between the act and the form. Indeed the first relation furnishes the form of representative unity and the second that of the object. To unite and to objectify are the two corresponding functions of these relations. Thus if unity and objectivity are two distinct things, there is nothing to prove that the unity of consciousness is the equivalent of objectivity. The one may be inferred from the other, when unity is objectivity itself, for then the relation is purely analytic. A rigorously logical use of the deduction ought to have brought the two to the absolute unity of the act of thinking. That would naturally have brought about the suppression ofthe distinction between the objective and subjective unity of consciousness. Fichte did not hesitate. He suppressed the subjective unity, 'which was more logical though less human. T11e same objection could be raised against judgment. This is exact theory when 112

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considered without any relation to logical formalism, but Kant introduced into it the conflict between form and function in th.e very originating act of thought. All these inconsistencies and hesitations derive fronl a common source, namely, the equivocal character of the theory of the subject. When all connection with psychology is to be avoided, the subject represents thought constituting the total a priori conditioning of the object known, without relation to any individual concretion. Subject and object therefore coincide in this definition. N-ow, Kant is not happy with such an interpretation even when the ontological and psychological self is supposed to have been definitely put on one side. The basic ambiguity in Kant's teaching is that between the subject and thought. The' I think' or the unity of consciousness is the element which totalises the a priori conditions of the object. Now for thought he substitutes consciousness. These are factors which are very different one from the other. Thought is an act, consciousness is a reflexive return on this act or on its product. Consciousness has not the same immediacy as the act of thought. On the other hand, the act of thought is indivisible and cannot be analysed into subject-object, while consciousness is essentially divided and dividing. Consciousness is thus the discursive logical transposition of the act which it presupposes. The subject considered as the summit of transcendental reflection is only efficacious on condition that it unequivocally signifies this originating act. The subject conceived as consciousness is not an act; it is a form or containing unity which by subsumption acquires a content. Thus constructivism needs a subject, the unity of "\tvhich is the very act of thought which is not yet consciousness. The latter is in some sort a sensuous subject, reflexive 'and derivative. These are Kant's fundamental weaknesses in relation to the generating principle of his Critical constructivism. In comparison witll the themes of 178 I, the second edition of 1787 clearly reveals an independent stage in the Kantian Critical thought. It is independent because it is marked by a tendency towards a more consistent form of idealism vvhich is more objectively oriented than the preceding stage. Most of the new themes which we (2,491) I 13 9


have just met will reappear at the turn of the nineteenth century, when Kant will find himself obliged to undertake a general recasting of his theory of objectivity.

2 THE MORAL SYNTHESIS cf. La Deduction III, 299-338

The Critique of Practical Reason was ready to go to the press just at the time when Kant was engaged in producing a second edition of the theoretical Critique at the invitation of his publisher, Hartknoch. A popular exposition of his moral teaching had preceded the practical Critique under the title of Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Foundations for the Metaphysics of Morals). The public certainly expected something different. On the basis of the promises reiterated by Kant over approximately twenty years, the ethical teaching was expected to consist of a metaphysics of morals, and yet here was Kant, both in 1785 and 1788, expounding, not the expected metaphysics, but a critique of reason as it judges in ethical matters. The theoretical Critique had been presented as the unique critico-propaedeutic introduction to the complete system of metaphysics. It included expressly a passage dealing with the practical order in which the fundamental concept offreedom is deduced. It might l1ave been concluded that in 1781 Kant did not think that a preparatory critique in the moral field would be necessary. However, nothing in the documents suggests that he devoted any time to the preparation of a Metaphysik der Sitten (Metaphysics of Morals). On the contrary, all the evidence we have certainly suggests that Kant was working on the Foundations, which plays with regard to the practical Critique the same role that the Prolegomena plays with respect to the theoretical Critique. It prepares the reader, by means of an analytic exposition, to penetrate into a new order of problems. There can be 110 doubt that from the beginning Kant 114

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wished to follow this popular introduction with a critique. Indeed, the Foundations asserts, with an insistence which must have been intended, that the auth.or is not developing in the Foundations his full critique of morality. A preface to the metaphysics of morals which presupposes a practical critique, the Foundations gives a critique in a popular abbreviated form; it was to have been immediately followed by the corresponding Metaphysics before the definitive Critique saw the light of day. Indeed, Kant judged, rightly or wrongly, that the moral critique is less urgent than the theoretical critique and that in consequence it was sufficient to give the reader a brief sketch of the main points by way of introduction to the Metaphysics. The conclusion is that Kant had originally intended to content himself with the Foundations and then to pass immediately to the codification of his Metaphysics. But instead of fulfilling this task, we see that he postponed it for ten years, and with almost feverish haste he worked out the practical Critique. If there is any serious problerrl of origin about Kantian etllics, it is certainly Kant's change of decision ,,,,ith regard to the Critique that has to be explained. At this point contemporary history comes to our assistance. Kant's whole decision was taken from a purely pragmatic standpoint. He thought that practical criticism is more easily assimilated than theoretical criticism. The history of the Foundations implies an important change in these expectations. It provoked a violent protest from the semi-Wolffians and Kant's optimism was to emerge considerably shaken. He could only admit his error in having trusted so completely in common sense: the public understood the moral aspect of his Critical philosophy no more easily than its theoretical aspect. It was then that he changed·his mind and proceeded to write the moral Critique. Although it had been planned as a work of apologetics, Kant did not wish his work to be a polemical piece. He left polemics to his friends. Although certain anonymous polemical preoccupations can be traced in this Critique, we find that its main characteristics are uniformly doctrinal. In a brief account of his moral teaching, we must take into consideration its twofold exposition. The Foundations 115


is presented under the form of a prolegomel~a or popular exposition of the Critique, but in a ratl~er special sense which makes this work rather different from the theoretical Prolegomena. Indeed it carries the reasoning up to just the point from which the Critique will be able to take its start. The Foundations sees in the n~oral problem a special case of synthetic a priori judgment requiring a deduction to assure us of its a priori possibility and of its objective validity. This makes it possible to integrate it without difficulty into the history of the Critical doctrine. The moral fact revealed in the restrictive nature of the law of duty, a law which carries the name of categorical imperative, is expressed in a synthetic a priori judgment. Its a priori character calls for a demonstration by pure reason; the synthetic character arises from the fact that the determination of the will by an objective moral principle does not analytically coincide with the subjective maxim of the will. Hence the determination of the will does not result analytically from the notion of the will itself, but is the result of a synthetic submission. In the theoretical order, the problem of the synthetic judgment is resolved by the detectiol~ of a third element in which the constituents of the judgment are united. This element is intuition. Now, the third element in the practical order is the positive conception of freedom, tl~at is, a causality determined by its own laws. Will and autonomy are therefore reciprocal concepts. It seems that in this case any deduction of the n~oral imperative must necessarily involve a vicious circle and be unavoidably sophistic. Indeed, if these concepts were absolutely univocal, this would always be the case. However, the question is whether the subject, when it appears as determined by a free causality, conceives itselffrom exactly the same point of view as when it appears to itself in the acts which it originates in consequence of this causality. It seems that this is not the case. The subject considered in the phenomenal order is affected by objects and by their affections, therefore by heteronomous laws, while the subject in itself is revealed in the most complete spontaneity of reason free from every natural pressure. Hence a twofold use of reason is called for: a use in connection with the affections which will 116

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conform to tIle laws of nature, and a free use uniquely guided by its free spontaneity. It can then be seen that spontaneous reason. can exercise a causal determination on the will even if the natural causality of its actions takes place entirely in the order of mechanical phenomena. It is in this way that the vicious circle is avoided. By this very fact the possibility of the moral principle as an a priori judgment is conceivable. There is a possible synthetic liaison between the subjective determination of the will and the objective moral law, because the subject of the will belongs to an intelligible world where it is freed from the mechanical conditions of the intuitive world. As a phenomenon it is seen to be subject to laws from which it escapes when considered as a noumenon. Obviously this whole reasoning is valid only in so far as the idea of freedom is presupposed. That is the idea which guarantees the validity of the moral imperative. How is this freedom itself possible? The Foundations finishes with the avowal of our inability to understand this question. In this work, therefore, we are led up to the idea of freedom witll0ut being able to justify it. It is from this idea that the practical Critique will take its start. Indeed, if the description and explanation of an a priori moral given was the principal object of the Foundations, a deduction of the objective validity of the moral principle was going to be the focal point in the moral reflection contained in the practical Critique. In the theoretical order reason in its pursuit of knowledge is always exposed to the danger of going beyond the limits which circumscribe objectivity, because of the a priori character of its formal concepts. A critical examination of reason is not so urgent in the practical order where there is no question of knowledge. Reasoll is there considered purely in its practical capacity of determining a will and of bringing into existence objects corresponding to its pure representations. The conformity of reason to its object is evident in the practical order because reason is itself the cause of its object. The only problem to be solved and the true object of a practical Critique therefore consists in asking if tllere really is a practical reason, a reason which can determine the will in an a priori 117


manner. The new positio quaestionis leads naturally to a new type of solution. The theoretical Critique aimed at the explanation of the a priori knowledge of objects. This presupposed sensible intuition as matter, the pure concept as form, and certain principles which apply the form to the matter. Practical reason does not ainl at knowledge but at the realisation of objects and that is achieved by means of a law or a practical principle. The law is therefore the primary object of investigation. It is clear that such a position leaves intact the theoretical criticism, if only for the reason that these two domains are not commensurable. It is not enough however that the two Critiques should merely be consistent with one another. A careful examination allows us to say that the logical setting of the solution of the theoretical Critical problem maintained itself intact in Kant's mind and that, despite strong temptation, the great restrictive guarantees with which it was surrounded are repeated without any weakening. I repeat-ill spite of strong temptation. Indeed, a summary inspection of the two domains seems to reveal contradictory elements. On the one hand, no penetration of the non-sensible world by the mind can be permitted in the cognitive order. Therefore whatever enlargement practical reason can procure, it will never affect the system of knowledge which has been definitively established. On the other hand, practical reason can be conceived only as a rational penetration into the nonsensible. Hence some enlargement must be held to be possible since it is real. The theoretical Critique admitted that reason is drawn by its very nature towards such an extension; it did not forbid the continuation of the Critical enterprise provided that the order of objective knowledge and its limitations be respected. To refuse to this extension the character of knowledge amounts to opening other perspectives from the side of faith. A legitimate field is thus opened for practical criticism. The principal aim of practical criticism is the deduction of the practical use of reason. Objective necessity is always the criterion of pure reason. In the practical domain, as in the theoretical domain, a necessary rule, whether of 118

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knowledge or of conduct, is called a law. Practical reason is therefore manifested by the law or the moral principle. The existence of this law or principle must first be established, and then it must be recognised as the foundation of the objectivity of the moral order. Now, the moral law is for Kant the object of an immediate awareness; it is a fact given by pure reason itself, a fact which is entirely inexplicable. In this absolutely fundamental fact of the moral consciousness we recognise an a priori principle whicll determines the will. Since it cannot be grasped by sensible intuition, the objective reality of this principle is not demonstrable by means of intuition as had been the case with the categories. The awareness of the principle is indissolubly bound up with that of freedom because the moral principle simply affirms freedom and the autonomy of practical reason. At this point the practical Critique and the Foundations come together. The moral principle, with which we come into contact in the immediate awareness, consists in the rational principle which determines the will a priori or which is autonomous in the determination of the will. At this point a very real difficulty comes to the fore. The moral principle is a fact, something determined, an immediate given of practical consciousness; hence any deduction seen1S to be superfluous and useless. On the other hand it is surely asking too nluch that such a principle should be admitted without any attempt at deduction, for this principle might be simply a subjective disposition on our part which was making an unfounded claim to objective validity. In the theoretical domain. experience constituted a permanent guarantee, but this recourse is not available to us in the practical domain. Therefore we are here in the presence of a practical reason which cannot be detern1ined by experience and which is inden10nstrable a priori. On the whole, if Kant nevertheless proceeds to a deduction, this deductiol1 will not be comparable to the process of reasoning which carried this name in 1781 and 1787. Indeed, the demonstrandum of this deduction is not the moral principle in the strict sense, but something else which is akin to the principle, namely, freedom. Theoretical reason was forced to deny objective validity IIg


to a causality extended beyond the realm of sensible phenomena. In spite of that, reason manifests an irresistible tendency towards such a causality, and this tendency is so strong that such a free causality must be allowed to be conceivable. It seems now that the moral principle is capable of transforn1ing the possibility of free causality into a reality; first, by showing th.at the moral principle completes the system of theoretical reason in the order of freedom, and then by showing that by this means the agreement of theoretical reason with. practical reason is possible in the theoretical field. This deduction proceeds by successive stages. In the first stage Kant has to show that the negative concept of freedom, or the non-dependence on foreign determining causes, acquires a positive function i11 the practical order, and that consequently it acquires the rank of a positive concept instead of being a limiting c011cept. Indeed the practical order grants to the concept of freedom the proper function of determining the will directly by the ideas of reason. The use which we make of reason is not a transcendent but an immanent use; i11 other words, it becomes possible to show how reason through its ideas exercises causality in the field of experience itself. The second stage justifies this use, a use w11ich does not violate the restrictive conditions of theoretical reason. The category of cause has no determinable object except within the limits of experience. In itself, however, by its a priori character it can be made to function beyond th.ese limits on condition that it does not claim objectivity, that is, does not claim to represent an object. The practical use respects the conditions under which the objective use is valid. The coexistence of a rational tendency towards objective knowledge and a tendency towards the determination of the will by ideas can be easily explained, because a rational being must be considered under a double aspect which makes it possible for his reason to be applied in two different ways. If the subject is considered in so far as he is temporarily conditioned, his acts are physically determined and hence subject to the conditions of the kno,¥ledge of phenomena; 120

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but when his acts are considered outside this temporal conditioning, there is no reason why the causality exercised by the subject in the order of phenomena should be any longer physically conditioned. It can be free on condition that this freedom is not taken to be a knowledge of the essence of the subject, but simply the voluntary power of determining the acts of a subject according to ideas. The deduction of the moral principle is very brief despite its double character. The principle is a basic undeniable fact. Now this principle cannot be a fact except on the condition that the will is supposed to have the power offree causality. Therefore freedom shares in the factual nature of the moral principle. However, the recognition offreedom does not involve any positive determination of a transcendent subject but is a pure condition of the intelligibility of the moral act or of practical reason. An object of practical reason is a representation in so far as it is the effect of a free causality. But let us be clear about this. To perform an act is a physical operation: only the willing of an act can be the effect of this kind of causality. Therefore the practical object is to will or not to will all act. Now, in this case good and evil are the only objects of practical reason, or the orlly practical categories as Kant sometimes calls them. These categories subject the diversity of our inclinations or of our desires to the unity of the practical consciousness governed by the moral principle, and this is the only deduction which we are capable of giving for it. The category of the good is a necessary but abstract rule which must be applied in concreto to sensible mechanical actions. How is this application to be made? It is a matter of determining the will to a concrete act made possible by the rule of the good. We do not seek a schema which permits the subsumption of a concrete case under the general law, but rather the schema of the law itself, if this improper expression may be allowed. The meeting of the rule of the good and understanding in the practical conditioning of an act is equivalent to asking the question: can the maxim which inclines us towards this concrete act be clothed with the form of a natural law? Natural law does not determine the will, but, by the form of law 121

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which it includes, it furnishes the type of judgment which we direct on the motives of our conduct. However, the problen1 is more complex. The moral law is the sole foundation of the apriori detern1ination of the will. However, this determination is not purely formal, does not consist solely in conferring the form of a universal constraint without any reference to matter. We find in ourselves a collection of inclinations which all manifest the form of happiness, but in varying degrees. The formal object of the moral law is the good, wllile that of inclination is happiness. As we belong to both the intelligible and the sensible worlds, the unity of practical reason depends on the discovery of a superior principle which goes beyond the regions of the good and of happiness. This principle is called the supreme good interpreted in the sense of the complete good How is this union of morality and happiness to be realised? This union would be perfectly intelligible if the notion of morality coincided with that of happiness or if there were some synthetic bond between them. Now a deduction is all the more necessary for the supreme good, because practical reason seems to engender an internal rational conflict in consequence of the difficulty of harmonising these two constituents of the practical order. Their harmony is not in fact determined either by identity or by a synthetic bond. Happiness does not determine moral reason and moral reason does not produce happiness. Hence the very notion of the supreme good is in doubt unless we can find a means of overcoming this conflict. Such a means seems to exist for Kant for, if the judgment which expresses the subordination of the good to happiness is false, the judgment which makes happiness depend on the good is not false in an absolute manner. The autonomy of the will forbids us to make an immediate synthetic connection between the two constituents of the practical nature of man. It does allow nevertheless a mediate synthetic connection, an external connection between them, that is, a connection which does not arise from the very nature of man but from the intervention of another being who would have nature within his power, a being which could be no 122

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other than God. Thus morality prepares the way for belief in the existence of God. It might be objected that the practical order, by making a rneta-empirical use of the category of cause, runs counter to the Critical tendency which so carefully limited that category in the theoretical order. In order to maintain the two Critiques side by side in a unified an.d unique synthesis, it is necessary to find a satisfactory explanation for the apparent divergence between their conclusions. Kant was obliged on more than one occasion in his moral work to furnish this explanation. It always comes back to a form of the argument which we have already come across in his writings. Use of causality in the noumenal or meta-sensible dimension is, objectively considered, impossible. However, reaSOll has another task than that of knowing an object: it tends also to realise objects by the will. A subject which exercises this causality is a causa noumenon. Thus the concept of such a cause is not cOlltradictory because the category is a form of synthetic unity. The objective use of the category is limited to phenomena but, organically speaking, it is not submitted to this restriction. Its use may therefore be extended to noumena 011 condition that there is no question of extending the boundaries of knowledge. If no attempt is made to penetrate the essence of the being who exercises this causality, and if its existence is simply affirmed on the basis of belief in the reality of a principle of a priori determination of the will, then no obstacle arises from tIle side of the theoretical restriction already referred to. The same is true of the regulative Ideas of reason, freedom, inlmortality, and the existence of God, although Kant has apparently just given thenl corresponding objects. However, the postulation of these three Ideas does not imply any intention to enlarge the field of our knowledge. On the other hand, while the Ideas were purely regulative for theoretical reason, they are clearly constitutive of objects in the practical use. But once again we are not trying to know their objects. We limit ourselves simply to inquiring whether there are such objects. Practical reason actually imposes the duty of replying affirmatively to this question. The refusal to penetrate the secret of their essence saves the homogeneity of the 12 3


double Kantian doctrine. The categories are organically bound up with knowing and with constructing the world of phenomena on the basis of given intuitions; in addition they have the function of enabling us to think the metasensible in so far as it is postulated by practical reason. The theoretical limitation of reason finds its counterpart in the practical extension of the saUle reason. This is the real meaning of the Kantian adage which is so often misunderstood: 'the suspension of knowledge is the condition of the installation of moral faith'. Scientific kno"Vvledge and moral faith form the two poles of the human spirit.

3

THE CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY cf. La Deduction III, 338-69

Let us go back to the years 1765-6. After publishing his Essay on the Beautiful (1764) Kant incorporated aesthetics into the programme of his lectures. When the Dissertatio made it possible to look forward to the realisation of a plan, conceived mucll earlier, which embraced a whole system of philosophy, the great Critical programme established in 177 I included the study of the beautiful under the title of a critique of taste. This plan became more detailed in 1772: under the heading of metaphysics Kant intended to follow the Critical propaedeutic with a metaphysics dealing with nature, morals, and the principles of feeling, of taste, and of the sensible appetites. Very little is known about the earlier phases of this plan and the paucity of information is itself a source of the most hazardous hypotheses. This is especially the case with regard to the last Critique. To make an a priori science out of a material earlier declared to be purely empirical, to include under one heading things as different as life and the beautiful, to recast the whole theory ofjudgment-there we have a group of paradoxes more than capable of arousing curiosity and stimulating speculation. 12 4

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The Critique of Judgment, which in 1790 completed the Critical synthesis, deals with the beautiful and witll organic teleology. It is essential to make a provisional separation between two objectives. We l1ave just recalled tllat a study of the beautiful and even a critique of taste had formed part of Kant's intentions ever since the conception of his general philosophical plan, but that we know scarcely anything about the stages by which this plan was realised. The first Critique, in explaining the term 'aesthetic' as 'sensible knowledge', makes a distinction between that and the theory of beauty, which, declares the text, it would be fruitless to treat by rational principles, since its sources and principles are empirical. Organic teleology is excluded by Kant from the list of categories; teleology does not figure among the constitutive principles of nature. On the whole, the situation does not appear to be too favourable towards the projected critique of taste. However, while he was rewriting the theoretical Critique and after he had written the moral Critique, Kant corrected the note which I have just cited and modified his views about the empirical character of the critique of taste. Not all the sources, but the principal sources, are now claimed to be empirical. His earlier confidence seemed shaken. Kant saw that l1ere was a field whicll might be explored successfully by Critical thinking. The few letters which belong to the period bet"\tveen 1787 and I 790 give very little help except one addressed to Reinhold in the month of December 1787. They show, however, that tIle correction made in 1787 had not been mere empty words but ought to be considered as a very timid announcenlent of a real revolution in his thinking about a critique of taste. A Grundlegung for it had even been begun in the course of this very year. The violent polemic with Eberhard at the beginning of 1789 and the emotions which it aroused in Kant's mind, together with the duty of self-defence in connection with the E'ntdeckung, interrupted the writing of it and delayed the completion of the Critical synthesis until 1790. The Critique of Judgment presents certain peculiarities : (I) its double objective, the inclusion of both beauty and 12 5


teleology under one principle, (2) the submission of beauty to a principle of subjective teleology, (3) the submission of beauty and teleology to the faculty of judgment, and (4) the rearrangement of this Critique in terms of the reflective judgment. In the absence of information it is impossible to give an account of the genesis of these peculiarities without resorting to hypotheses. It does seem certain that, as early as 1787, the necessity of including both beauty and teleology under one single explanatory principle had forced itself on Kant. To be successful, any hypothesis about the origin of these peculiarities must take account not only of the intentions and ideas of Kant, but also of the cultural environment of the period. The account which follows, then, I repeat, makes no claim to be anything more than an hypothesis. At this time beauty and teleology were commonly thought to be intimately connected. Their joint appearance in the third Critique raised no suspicion or distrust on the part of the public. Kant wanted to explain the aesthetic judgment and to discover the a priori principles which govern this field. Contemporary aesthetics treated this judgment in two ways, as expressing a feeling of pleasure or of displeasure, and as suggesting a teleological relation between man and the organisation of his psychological faculties. According to the scheme of the Franco-English psychology which was universally adopted in Germany at this time, there are the three distinct faculties of knowledge, will, and feeling. To these faculties, Kant says to Reinhold, there correspond three fields of study, namely, philosophy, ethics, and teleology. These three fields are governed by a priori principles which must be found through the analysis of the mind. The human mind is divided into the three functions of understanding, judgment, and reason. Understanding constructs knowledge, as shown in the theoretical Critique, reason deals with morality, as shown in the practical Critique. Judgment will therefore be the function and the source of a priori laws of teleology and feeling. In the theoretical field, judgment played the part of an intermediary adjusting the different needs of the other two faculties. Teleology has the same role to play in the practical order. To all 126

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this must be added the fact that from 1784 to 1790 Kant's activity was principally concentrated on ethics, on philosophy of history, and on the problems of organic life. These preoccupations were all converging on the organisation by a priori principles of the domains of the beautiful and the organic. All the movements in contemporary cultural life were uniting to test the strength of tIle Critical philosophy. A possible explanation of the direction of the Kantian meditations can be developed along these lines although it will not of course throw light 011 the details. The state of our information forbids further speculation. The Critique of Judgment contains a long introduction which was substituted for one originally even longer but condemned for this reason. III it Kant defined exactly the place which the Critique occupies in the whole scheme of the Critical synthesis and then described the study of aesthetic teleology and organic teleology. The introduction fixes the transcendental framework within which the various forms of teleology are to be found. Its systematic importance is therefore of the very first order. We know that the cognitive power of man is divided between understanding which is provided with a priori principles governing the knowled,ge of objects, reason which is the repository of principles in the order of the will, and judgment in con11ectio11 with which the questio11 of a priori principles is actually being raised. The analogy with the other legislative psychological faculties in the order of knowledge and in the order of will is to be taken as suggesting that the same will hold for judgment. However, it is hardly necessary to point out that the difficulties ill this case will be so considerable that the suggestion will force us to undertake a transcendental examination of judgment, but does not guarantee in any way the success of this enterprise. The analogies just cited include the most important of these difficulties. Indeed, what will be the specific object of a third faculty when understanding governs knowledge of objective causes and reason determines their realisation by a free causality? Moreover, what connection is there between judgment, generally defined as the power of thinking the individual content under the general, and the faculty 12

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of feeling? These two difficulties must be examined in the light of the nature of judgment. Understanding is the concept which comprehends the general laws which, applied to intuitions, produce the objective representation of phenomena. Judgment is the function which subsumes impressions under the laws of intellect. This function is determinating since the qual~ty it confers is that of a deternlinate object. In this way understanding includes general laws. Besides the schematic figures of general objects which express its identical essence and fundamental structure, the intuitive world also presents us with an infinity of diverse objects, of particular forms, of kinds and individualities. Now this infinite diversity cannot be explained by the activity of the categories; the theoretical criticism had to limit itself to their determination in experience. There is thus no doubt that the explanation of nature is not perfect unless the specific diversity is explained in the same sort of way as the generic identity, and hence it is legitimate to suppose that the. diversity is also governed by laws which have so far escaped transcendental investigation. However, judgment does not have the same role to play in the present problem. In the theoretical criticism the laws of subsumption were known a priori and it was the function ofjudgment to find the intuitive diversity to subsume under them. Here the specific diversity of nature is known a posteriori and ifj udgment has a role to fulfil, this role will consist in the detection of laws which will explain the diversity. In the theoretical ord,er there was pre-knowledge of the general or of laws, while here there is pre-knowledge of the particular. Kant entitles such a function ' the reflective use of judgment '. However, there must be no mistake about the true object of this judgment. The particular forms of nature are not explained by the teleological principle: only mechanical causality contains this explanation. The purpose of the principle is to guide the mind in the study of these forms. The laws which govern the reflective judgment are not laws constitutive of nature but laws of the faculty of judgment. Kant explains this directive law as follows: we must assume 128

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that the empirical and particular forms of nature are made as if an understanding had established them with the purpose of allowing the mind to construct the total system of experience by means of laws of nature. This tendency of the laws towards the realisation of the systematic aspirations of the mind is not an objective law of things but a constructive law of the faculty of judgment. The latter has to represent the diversity of nature as forming a systematic unity and it thinks of the things of nature as having an essence similar to the essence of those things which owe their reality to the representation of an end. What validity can one attribute to this postulation of an a priori principle of teleology? The deduction of its validity cannot be empirical because teleology is an a priori principle, and it cannot be psychological because while that would certainly show how we judge according to teleology, it would not show how we ought to judge nature. Since we must seek for the principle capable of governing the logical necessity of judgment, the deduction must be rigorously transcendental, that is, we are required to disengage the principle of nature itself from the faculties of knowledge. Such a deduction is not very complicated. Nature manifests certain necessary forms which govern the permanent structure of the object as object of experience in general: these are the categories. The same nature shows a specific diversity in the particular forms of these same objects. Either this formal diversity answers to laws or it does not. If a law does not govern these forms, we make chance their origin and reason is thereby forbidden to realise their systematic unity and its own spiritual aspirations. Hence reason requires that the particular forms, like the permanent forms of nature, correspond to a law. It may be seen, by this very deduction, that the postulate of teleology is not required in order to understand the sensible object, but is indeed required in order to construct the science offormal diversity. The legitimacy ofsuch a diversity is not a condition of nature, but of physical science. Hence, the sale principle which can be invoked is this: in the study of nature, jlldgment must be guided by the general law that the forms of nature are so made that they can form a (2,491) 10 12 9

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systematic totality. The teleology recognised in nature is not a teleology internal to nature itself, but a teleology of the aspirations of the faculty of judgment which sets itself the task of building the science of nature. The principle of teleology is therefore a pure subjective principle, that is, it involves only th.e exercise of the faculty of judgment. In this way judgmeIlt appropriates for itself its own object. While understanding studies the uniforn1. categorial structure which conditions the type of the object of experience, judgment studies the diverse structure which conditions the kinds contained under the type or the diversity of empirical forms through the agency of the principle of teleology. The first difficulty connected with judgment is then resolved in that Kant has determined for it a specific object. The second difficulty concerns the connection of the same faculty with feeling. It is again the concept of teleology which establishes the connection between knowledge and feeling. The categories are necessary: their mechanism comes into play auton1atically without understanding having to set itself an end to realise by their activity. The particular forms of nature are intelligible only on the supposition that they exist because of their teleological adaptation to the faculty of judgmellt. Thus in achieving any end a certain sense of pleasure is always experienced. The agreement of the percepts with the categories produces no pleasure and evokes no feeling because no end is achieved by this agreement. Establishing the agreement of empirical laws witll the purpose which reason sets itself does provoke a feeling: success is translated into an agreeable sentiment, failure into chagrin. It is therefore again the supposition of teleology in nature adapted to the rational constitution of the human mind which permits judgment and sentiment, united in both good and bad fortune, to enter into the subjective organisation of this mind. Having established the legitimacy of an appeal to teleology, Kant had to set himself another problem: does the faculty ofjudgment pursue an absolutely identical end in all cases? No, replies Kant: there are two forms essentially dissimilar, namely, aesthetic teleology and logical teleology. The distinguishing feature of aesthetic teleology lies in 13°

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representation, but without any reference to anything connected with the object. Therefore the subjective side is alone important. Thus the subjective part, which can never become the knowledge of an object, is the feeling of pleasure or of displeasure which accompanies th.at knowledge, although the pleasure does not Inake us know more fully the object which evokes it. When perception of the form of an object is accompanied by pleasure, and when the pleasure is stimulated only by the perception of the form, we must interpret this as an example of subjective teleology, that is, the pleasure is the echo of an agreement between the form of the object and the faculties engaged in its perception. These faculties, according to the teaching of the theoretical Critique, are imagination and understanding. If these two faculties find themselves in a harmonious state in considering an object, we can say that this object is proportioned to this faculty or that it manifests an external teleology towards it. Thus the reflective judgment announces this proportionality or this external teleology resting on the feeling of harmony among the faculties engaged in the pure and simple consideration of the form of the object. Thus the form of the object, of which the pure representation stimulates pleasure, is called ' beautiful'. I-Ience aesthetic teleology is represented by beauty. Two tasks are set by this new notion: its exposition or the analysis of the aesthetic judgment; its deduction or the justification of the necessary and universal cl1aracter which we attach to this judgment. The table of categories includes all the moments in the analysis of any transcendental factor whatsoever. Ka11t therefore conducts the analysis of beauty by the categorial tetrachotomy. The quality of the aesthetic judgment must distinguish it from the logical judgn1ent and the moral judgment. It differs from the first because it expresses not an essence but a subjective pleasure, and it differs from the second because the pleasure reveals no trace of an interest inherent in the practical order. Considered according to quantity, the aesthetic judgment is universal in the sense that, contrary to all the other feelings which do not claim to be more than purely subjective inclinations of an 13 1


individual subject, the aesthetic feeling claims acceptance by all subjects without distinction. Its universality therefore consists in the general communicability of the subjective state which the consideration of tIle form stimulates. Knowledge and everything connected with the exercise of the cognitive functions are universally communicable. But knowledge is excluded because it is a matter of a pleasure. The enigma of its communicability is found therefore on the side of the faculties. The determination of imagination by the categorial understanding produces the concept of the thing or its representation. That presupposes between the two faculties a preconceptual state where the two faculties find themselves in reciprocal affinity, and this affinity is the source of the pleasure represented by the sentiment of beauty. This harmonious preconceptual state can be sh.ared by all subjects: the universality of the causes implies that of the effect. It is sufficient therefore to appeal to the idea that the organisation of the cognitive faculties is constant in the human race in order to comprehend the universality of the aesthetic judgment. Teleology determines our judgment on the side of reason. This teleology seems to presuppose the priority of a concept and the aesthetic judgment does not admit of any such priority. 1'he teleology in question must therefore be a state which represents no objective or subjective end determined in the consideration of the object. The modality of the judgment consists in the necessity of general acquiescence in the aesthetic judgment. There we have the characteristics of the aesthetic judgment. How is its claim to necessary universality to be justified? Basically Kant has already prejudged the question in his very analysis when he posed the question of the general comnlunicability of the conditions of the aesthetic judgment. This judgment is a particular case of the synthetic a priori judgment: synthetic because the predicate of pleasure goes beyond the analytic constituents of the concept of the subject: a priori because it claims to be universal. On what are we to base the universality of a pleasure connected with the aesthetic judgment of beauty? In aesthetic pleasure we experience only the teleology of an object adapted to the faculty of judgment in order to create a state of harmony 13 2

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between imagination and understanding. This faculty of judgment corresponds to certain subjective conditions. We have the right to presuppose in all men the same subjective disposition to judge. It is clear in this case that the judgment demands universal communicability of the general conditioning of the faculty. In this way the aesthetic sentiment is integrated in the transcendental organisation of the human mind. I-I~wever, teleology does not always appear in the aesthetic form. Vve are not content with finding a teleological affinity between the form of nature and our faculties of knowledge. In order to become aware of the existence of these forms we often make it appear that they exist as the product of the ends of nature. That is, we impose on our faculties the rule of considering these forms as if they owed their existence and determinate essence to a principle of teleology. Once again then in this case we follow not a principle of nature but a principle governing our faculties in the representation of nature. How can such ends exercise a particular causality? Certainly not in the manner of efficient causality which would exercise its activity through the representation of an end to be achieved, since vve should then interrupt the mechanical chain by introducing a completely heterogeneous causality. Therefore the explanation of the particular essences of things by the idea of teleology is to be utterly condemned. But that is not what we claim. We claim to submit nature to certain norms of observation and scientific inquiry, 110rms which are simply rules of our faculty of judging nature in its particular diversity. The appeal to teleology is of a kind to provoke an internal conflict in the consideration of nature. The object of experience has as determining principle the mechanical chain of causes and effects. On the other hand, the intelligibility of this chain in its diverse particularisation depends on the recognition that the cause itself has not been able to exercise its causal power without the prior representation of the effect as the end to be achieved. It does not seem possible to attribute a similar representation to the things of nature since they are not 133


intelligent beings capable of representations. How therefore can the phenomenon in question be at the same time cause, as the representation of the effect to be produced, and effect, as the causality which produces the effect? Kant limits the possibility and the thing to the one case of the organic body. Such a body is distinguished from inorganic bodies because it reproduces itself as a kind, because it reproduces itself as an individual by growth, and because it reproduces itself in its parts, since there is indeed in the organism a causality of the part on the whole and a causality of the whole on the part. The whole and the part are reciprocally cause and effect. This organic causality differs essentially from mechanical causality. A phenomenon is determinable as cause through its necessary antecedent, that is, through the non-reversibility of antecedent and consequent. The only ground of connection between phenomena by the category of cause is the irreversibility of their succession. Now organic causality is quasi-circular. Such a causality is not mysterious in the intelligent being because it is not strictly the effect, but the representation of the effect by the understanding, which makes this same being produce the effect and call it into existence. But precisely because intelligence is excluded from nature, it is difficult to conceive in it any analogue to intelligent causality. Despite that, organic causality seems in certain of its details even more perfect than intelligent causality. In the intelligent being, the object caused is external to the determination of the causality. In organic nature the whole exists, conserves itself, and perpetuates itself by the causality of parts on the whole and of the whole on the parts. Experience does not show that in organic nature reciprocal causality is determined by the representation of a purpose, and the transcendental analysis of knowledge of nature also gives no such assurance. On what grounds then do we interpret organic causality as analogous to the efficient causality of the intelligent being? It is clear that the judgment which asserts it cannot be a determining judgment: otherwise, teleology would be a constitutive principle of nature and would rest on a category of teleology irreconcilable with that of mechanical 134

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causality. The judgment will then be purely reflective, that is, teleology will be recognised 110t as a rule of nature but as a rule of our judgment, so as to render nature intelligible and assimilable to our cognitive faculties. Every judgment amounts then to laying down the principle that we must conceive first organic nature and then nature in general, as if it had followed, by means of its particular objects, the realisation of a purpose both in the whole and in detail. This principle avoids both mechanism, which attributes all the peculiarity of things to efficient causality, and also dogmatism, which attributes the same peculiarities to divine efficient causality. It is quite false to attribute these principles to nature itself. They are a part of the logical structure of reason . Nature can be explained without then1 but not in a manner satisfactory to reason. Reason indeed wishes to do more than to explain experience. It wants also to make it a unitary system. Subjective and objective teleology are thus not principles constitutive of experience, but principles which regulate systematising reaS011. The general solution of the Critical problem entailed nothing less than a total and complete philosophy as a natural and indispensable preface to the total system of metaphysics. This profound analysis of reason, which, in its daring extensions as well as in its careful restrictions, covers all the knowledge which man can attai11 without the help of experience, is terminated by Kant, twenty years after he had first conceived it, by the Critique of Judgment. The domain of the a priori has been explored in all the recesses accessible to the human mind, and it has been circumscribed and limited, if not easily, at least without encountering insoluble difficulties. All the problems which kept appearing in this vast domain have been solved in such a way that, while consistent with each other, they all tend to support the transcendental edifice. This means that Kant has solved the main problem of his life: he has discovered the method of metaphysics. In doing so he has taken into consideration the particular conditions assigned to meta-sensible inquiry by the objective knowledge of nature, by the objective belief in morality, and by the analogical interpretation of the world in a teleological 135


order, thus satisfying all the legitimate aspirations of human reason. The success of this enterprise does not mean that it was simple. One of the major obstacles to its success was the heterogeneity of the demands to which reason itself is exposed. Understanding governs nature by the categories; reason governs morality by freedoffie Understanding connects phenomena in the rigorous mechanical order of efficient causality; reason introduces into this order the explosive concept of freedom. Understanding constructs in its formal laws the outline of the sensible world; reason creates in the moral imperative the intelligible world. The limitation of knowledge is such that each of th.ese worlds is forbidden to trespass one upon the other. Transcendentalism creates a profound abyss between the scientific aspirations of the mind and the moral aspirations ofthe soul. The existence of this abyss is difficult to accept. Is not this harsh break between nature and reason a decisive weakness? Kant certainly was well aware of the danger. The Critique of Judgment is given the vital role of riveting and soldering to one another the two separated braIlches of human speculation. Science cannot admit free causality but it must recognise its possibility, that is, tIle conceivability of the idea, in such a way that it is no longer absurd to hold that a free causality produces effects even in the order of phenomena. On the other hand, the exercise of this free causality is stimulated by the representation of a final purpose, the achievement of wh.ich. rests on the assurance that our very nature contains the conditions of its realisation. A meta-sensible substratum for the order of phenomena is possible according to the teaching of the Critical philosophy. This substratum is positively determined by the practical law. It might be claimed that this is contradictory because this determination oversteps the objective limits of the use of reason. The Critique of Judgment meets this objection by showing in what way a n1etasensible substratum is determinable by an intellectual faculty. It does this by resolving a theoretical problem by means of the principle of teleology. Pure reason determines the theoretical given by teleology on condition that it is not illegi13 6

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timately transposed into something constitutive of the world. Since reason does not invoke this meta-sensible substratum in order to achieve knowledge, but does so with a practical purpose as regulative of free activity, there is no reason not to conclude that the a priori domain forms an admirable self-consistent unity and exhibits perfect coherence in its diverse functions, and this is true despite the apparent inconsistencies whicll are revealed by the critical review of their respective provinces. The Critique of ]udg17'lent is the mediator which resolves the conflicts and wins over opponents to the systematic unity of reason. Kant had good reason to clain1 that his propaedeutic work had been completed, since the Critique of Judgment truly brings to completion the whole Critical philosophy.

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Chapter IV

The Defence of the Critical Synthesis

THE AWAKENING OF THE WOLFFIANS cf. La Deduction III, 370-443

The transcendental philosophy to which Kant had just devoted twenty years of work ftlnctions at two levels. To begin with, it examines the conduct of pure reason in all the orders of a priori knowledge. Secondly, it claims to construct on that basis the systen1 of pure reason under the heading of a metaphysics of nature and a metaphysics of n10rals. The Critical writings with their threefold structure play the part of a propaedeutic to a corresponding systen1. They endeavour to give a preliminary detailed elucidation of the method of acquiring metaphysical knowledge. It is not surprising, therefore, that the more perspicacious of his disciples should have interpreted the well-attested declarations of their master along these lines and should have endeavoured to erect the system which, on his own admission, he had always postponed. From about 1787 onwards the normal play of critical discussion around his doctrine blurred the clarity of this distinction between propaedeutic and system, and in the sequel it was to disappear completely. From then on the Critical philosophy slowly fused with the metaphysics and the two came to share a kind of joint destiny. Because of this very confusion, the defence of his system became for Kant the defence of philosophy itself. Historical circumstances played a great part in bringing about this confusion. Because it had shaken German philosophy out of its slumbers, the Critical philosophy rapidly became its nerve centre. It was a centre of attraction for 138

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some, but also a target for a host of different kinds of opponents. The fortunes of the Critical philosophy eclipsed the literary and scientific discussions, and the psychological, moral, and aesthetic disagreements became much less sllarp. In short, the number both of his disciples and of his rivals made Kant the master of the day. This does not mean that at one fell swoop the whole of Germany embraced his teaching. On the contrary the critics, deriving their inspiration from many varied sources, were far from idle. Some had their eyes turned towards the past and were engaged in defending their heritage against the threat represented by the Critical philosophy; others fixed their gaze on the future and misinterpreted the Critical philosophy. The latter derived from it consequences which th.e master had never had in mind and which did not have the good fortune to please him overmuch. With his astonishing clearness of vision he foresaw the dangers attendant 011 the bungling strategy of his disciples. He had therefore to defend himself simultaneously on two fronts: he had to defend th.e originality of his doctrine against his opponents and its integrity against his own disciples. The resistance against the Kantian threat was organised on two fronts. The leaders were animated by either the progressive English spirit or the conservatisn1. of the Wolffian school. The Anglo-Saxon attitude first appeared in the form of a benign eclecticism which concealed a mild empiricism derived from a popularised Locke. Like all forms of eclecticism it took refuge in a delicate synthesis of curious ideologies. It denounced the would-be scepticism of a metapl1.ysical method resting on the principle of the limitation of knowledge to phenomena, and it attacked a priorism which it claimed to be the result of sophistical reasoning in which from the necessity of a subjective basis there was inferred the exclusive sufficiency of this basis. These eclectics were very numerous. Towards 1790 German scepticism took shape under Platner, Schultze, and Maimon, a scepticism which placed itself under the tutelage of Hume. But Kant, despite his limiting thesis, had parted company with Hume when he replaced psychological habit, to which Hume had appealed, by the transcendental mechanism. By this means 139

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he believed himself to have conquered Hume 011 his own ground. The sceptics followed Kant in part as if he had made common cause with Hume, but they tried to SllOW how great was his illusion when he published urbi et orbi his bulletin of victory. The IIpwTov 'P'EVOOS of the Critical philosophy was detected and identified with the view that objectivity is to be found exclusively in the fact tllat the a priori concepts function as conditions of experience, but of an experience whicll can never be identified with ordinary perception and which is itself a purely rationalist construction. The problem posed by Hume, far from having been solved, remained untouched. Furthermore, and here it may be seen how friends and enemies were to merge in the mind of Kant, the sceptics especially attacked the Vorstellungstheorie invented by Reinhold and presented by him as an authoritative commentary on the Critical system. Schultze in his Enesidemus saw in this theory a prelude to a new dogmatism and disposed of it with a masterly hand. Unfortunately, in attacking Reinhold he could not avoid touching Kant. This eclectic and sceptical criticism had an undoubted doctrinal success which at the same time set Kant against his imprudent pupils. It was of very short duration, however, and had no appreciable effect after 1794. In any case it was eclipsed by the revival of Leibniz. The sceptics could hardly be described as passionately enthusiastic, but it was very different with the Wolffians who had territory to defend and a tradition to preserve. Apparently dull and lifeless during the build-up of the Critical system, the Wolffian riposte came with great suddenness in 1789. The leader was Eberhard, who never tired of pointing out that all the happier insights of the Critical philosophy could be found in the philosophy of Leibniz and that what could not be found in Leibniz was the work of a sophist. Ulrich and Brastberger, two influential philosophers of the same persuasion, added weight to this attack, but Eberhard was the warrior who accepted and even provoked the combat. Himself the author of a complete systenl of dogmatic philosophy, and a well-known professor at the leading University of Germany, Halle a/s., he founded in 1789 a quarterly review, the Philosophisches 14°

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Magazin, witll the intention of crossing swords with the Critical philosophy and measuring himself against its author. The revievv had a short life, but that is of no importance as only the first volume is of interest to us. It must be admitted that Eberhard developed a very clever strategy in his review. He wanted to defend the old order against the new, Leibniz against Kant, and he did it as an intelligent but prejudiced disciple. He protested against the Kantian claim that his personal philosophy was the sole possible critical philosophy, a claim wl1ich involved the denial of all critical value to the philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff. Not content with that, he tried to make out that the Critical philosophy, in so far as it was true, was an atrophied offshoot of dogmatism. Leibniz, he argued, had all the a priorism of Kant, but Kant llad added to it the thesis of limitation. A priorism was true, but the thesis of limitation was false. Tllis amounted to a refutation of the Critical philosophy by n1eans of the Nouveaux Essais. Wit}l this in mind Eberhard subjected the whole of the Critique of Pure Reason to severe criticism. In the first volume he left to his colleague IvIaas the task of discussing the positions of the Aesthetic and the Antinomies, that is, all the problems relating to space and tinle, and he undertook to deal with the theory of objectivity and indirectly with the possibility of nletaphysics. The Copernican revolution, a striking and widely accepted image which had been used by Kant to announce the Critical philosophy, consisted in holding that the object models itself on the mind. The great defect of all previous metaphysics resided in the fallacy of taking as objective something which is in fact subjective. Eberhard claimed that it was not true that the objective depends wholly on the subjective. Objectivity was not a question of being, but of validity, and in relation to validity it was essential to distinguish between form and matter. The correctness of the form of our knowledge depended wholly on conformity with the principles of contradiction and sufficient reason, formal principles which govern the whole field of knowledge. Eberhard established the objective validity of these two principles. As to matter, Kant had reduced the 14 1


objective content of knowledge so as to include only the sensible spatio-temporal given because he denied to man the capacity of intellectual intuition. This meant that understanding was inseparable from sensible intuition of the given and from the pure discursiveness of concepts. But, according to Eberhard, this limitation of the intuitive capacity was purely arbitrary. Consequently understanding and reason do have their own material: the universal . essences of sensible things and the supersensible in general. As long as the uniqueness of sensible intuition rested on a gratuitous supposition, it could not be said that Leibniz had been refuted by the Critique. This general defensive attitude was supported and constantly renewed by piecemeal examination of major Critical theses. It was in the course of doing this that Eberhard denied that Leibniz had distinguished sensibility from understanding only by the single logical criterion of clearness. He did not define the phenomenon as that which is represented confusedly, but as that which is represented confusedly by the senses,. and this definition meets all the legitimate demands of a transcendental definition such as Kant conceived. He also denied the originality of the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments under the pretext that in the Kantian sense the Wolffians knew it already but had not however reduced the analytic judgment to a mere tautology. Finally, he denounced the weakness of the Critical philosophy in dealing with the problem of the origin of kn~wledge, since on Kant's view it con1pletely escapes our powers of investigation. Empirical knowledge rests on the percept; the object of this percept is in its turn a representation: if it were not, the object of the percept would be the thing in itself. Therefore empirical knowledge has no foundation outside ourselves. Neither does it have any foundation within us because there too it would be necessary to reach the Ding an sich which Kant claimed to be unknowable. Kant did not succeed in making more than the simple point that the foundation of knowledge is X, an indeterminable unknown. The same holds good for a priori knowledge or the categories. They do not come from the senses nor consequently fron1 any 142

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external thing. They are not innate. Hence they come to like our empirical knowledge, in some occult fashion. All these arguments have the sole object of reducing the claims of the Critical philosophy and of showing the critical superiority of the Leibnizian metaphysics and epistemology. That was the general line of Eberhard's strategy. How would Kant parry this thrust? This was hardly the moment for a vigorous counter-offensive because Kant had the Critique of Judgment in hand and it absorbed all his energies. However, some sort of reply seemed essential, so, along with a pretty set of insults directed against Eberhard, Kant sent some observations to Reinhold with his authority to make use of them at his discretion. Once he had finished with the last Critique, Kant began to write an article directed against the Magazin for Schutz's review. Between September 1789 and Easter 1790 this article took on the proportions of a book which was actually published towards the end of April of that year under the title Uber eine Entdeckung nach der alle neue Kritik der reinen Vernunft durch eine altere entbehrlich gemacht werden soll. In view of the fact that this work is an act of revolt and a work of self-defence, we might well expect not to have to deal with sensational new ideas. At the most, we might hope to find some useful attempts at clarification stimulated by the lack of comprehension shown by his opponents. The strategy of the Wolffian Eberhard, which was conducted vvith undeniable skill, was a serious threat to the originality of the Critical philosophy and Kant realised this at once. Eberhard wanted to show that the Critical philosophy was unnecessary. He based his arguments on the claim that it depended on and was inferior to the work of Leibniz. Setting himself up as the defender of Leibniz so as to hit harder, Kant turl1ed the tables on Eberhard. He followed l1is opponent step by step and conducted his counter-offensive in three successive stages: first, he attacked the meta-sensible use of reason, which Eberhard wanted to save by means of his appeal to the principle of sufficient reason and to the simple element; secondly, he refuted the objections raised against the synthetic judgment; and finally, he interpreted the doctrine of Leibniz 143 US,


in such a way as to show that it foreshadows and even demands completion by the Critical philosophy. It is unnecessary to run over the whole content of a purely polemical work which, compared with the earlier expositions of the Critical philosophy, hardly shows any real advance in doctrine. A few soundings at random will be sufficient to give an idea of its contents. To begin with the synthetic judgment, Kant rebels against the lack of philosophical acumen shown by his opponent in trying to diminish the importance of the difference between the two types of judgment, which, in Kant's eyes, was really a Hauptpunkt of his teaching. The real problem concealed in this distinction is the problem of the possibility of the extension of scientific knowledge, since the increase of knowledge is the raison d'etre of hun1a11 science in general. On what then is this extension based? In the field of physics we attain to genuinely new knowledge (not merely factors implicit in what is already known) by means of a posteriori intuition. The problem becomes acute when we seek a similar extension of knowledge without the constant support of direct perception. The Critical philosophy solved the problem by showing how we reach knowledge in the mathematical order on the basis of an a priori intuition which is spatio-temporal in character. It is clear that transcendent metaphysics, which claims to furnish us with the true science of being, is mistaken, since it refuses to pure ideas the guarantee of limitation to corresponding intuitions. Eberhard therefore only shows how little philosophical sense he has when he reduces the problem of the synthetic judgment to a simple question of formal logic. Eberhard also refused to see that the scope of Kant's Critical reflection transcends the logical dimension. His mistaken attempt to reduce the Critique to logic exposed the pointlessness of his argument. He constituted himself the apostle of a dogmatism which preached the extension of objective knowledge by pure reason without the restrictive constraint of intuition. In doing so he relied on the principle of sufficient reason to which he attributed absurdly extended powers. The Critical philosophy was certainly not rendered useless by a Wolffianism which revolved around 144

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an analytic metaphysics incapable of extending knowledge. This type of dogmatism is essentially analytic and therefore sterile when judged with reference to the true purpose of science. Eberhard was mistaken with regard to the thesis oflimitation, in which he detected a concealed and arbitrary agnosticism. On the contrary, the thesis of limitation proves that metaphysics as a science is possible but that metaphysics is not necessarily dogmatic. It can be established by synthetic judgments, vvhich do extend knowledge, on condition that they are employed and deduced as necessary conditions of the possibility of experience. The attentive reader will readily note that Kant's defence is a powerful reaffirmation of the originality of the Critical synthesis and goes beyond the doctrines developed in the Critique and in the Prolegomena. Eberhard's attack rested on sheer equivocation. He attempted to identify the Critical philosophy with Wolffianism on the pretext that they resembled one another in some of their modes of expression. The sharper focus given to his position by Kant in his reply certainly makes any attempt to identify the two positions much less easy. An examination of the long diatribe and the tangled dialectic indulged in by Kant when he discusses the validity of the transcendent metaphysics which Eberhard took under his protection, leads to the same result. Eberhard felt that he had to safeguard the secular heritage of a doctrine which had allowed Germany to take its place in European thought. Th.e preservation of this heritage consisted for Eberhard in defending the objective validity of our meta-sensible knowledge against the extravagant Kantian doctrine which imprisoned objective science within the limits of experience. Eberhard tried to pit Leibniz against Kant in a debate around this question. The argument was conducted on three levels: first, the principle of sufficient reason as the key to our knowledge of things; secondly, simple being, which~ was the generally accepted object of any knowledge freed from the conditions of the sensible; and thirdly, the passage from the sensible to the meta-sensible which can be achieved by reason. Eberhard reasoned in the following manner. As knowledge has a form and a matter, it is necessary to show the (2,491) 145 11


validity of the two elements. The objective validity of the form lies in its conformity with the formal principles of knowledge, which are the principles of contradiction and of sufficient reason. Eberhard proves the validity of the latter principle by deducing it directly from the former in a syllogism which may still be seen in a number of manuals. Furthermore, the principle of contradiction is absolutely objective, for its negation entails the destruction of thought itself, no matter whether it be about ideas or things. As to matter, Kant is mistaken in saying that the only matter which can be justified is sensible matter. Beyond it there is another matter, made up of non-sensible elements without which spatio-temporal images are not possible. Concrete time is a complex of simple elements which are imperceptible when isolated. Therefore the absolutely simple is found outside sensible intuition. Space in its turn is an aggregate of simple substances although only their accidents can be perceived. Therefore understanding is capable of rising above the sphere of the sensible. Kant owed it to himself to reply seriously to this aggressive return to an outmoded Wolffianism. The appeal to the principle of sufficient reason, says Kant, only proves Eberhard's inability to understand the notion of the transcendental. A formal principle simply concerns the conditions of the form of the judgment without any consideration of the object; a transcendental principle concerns the a priori possibility of the object. The principle of sufficient reason includes, first, a formal principle, analogous to that of contradiction, which may be stated as follows: 'every proposition has a ratio cognoscendi '; and secondly, a transcendental principle, ' every thing has its raison d' etre " which cannot this time be derived from the principle of contradiction. Thus the neutral formula employed by Eberhard is the source of a regrettable confusion between the two principles, and this vitiates the proof which he outlines. But Eberhard wanted more. He did not claim only to have shown the de jure objectivity of meta-sensible knowledge, but he also wanted to show by a concrete exan1ple that this objectivity is de facto real. To do this he appealed to simple being which is purely intelligible and even 146

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underlies sensible being. To this Kant replied that tl~e metasensible was a singularly equivocal term in Eberhard's n~ind. Sometimes it designates what can no longer be consciously perceived in the sensible presentation, and sometimes it denotes a being of which no sensible image is possible. Because of tllis equivocation Eberhard can den10nstrate that space and time are composed of simple elements, and, since he is the victim of an incredible illusion, still go on to show that these simple elements are intelligible. But it is false that space and time are composed of simple beings. What is given in them is divisible into as many parts as space and time themselves. They are infinitely divisible, in which case no simple element can be given to us. Therefore the matter contained in them is likewise divisible to infinity. The error to be found at the basis of Eberhard's reasoning consists in conceiving space and time as if they were abstract concepts, in thinking of space and time as common notes belonging to a multiplicity of concrete times and spaces. Actually it must be said not that they are abstract, but that they are employed in abstracto, that is, without any reference to an empirical condition. Eberhard allowed himself to be misled by a false interpretation of Leibniz. Leibniz did speak of matter, but in his matter the simple element was the meta-sensible foundation and certainly not one of its constitutive fragments. This thesis is perfectly consistent with the Critical teaching. Furthermore, it is contradictory to divide an intuition into non-sensible elements. It is clear that if no constitutive element can be perceived by the senses, then the total or th.e composite intuition cannot be either. The fact that an in1age does not correspond to an element is not enough to raise the element to the rank of the meta-sensible: for that, there must be a radical separation from intuition. In consequence, the two bases which Eberhard adopted as starting-points are shown to be deficient. The thesis about sufficient reason is vitiated by an ignoratio elenchi: that about sin1ple being is manifestly false. What conclusion must be drawn from this about the method of metaphysics, which Eberhard, opposing his conception to that of the Criticaltnethod, regards as involving

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a passage to the meta-sensible? The Critical method limits the objective use of pure reason to the domain of the sensible; Eberhard's n1ethod leads to an indefinite and indefinable extension of pure reason. Eberhard took his stand on the two above-n1entioned tl1eses in trying to show that the meta-sensible can be discerned even in the sensible. He held that space and time, and consequently the sensible phenomenon, have undoubtedly a subjective basis i11 the knowi11g subject, but also an objective foundation in the object. Kant recognised this. He makes a concession which could be dangerously misleading, but which is too explicit to be treated as a simple linguistic slip. Fortunately, however, the explanation which he gives makes the concession relatively innocuous. What he does hold is that the objective foundation of phenomena, that is, the thing in itself, does not enter into the phenomenon, but constitutes its foundation outside space and time. It must be adn1itted, however, that this text could be interpreted as if Kant recognised a degree of knowability in the world in itself, and in what followed Eberhard did not fail to interpret it in this manner. What is quite certain in any case is that this correction brings the Kantian Aesthetic much closer to that of Leibniz. They are not however identical, for Kant maintains in all its rigour the objection that the whole Leibnizian position depends finally on the false distinction between sensibility and understanding. For Leibniz, the sensible "is the obscure, and the intelligible is the clear representation of the object. This means that the real problem, which is to discover whether there is a knowledge to which no intuition can correspond, is made to vanish. Kant replies to this question in the negative, Eberhard in the affirn1ative. Kant denies the possibility of such knowledge because the difference between our faculties is more than a mere difference of degree in the logical clarity of our presentations. OUf faculties are distinguished botll by origin and by content. There is therefore no fundamel1tal identity between them. It follows that one type of"knowledge cannot be transmuted into another merely by denying generic differences. Theoretically there was a way of saving the transcendent 148

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metaphysics of the Wolffians with all its claims, namely by an appeal to an intellectual intuition producing a purely intelligible matter. The Critical philosophy had admitted the tlleoretical possibility of such an intuition, but maintained its unreality in the human order. We have only sensible intuition. On the other hand, innate ideas, the supreme hope at this point, must be rejected. I hope that it is not necessary to examine again the justly celebrated text where Kant categorically rejects this worst of all soluti.ons to the transcendental problem. All our representations are acquired: only the receptivity and the spontaneity of our faculties of knowledge can be considered coexistential with human thought. This receptivity consists in the human capacity to have spatial representations; it never denotes a representation of space. It follows that the method of saving transcendent metaphysics attempted by Eberhard is fundamentally erroneous: it falsifies the nature of sensibility. This is the point where the paths of Leibniz and of Kant radically bifurcate. This is the one point where the most ingenious interpretation of the texts is bound to fail. The Critical philosophy cannot be contained within the strict lin1its of Leibnizian thought. Kant attempted the very opposite: in the last part of his work, which is more picturesque than convincing, he tried to bring Leibniz into the framework of the Critical philosophy. Eberhard had spoken in the name of Leibniz and had not concealed his belief that he was greater than Kant. Kant thought that it was good politics to concede to Leibniz as much as was compatible with his own thought (without of course conceding anything to the Eberhardian interpretation), with th.e intention of showing to the whole world to what extent Eberhard's mind was closed to the deeper meaning of Leibnizian thought. His task consisted in showing how themes found in Leibniz can be considered as timid anticipations of his own Critical themes. Kant appealed successively to sufficient reason, to the monadology, and to the pre-established harmony. Leibniz, he says, cannot have seriously meant to erect the principle of sufficient reason into an objective law of nature. By the principle of contradiction we know only 149


what is already part of the content of a logical subject. If we claim to know something which goes beyond it, there must be a reason which will validate this additional information. The principle of sufficient reason sanely interpreted is simply the affirmation that in synthetic knowledge a special ground beyond the logical content of a subject is necessary. The principle therefore only opens perspectives on metaphysical inquiries which extend beyond the domain of logic. Leibniz did not carry out these inquiries. By the principle of sufficient reason 11e postulated precisely the inquiries to which Kant devoted himself. The monadology, on the other hand, only obscures the Critical philosophy by misunderstanding it. Leibniz was too good a mathematician not to be aware that the view that a body is composed of simple beings is i11compatible with the clear teaching of mathematics. Therefore the monadological conception does not apply to the body as a sensible object, but relates uniquely to the unknowable substratum of this body, that is, to the intelligible world. The same is true of the pre-established harmony: body and soul are distinct as unknowable substrata of phenomena, but as phenomena they are not distinct. Since the phenomenon is a representation and unites the faculties which make it what it is, it is necessary to look for the true meaning of the Leibnizian harmony in the nlode of union of our faculties. Their harmony is easily discoverable a priori through their collaboration in possible experience. The schematism therefore constitutes the foundation of the harmony of our faculties in view of the formal constitution of experience. From this formal harmony there immediately results harmony in its material constitution in virtue of the Critical principle that the conditions of experience are also the conditions of the object of experience. Therefore the harmony seen by Leibniz in the objects of experience is the natural consequence of the harmony of our faculties in the constitution of experience. It is therefore probable that Leibniz envisaged only this regulative role accorded to the idea of harmony. It expresses the obligation of the mind to understand ourselves and things as if they were adapted to a teleology due to a supreme causality. 15 0

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I should be the first to affirm that in the interests of his cause Kant does manifest violence to the thought of his predecessor and that Leibniz would have seen only a travesty of his teaching in this appendix. This does not matter greatly, for the Kantian tactics are clear. He wished to have the great name of Leibniz on his own side in order to counter the tactics of his opponent. Indeed, while reading Kant's interpretation we feel that Leibniz was aware of the urgency of the problem raised and solved by Kant. The originality and validity of the Critical philosophy is skilfully exhibited to its conten1.poraries by the demonstration that the Leibnizian metaphysics itself is a kind of distant anticipation of the Critical philosophy. The Critical philosophy thus loses a great part of its revolutionary appearance. Kant had good reasons for believing that the appeal wl1ich Eberhard addressed to Leibniz would eventually turl1. into a solemn homage to the Critical philosophy. For by examining the basis of Leibnizian thought the Critical philosophy constitutes a finer defence of that great philosopl1.er than does the outmoded Wolffianism in terms of which Eberhard wished to understand him. If we put accuracy of interpretation aside, the Entdeckung shows us that Kant was able to conduct a public debate, that he knew how to use vigorous ad hominem arguments, and tl1at 11e could extricate himself from a difficult situation with a skill which commands our admiration.

2 VARIATION ON THE SAME THEME cf. La Deduction III, 444-90

The class of physics in the Academy of Berlin had set a competition in 1788 on the question of the progress realised in metaphysics since the death of Leibniz. By son1e n1ischance this question had been lost sight of until 1790, then the time-limit was twice extended, first to 1792 and then to 1795. This scientific body gave first prize to the memoir 15 1


presented by the Wolffian Schwab, and gave second prizes to two Kantians, Reinhold and Abicht. The Academy stipulated that it would not be content with a mere list of systems together with the nomenclature appropriate to them. The essays were also to reflect as exactly as possible, in the nature of the reasoning adopted, the actual state of philosophy. Schwab, convinced that luetaphysics was at the end of the century still in the state in whicll Leibniz had left it when he died, saw no progress. The Kantians WilO distinguished themselves in the competition confined themselves to praising the excellence of their own ideas and became, in fact, deeply involved in self-justification. The question set for the competition was of a type which naturally excited Kant's interest. Indeed it furnished him with an unhoped-for occasion to set side by side the philosophy which he had found prevalent in the middle of the century and the Critical philosophy in the definitive and complete form in which he bequeathed it to his contemporaries. Furthermore, since the Critical philosophy was exposed to cOITlbined attacks both from outmoded Wolffianisrn and from the l1ascent romanticism, the competition provided too good an occasion to miss. A prize from the Academy obtained under these conditions would have signified more than a mere recognition of excellence. It would have beell an occasion of considerable historical significance and would have officially established the fact that a philosophical period had come to an end and that the Critical era had opened victoriously with the destruction of its oppOl1ents. Kant actually thought of taking part in the competition some time in 1792, that is, after the second extension of the time-limit, but he abandoned the project for reasons unknown to us. They may have been purely personal reasons, SUCll as difficulties of old age or fear of censure. Let us not attempt to guess. In 1800 he sent to his old friend Rink three manuscripts intended for publication which. certainly showed that, in his mind at any rate, the text was ready to be submitted to public scrutiny as a work from his pen. The three manuscripts, as well as Rink's manl1er of editing them, naturally give rise to a host of problems, of criticisms, of explanations, 15 2

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and of attempts at reconstituting the text. I have tried to deal with these elsewhere, but it is not appropriate, I think, to undertake that task again here. Two of the manuscripts, it may be noted in passing, do not form two independent texts, but rather two parts belonging organically to the same memoir : the third reopens the whole question, but abandons it very quickly. The incomplete text bears the title Welches sind die wirklichen Fortschritte die die Metaphysik seit Leibnitz's und Wolf's Zeiten in Deutschland gemacht hat? It may be taken as certain that this memoir could well have been one of the most interesting of Kant's works. The survey of the past contained in it would have been doubly precious. First, it throws light on his teaching, for Kant had the whole of his system before his eyes; he was in a position to compare it easily with Wolffianism and to give it the place which he personally inte11ded for it. Secondly, this incomplete work, such as it is, tells us about Kant's intellectual preoccupations. It allows us to watch the repercussions in his thinking brought about both by the aggressive returll of WolffianislTI and by that apostasy of his pupils to be discussed in the next section. It marks an important stage in the process by wl1ich the distinction between the Critical propaedeutic and the transcendental system became obscured in Kant's mind. Kant at last comes down from the abstract heights of pure speculation into the arena, where ideas are seen in their temporal environment and acquire historical significance. He clarifies the maill lines of the gigantic effort lying behind an intellectual career devoted entirely to the elucidation of one sole problem. Kant had just contrasted the Critical philosophy with Wolffianism in the Entdeckung: he takes up the same task again in the Fortschritte, but in quite a different fashion. This first work devoted to defence of his views stays on a diplomatic plane of conciliation: it was politic for him to bridge as far as possible the gulf which separated the two systems. In the Fortschritte Kant abandoned polemics. It was now to his advantage to exhibit in all its force the originality of his Critical philosophy, which he interprets as the unique advance achieved in the course of the eighteenth 153


century. At the same time, the occasion allowed him to define more accurately the essential contours of this philosophy and to introduce certain peculiarities which mark an indubitable development in the content of his thought. Among these may be mentioned the grouping of the whole discussiol1 around the living kernel of the synthetic activity of the subject, and the increasingly important part played by formal intuition, which makes it possible for the Aesthetic and the Analytic finally to fuse together in a single creative synthesis. No other work shows so clearly how absurd is the positivist interpretation of the Critical philosophy according to which Kant is simply the grave-digger of metaphysics. Kant sees metaphysics as the most powerful spring of the human personality. He believes in the indestructibility of the metaphysical disposition. He makes no attempt to uproot it but tries to render it invulnerable. It is around the notion of metaphysics that Kant arranged his whole work. At first he defines it, tl1en he measures it against the Critical philosophy (which he discusses once again in its most important articulations), and he marks its progress by detailing the three stages which he thinks can be distinguished in its evolution. By means of this plan it is easy to orient oneself in this memoir. Under the direct inffuence of Eberhard and the Entdeckung, Kant defines metaphysics as the science of the passage from the sensible to the meta-sensible, that is, as the science which depicts for us the attempt of the mind to liberate itself from the conditions of the sensible. This notion of metaphysics is at once subdivided into a material and a formal. notion. Considered materially, metaphysics corresponds to ontology or to the study of the whole domain of a priori knowledge without distinction of type, so that the distinction earlier established between it and transcendental philosophy disappears almost completely. This ontology can be applied primarily to determinate objects, but it has never been developed in this way because the apriori knowledge involved in physics has never been clearly differentiated from physics itself. Kant uses the term 'immanent' for a metaphysics which codifies the a priori laws of physics. Another form of this metaphysics deals with the non-sensible. This was 154

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indeed his classical conception, which cannot simply be rejected as false because Kant had recognised the positive value of the Critique in 1787. In addition to this first definition based on its avowed purpose, Kant also defines metaphysics by its method and its procedures. He sees in it the science of rational knowledge througll concepts which stresses those principles which, taken as a whole, form the system of pure theoretical philosophy. To this metaphysics falls the task of studying and evaluating the capacity of the subjective functions involved in knowing. It presupposes the preliminary critique of pure reason which determines what reason can clainl when related to experience or when freed from this relationship. A study of the progress made by metaphysics since the death of Leibniz must be a study of metaphysics in its double modality. But these two modalities are not co-ordinate. The primary concern is to concentrate on the nature and validity of metaphysics as method and as system of theoretical knowledge. This is the object of a critique of pure reason, and this critique must, therefore be conceived as the general propaedeutic to metaphysics. However, an appreciation of the progress achieved by a science presupposes some standard of measurement. In a priori knowledge this will be the idea of what must be done in this order, and such an idea allows us to appreciate what has been done. It is the theoretical Critique which states this ideal conception and Kant re-expounds the whole section dealing with it. He arranges this exposition, as in the Prolegomena, around the a priori synthetic judgment: he establishes the reality of this type of judgment, then its validity, and finally the synthetic extension of a priori knowledge. The postulation of such a judgment or even the recognition of its reality carries us immediately outside the field of fornlallogic within which the synthetic judgment is unintelligible. Leibniz was completely unaware of it, and the first advance made by nletaphysics since his death consequently consists in tIle recognition of this type ofjudgment. The otller advance consists in the solution of the problem which it poses. The essence of the Critical philosophy, and at the same time its value in the history of philosopllical 155

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ideas, lies in its having accomplished this. As to the possibility of this type of judgment, Kant repeats the argument given in the Critique without any modifications. The real originality of the exposition given in Kant's incomplete memoir is to be found in the third object of inquiry, that is, in the distinction between the synthetic judgment and the a priori knowledge gained by the synthetic judgment. This distinction can be interpreted in two different ways. Indeed, it includes the question, not how mathematics is possible, but how mathematics is applicable to physical objects, and how this physics can be extended to the metasensible. It includes also the question of its objective validity. If knowledge is always objective, and if the synthetic judgnlent is not always necessarily so, how can the synthetic a priori, whose essence is purely formal in itself, be objectified? As in all the other expositions, this arrangement of the memoir around the problem of the synthetic a priori is constantly upset by the other positio quaestionis concerning the possibility of experience. T"his is often represented as the highest task of transcendental philosophy. The memory of the sceptical reviewers wh,o criticised the arbitrary character of his conception of experience is very much in Kant's mind here. In spite of that, this twofold formulation of the Critical problem does not appear self-contradictory here either, although Kant continues to leave his flank open to the sceptical objection since by extension of meaning Erfahrung and Erkenntnis are synonyms. But it may be s"een that while Kant prefers the formula of the synthetic judgment when he discusses questions connected with the metaphysical deduction, 11e prefers the formula of experience when he discusses questions related to the transcendental deduction. In this way the possibility of intuition and of the a priori concept is resolved without recourse to experience, while the objective validity of these elements is not deduced from the analysis of the synthetic judgment itself. It will be appreciated that in this essay I cannot again discuss in detail all the arguments in the Critical philosophy which deal with these two problems and particularly with the problem of objectivity. Analysis by reason can explain 15 6

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the thought of th.ese objects. But there is no immediate inference from thought or from the concept to the real possibility of the object. We must therefore look to another procedure to show how the a priori concept functions in connection with intuition, which is how objectivity is explained. The manuscript entitled' No. I ' provides the explanation following the inverse route. As in 1787 he opens the debate with the Critical notion of Erkenntnis which is made up of the concept and intuition; he studies these elements from the point of view first of their possibility and then of their validity, and this corresponds to the metaphysical and the transcendental deductions. This plan, which is the result of a clear and precise retrospective view of the internal structure of the Critical philosophy, represents a great advance over the Critique itself. At an earlier stage I accused the Critique of making inevitable the distinction between Aesthetic and Analytic, thus necessitating frequent reciprocal corrections. But in the memoir the unity of the two parts is shown clearly in Kant's reasoning. He was doubtless made aware of the need for this when the doubts and hesitations of men ·like Maimon, Beck, Schultze, and Reinhold reached him. It is not without interest to note that at the time of writing the fragments Kant was discussing the vvhole matter with Beck. He took over from Beck the proper principle with which to face the task of soldering together and unifying the different parts of the Critique. Kant in any case gave his unqualified approval in the middle of 1792 to the reorganisation of the Critical philosophy attempted by Beck under the aegis of the principle of Zusammensetzung. The same purpose of unifying the two parts of the Critical philosophy explains the growing importance assumed by the thesis of forulal intuition. In the Fortschritte it is made to imply the necessity of the existence of pure concepts and it postulates the principal factor in the demonstration of their objective validity. Time and space as determinate representations are constructed by the subject, and the function at work there is Zusammensetzung which is expressed by the pure concept. Time and space derive their objective validity from the very constructive process which exhibits 157


a concept in a priori intuition. It follows that the only non... sensible factor to be encountered in the analysis of knowledge in general is Zusammensetzung. This confirms Section 15 of the Critique of 1787, for Zusamlnensetzung is to conjunctio what a German term is to a foreign term. Kant abandoned his earlier expressions under the influence of his pupil Beck. There can be no doubt that Kant is now entering on the path of an intellectual dynamisn~ which leads logically to the idealisation of matter, which is produced by the work of understanding itself in the same manner as mathematical constructions. For the origin of a priori matter can only be found in understanding. The re-exposition of the doctrine in the Fortschritte shows clearly the correctness of this interpretation. The Aesthetic and the Metaphysical Deduction are recast without modification. The first deepening of the doctrine is to be found just at the point where Kant wants to reconstruct a logical passage from this deduction to the deduction of objectivity. A similar passage occurred in 1787, but in another place. The categories organically presuppose a corresponding intuition but not necessarily a spatio-temporal or sensible intuition. In themselves they are therefore independent of the specific form il~ which intuition is clotlled, and that will be tl~e foundation of the necessity of a deduction of their validity. If they were always bound to sensible intuition they would always be objective. Therefore the problem orlly arises when objectivity is supposed to reside in the applicatiol~ of the categories to the sensible. Formal illtuition furnishes the key to this whole demonstration. One of the original features of the Fortschritte is the way in which the Critical problem par excellence is solved by the opposition between en~piricism and rationalism. This cannot be found earlier. To the question whether pure knowledge presupposes sensible experience as the foundation of its objective validity, empiricism replies yes, while rationalism replies no. To adopt the empirical point of view is to fall into a contradiction, since then the a priori rule of experience would be itself empirical. Rationalism looks for a generating principle of a priori rules beyond perception and finds it in Zusammensetzung. The latter is the source of the a priori 15 8

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factors involved in knowledge; it thus creates formal intuition and clothes all sensible representations without distinction in the same way. The reciprocal relation manifested by a priori intuition and the category in the constitution of experience is raised to the rank of the supreme objectifying element. Objectivity has a validity limited to the given wherever this relation holds: when this relation does not hold there is no ground for speaking of objectivity. The function of exhibiting the category or the Zusammensetzung in the corresponding intuition amounts to what Kant calls the schematism, and he takes advantage of the occasion to reply to a very real criticism directed against this aspect of the Critique. I have already said on more than one occasion that the subsumptive procedure which characterises the schematism is not calculated to express the intellectual dynamism, stressed by Kant in this memoir, which allows the pure concept to be brought close to intuition. Kant was aware of this, for he appealed to the synthetic act to effect the definitive unity of the two constituents. In addition, the very principle invoked in the Fortschritte was to draw Kant's attention to a doctrine which the Critique did not annOUl1ce. The one unique a priori element is Zusammensetzung, he declares, following Beck. Taken in this way it is difficult to see how this function becomes differentiated, al1d yet it is clear that this originally single function is broken up in its concrete actualisation into a nun1ber of kinds of acts or of categories. The origin of their differentiation cannot be attributed to the llnique operation of this a priori element which is essentially a source of identity. These differentiations are required to correspond with the sensible presentations of objects in space and in time. That means, it seems to me, that the a priori diversity, the foundation of formal intuition, is the principle which differentiates the functions which are distinct from Zusammensetzung in general. This a priori diversity therefore acquires capital in1portance in this development since it sets the whole transcendental apparatus in action. Under these conditions it is highly regrettable to have to report that Kant prudently abstained from giving a clear and precise account of the origin of this a priori diversity. Everything points to the conclusion that 159


at this juncture in Kant's thought it has no other origin than the activity of the logical subject. This means that after all it is Beck and Fichte who are right in their exegesis of the Critical philosophy. After being subjected to severe criticism Kant had recast his teaching arId had brought it into line with the new tendencies to which he was always sensitively alert. Do the newly illtroduced articulations mean that Kant abjured his earlier expositions? This conclusion is in no way necessary since they are not contradictory. Kant was aware that" his teaching had been enlarged and developed by his pupils and he re-thought it in terms of their method of exegesis and of their vocabulary. This explains why the Fortschritte represents a useful additional text. Although it does not develop any standpoints wh.ich are absolutely new, it opens a perspective on elements in the Critical philosophy which Kant had not explored in the constructive decade from 1781 to 1790, either from lack of opportunity or lack of courage. This n1.ore or less accurate exposition of the Critical philosophy was not introduced simply for the pleasure of constantly re-hashing the same doctrine. On the contrary it had a very precise role to play. It brings to light the standard which makes it possible to exhibit the degree of philosophical progress to be credited to the Critical philosophy. After he had defined metaphysics and drawn out further implications of the Critical philosophy, Kant completed his reply to the question which formed the subject of the competition by studying the progress represented by the Critical philosophy whe11' compared with the WolffioLeibnizian philosophy. The exposition of the Critical philosophy is not an end in itself but a means of demonstration. When it is necessary to appreciate the progress made by the science of metaphysics, defined as a science of the passage from the sensible to the meta-sensible, the Critical philosophy appears as the standard, since it alone permit~ us to determine the objective use and also the limits of a priori knowledge and leads to the conclusion that objective knowledge of the meta-sensible is illusory. Is this a complete illusion or is it only relative? To declare that it is complete is to fall into scepticism. Kant 160

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was to hold to the view that it was a relative illusion and was to discover in the critique of reason itself the elements necessary to support the view that it is a relative illusion. It also marks the only advance which Kant is able to detect. He believed it essential to distinguish between two kinds of progress in metaphysics: completely illusory progress where metaphysics claims to knovv the meta-sensible, and genuine progress. Unfortunately Kant keeps on obscuring the issue because lle keeps on confusing the two kinds of progress. The illusory progress is always worked out in three stages: dogmatic progress, sceptical progress, and Critical progress, with these terms understood in their COUlmon acceptation. Real progress is subdivided into the same stages with the same names, but this tilne understood in a quite peculiar sense. It is therefore worth while attempting to distinguish what each of them really amounts to. The first, admittedly illusory, progress whose development is sketched by I(ant, describes a curve going from dogmatic illusion up to Critical prudence. Dogmatism consisted in the elaboration of a science of the meta-sensible without prior examination of the possibility of a priori knowledge in general. It rested on one hand on the misleading method of mathematics, and on the other 011 the negative confirmation of experience which cannot contradict SUCl1 a science. Scepticism then presents reason as engaged in a retreat which cannot be halted. The universal doubt in regard to the possibility of a priori knowledge is not significant in the case where the a priori is related to the sensible; but it marks undoubted progress when it is interpreted as an invitation addressed to dogmatism to criticise its own a priori principles. Here the weakness of dogmatism is clearly revealed; not because dogmatic metaphysics conflicts with experience, but because the critical examination counselled by scepticism places it before the antinomies, thereby destroying all confidence in reason itself. There is here an evident confusion between Pyrrhonian scepticism and the criticism furnished by the transcendental dialectic. Finally, the Critical philosophy is the last stage covered by Kant in his celebrated trilogy. Its purpose is to determine all the conditions governing the extension of (2,491)

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a priori knowledge to the sensible and to the meta-sensible. These three stages· could have perhaps settled the place which the Critical philosophy occupies in the evolution of philosophy and could have illuminated the curve of progress, if Kant had really worked out the historical stages in the manner required by the Academy of Berlin. However, he was no historian and he quickly abandoned the first more or less historical triad in order to sketch another doctrinal triad which corresponded better to his systematic tenlperamente This new triad consists in a theoretical dogmatic stage called Wissenschaftslehre, a second sceptical stage called Zweifellehre and, finally, a third practico-dogmatic stage called Weisheitslehre. The first stage constructs scientific theoretical knowledge or a Critical system of knowledge; the second represents a discipline of reason or of rational knowledge; the third guides us in the use of practical reason. However, far from simply developing these three stages according to a uniform plan, Kant deligllts in the accumulation of difficulties by confusing the points of view contained within the framework of the new triad. In tIle manuscripts there is a first form in which the doctrine of science denotes the Aesthetic and the Analytic combined, with scepticism corresponding to the Dialectic and wisdom to practical reason. Another form is to be found, however, in which science corresponds to ontology, scepticism to cosn1.ology and psychology, and wisdom to theology. The description of these three stages shows how the two forms can be reconciled when their paths cross: the first is modelled on the structure of the Critical philosophy, the second follows more faithfully the classical divisions of metaphysics. Dogmatism consists either in the exposition of the Critique or in a critique ofWolffian ontology. Scepticism denotes in both cases the Critical Dialectic, while the Critical stage corresponds either to the practical Critique or to a con1.bination of the Dialectic and the practical Critique. In the detail of his exposition Kant gives evidence of a marked preference for the second form. In this way the exposition of the dogmatic stage is generally transformed 162

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into a close criticism of Wolffio-Leibnizian ontology. In this Kant conducts the discussion along the lines of the three principles mentioned in the last paragraph, but to them 11e adds a fourth, namely, the principle of indiscernibles. Kant adopts a completely changed attitude towards his predecessor. The demands of his polemic forced Kant in the Entdeckung to reduce as far as possible the distance between himself and Leibniz. Th.e Fortschritte on the other hand shows that the backward movement of the Entdeckung should not be taken too seriously. He accuses Leibnizian dogmatism of moving exclusively in the logical sphere, when, in order to explain the existence of things, the formal principles of reaSOll are invoked; without adding any new elements Kant criticises the conception of intuition as a faculty of obscure knowledge, so that the true progress nlade by the Critical philosophy consists in 11aving liberated philosophy from this dogmatic leap into the realm of the meta-sensihIe. Scepticislll corresponds to the Dialectic, which takes exception to any special metaphysics. Although it was announced as a critique of cosmology and of rational psycll0logy, it is linlited to calling attention to tIle antinomies. The mobilisation of the antinomies always had as its object the denunciation and disarming of cosmological dogmatisnl, but here it has also a positive subsidiary purpose. The antinomies represent the hardest test to which reason can be subjected, and from this springs the necessity of th.e distinction between phenomena and noumena. This recalls how tIle dynamic antinolllies had established the reality of noumena and indicated a way of access to the domain of the transcendent by anticipating the practical solutioI:l which. this problem allows. As might be expected, it is the Critical stage which is treated with the most loving care. In keeping with the desiderata of the competition, Kant underlines in a positive section the possibility of the passage to the meta-sensible through practical reason and in a negative section rejects the Wolffian metaphysics. The Critique established beyond doubt that, within the limits of theoretical reason, knowledge of the nleta-sensible must be formally rejected. Despite 163


the agnosticism of this position, it also indicated the expedient by which reason can safely run the risk of a transcendent metaphysics. To know nature and to understand it are claimed to be two quite different things; to know it is to apprehend its phenon1enal reality which is rigorously mechanical; to understand it is to consider it as if it had produced things according to a purpose. This hypothesis is not justified by any scientific need but by a moral need. Freedom is an indisputable fact which is intelligible only by a final purpose to be found in the supreme good, which itself cannot be understood without the postulates of imn10rtality and the existence of God. We do not know these objects as they are in themselves, but as they must be if the supreme good is to be realised. The necessary acquiescence in an idea, or the acceptance of a theoretical proposition because of the needs of practical reason, is called faith. Therefore the theoretical path, or science, does not reach the meta-sensible; there is therefore no true passage from the sensible to the meta-sensible. On the other hand, by faith we realise these meta-sensible ideas, that is, we give them objects. Therefore, in the practical order the passage is real, and that is the sole advance to which metaphysics can lay claim. It is th.e same with practical theology. The Critical philosophy in its negative part challenges the vain attempts of cosmological theology to prove apodeictically the existence of God. There is never a true, direct proof of His existence, but it is once again postulated on the basis of the final cause of man. All argumentation is then always KaT'avOpw7ToV, never KaT'dA~OE(,av. Cosmological optimisn1, or the faith that the creation advances indefinitely towards the better, which results from cosmological theology, can never be the object of a theoretical and scientific proof: it is a demand of our moral nature. In consequence these concepts, which are false and unjustifiable within the theoretical framework, acquire validity and moral reality. The same is true of psychological theology: to prove the immortality of the soul is a wager; to find the necessity of immortality in the prolonging and conditioning of the moral fact furnishes practical certainty.

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In the Fortschritte therefore we are confronted with a rather peculiar conception of metaphysics. It is the science in which the passage from the sensible to the meta-sensible takes place. This passage is effected not by a philosophy analogous to that of Leibniz, but directly by the Critical trilogy. Thus the Critical pllilosophy, or in other words transcendental philosophy, no longer appears as a simple propaedeutic to a future system, but as an integral system of metaphysics, and this metaphysics is preceded by a Critique of pure reason which fixes the limits of its cognitive capacities. Therefore the Critique is an integral part of a transcendental philosophy and is not solely destined to serve as a support for it. Gradually transcendental philosophy merges with metaphysics itself. It includes ethics and theology. The structure of this system, Kant says in an appendix, is determined by two ideas, namely, the ideality of space and time and the cOIlcept of freedom. The ideality is the origin of phenon1enalism and it represents the main addition to the theoretical criticism. In consequence the deduction is only indirectly the Critical problem, so that the Fortschritte is closer to the note in the Anfangsgriinde than to the Critique. The ideality must be limited to opening perspectives on the meta-sensible. It is freedom which opens the way by which we penetrate to the meta-sensible. It must be remembered in what is to come that the Fortschritte in its Critical part is characterised by a progressive tendency towards idealism through the factor of Zusammensetzung, which is the constructive principle of knowledge. The same essay is distinguished in its historico-systematic part by a definite modification in the reciprocal relations between the great divisions of the Critique. The position of the Critique and also of transcendental philosophy has undergone considerable modification. The Critical whole in its three parts is raised to the level of philosophy itself instead of occupying, as in the tl1eoretical Critique, the modest place of a preliminary study. These two tendencies are increasingly to develop into the new axes of the master's thought, for Kant will soon set himself to give the final retouches to the eternal problem which filled his whole career. 165


3

THE APOSTATES cf. La Deduction III, 491-551

The Critical synthesis did not face criticisn1. only from men like Eberhard, who were rooted in the Wolffian tradition. Another surprise awaited Kant toward 1790, a surprise which was to arouse painful echoes in his mind during the last decade of his life. From the anonymous mass of his disciples there emerged some outstanding figures who, despite their admiration for their common n1aster, were determined to restate the Critical doctrine in an irreproachable form. In the pursuit of formal correction, however, they were unable to avoid making certain doctrinal corrections. Reinhold, Beck, and Fichte are the most noteworthy. Their bold alterations to the original Critical teaching produced a number of centrifugal movements. On each occasion Kant experienced the painful shock of betrayal and with some bitterness lle watched a wind of apostasy shake his school. The attitude of these men towards Kant was not hostile, for they were his principal lieutenants. Kant had just rU11 up against the heavy opposition of the schools, and the structure of the Critical philosophy did pres~nt a certain number of weaknesses which his enemies seized upon. The Kantians in their turn did not expect the consolidation of the Critical philosophy to come from the direct refutation of its opponents, but rather from a clearer focusing of the Critical philosophy itself. The Critical philosophy, according to the express desire of the master, was to form a rigorously deductive and perfectly coherent system. Now, Kant was still of the opinion that the Critique did not constitute such a system, but was simply a propaedeutic. This suggested that the ren1edy for several of the weaknesses was to construct the complete system of transcendental philosophy. The systematic search for the unique principle from which transcendentalism in its entirety would be seen to flow, constitutes 166

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the true motivating force of philosophy in this feverish fin de siecle. Kant rarely intervened personally in the struggle, but the two pages written against Fichte which brought his working life to a resounding end, acquire their full meaning within this framework, and their psycllological resonance is so deep that their logical weaknesses may be regarded with tolerance. The source of all the difficulties is the doctrine of the transcendent, which was the cause of the contradiction between the agnosticism which he professed with regard to it and the role which he assigned to it. The radical dualism between sensibility and understanding carried the germ of this contradiction which was fatal to the doctrinal unity of the system. Jacobi set the tone for a whole generation when in 1787 he coined the famous slogan: without the thing in itself one cannot enter into the Critical system; with it, one cannot stay inside it. A consistent Kantian can only be an idealist, because idealism is the only conclusion which the Critique permits. That was the programme of the exuberant philosophical activity whi~h can be observed from I 790 to 1800. A minority felt obliged to abandon the Critical philosophy in favour of a radical scepticism, while the majority deserted it in favour of romantic idealism. The first apostate, malgre lui, was Reinhold, who had paved the way for the Critical philosophy in the learned world of Germany. In I789 he sent Kant his Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermogens (Essqy on a New Theory of the Human Capacity of Representation). Kant received it rather coldly because the success of the work could not fail to upset Kantian orthodoxy. The Vorstellungstheorie had scarcely appeared when it was exposed to the attacks of the orthodox. It is not a commentary but it provides material from wllich it would be possible to construct a system of philosophy on the Critical basis KaT' JgoX1Jv• Since the Critique was only the introduction, the extension of the Critical plan alone permits us to realise this end. The argument of the Critical philosophy was based on the arbitrary postulation of the physico-mathen1atical sciences as fact, and it argued regressively to the conditions of their possibility. Reinll0ld started from the Cartesian 16 7


principle which implies its own evidence, l1.amely, the existence in us of representations. The Critical philosophy in consequence can accept a complement a parte ante. Atten1.pting to deal with the most important things first, Kant had neglected the true first principle. He developed the doctrine of Erkenntnis or of the scientific knowledge of the object, but this doctrine must be held to be arbitrary as long as it is not preceded by a more elementary analysis which goes right to the genus of which knowledge is only a species. From the fact of consciousness Reinhold deduced a whole episten1.ology by borrowing his modes of operation fronl the storehouse of the Critical philosophy. Reinhold had overestimated his strength. Instead of being an olive branch his essay only succeeded in being a brand of discord. The Kantians considered this well-meant work to be that of an apostate, the Wolffians unmasked its internal weaknesses, the sceptics dispatched it mercilessly, and the Enesidemus of Schultze gave it the coup de grace. Despite his obstinate silence, Kant noticed that what was taking place was dangerous to him, because each blow against Reinhold affected him indirectly. He saw that his teaching would not emerge unharmed from the test to which the tempestuous zeal of Reinhold vvas submitting it. More firmly than ever the conviction grew in his mind that the Critique alone was the law from which there must be no deviation. This conviction explains the sort of enslavement to the letter which he wished in future to impose on his partisans. The curtain had barely fallen on this first psychological drama when Beck's non pOJsumus was to reproduce the painful experience of the Reinhold case. Meanwhile the sceptics rapidly denl0lished Reinhold's unfortunate essay. Maimon torpedoed tl1.e doctrine of the transcendent and saved the unity of the Critical philosophy by reabsorbing the matter of knowledge into the cognitive activity of the subject. After the disastrous Enesidemus of Schultze, Reinhold disappeared completely from the scene. At this point Kant based his last hope on his most brilliant pupil,]. S. Beck. He not only persuaded him into the path of philosophy, but he encouraged him in the work which was to be the source of grave dissension. The book was of 168

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course an exegetical work on the Critical philosophy. The first volume, which appeared in 1793, carried as its subtitle Auf Anrathen Kants, as a kind of authorisation from the master. However, the situation deteriorated in 1795 when Beck wanted to add to it a third volume under the title of 'Einzig moglicher Standpunkt aus welchen die critische Philosophie beurteilt werden muss' (' Only possible standpoint from which the Critical philosophy can be judged '). Everyone, it must be remembered, had taken a dislike to the doctrine of the transcendent. Some held that the Ding an sich was indispensable, while others took it to be incompatible with Critical principles. It was this problem which Beck proposed to resolve. It was true that Kant referred to the thing in itself, he pointed out, but did he not do that with the intention of accommodating himself to the conceptions of the public? Did not all the false interpretations of the Critical philosophy derive from the failure to recognise the fact that Kant wished to place himself at the level of his readers so as to lead them by measured stages towards his personal positions? If the answer is yes, all that is necessary is to correct the exposition of the Critical philosophy and to rewrite the Critique. Kant did indeed, said Beck, at first adopt the dogmatic level of his readers so as to conduct them step by step to his own transcendental level. To this source are to be traced all the equivocations which were detected in his work. It is necessary therefore to change the method. Kant went from the given to the synthetic unity. Beck proposed to go from the synthetic unity to the given, and therefore adopts a transcendental point of view right from the start. Beck was too much of a mathematician simply to follow Reinhold, who had postulated the fact of consciousness so as to seek out its constitutive acts. Beck wanted his readers to adopt the transcendental point of view by a deliberate act. The unique originative act is the act of representing, all act which is not taken as a fact, but as an invitation to postulate the fact. He sincerely believed that he was sacrificing nothing of the Critical philosophy since the transcendental deduction seemed to him to be the description in detail of this constructive process of the act of knowing. Indeed, 169


Kant started from the synthesis not as from the product of an act, but as from the very act which constructs our representations. In the construction of the object by this originating act, three problems are set which are to be found under other names in the Kantian Critique: (I) What is there before the originating act? (2) What specifically determines this first syntlletic act? (3) Wl1at specifically determines the representation of the general object in a representation of a determinate object? Kant replied to the first question by asserting the relative independence of the given diversity. It cannot be denied that by his method of successive approaches Kant fell into dogmatic realism. Instead of seeing in the diversity something which precedes the originating activity, Beck made it the product of the synthesis and the final term of the process of objective knowledge. Therefore a synthetic act is the absolute incipit of this knowledge and no constraining force either precedes or determines this act. This first act is never given as generally undetermined: it always takes the fornl of a determinate synthesis or of a category. Beck wanted to avoid the logical conception of the category according to which it is a concept. It is a function. It is the act itself, but in its concrete determination. Now this conception destroys in his mind the duality introduced by Kant between sensibility and understanding, wl~ich is also to be seen as an attempt to adapt his doctrine to the mind of his readers. Sensibility, indeed, is not to be taken as an independent faculty: there is no radical opposition between intuition and concept and the basis of their apparent dissimilarity 11as to be found in the synthetic act itself. Indeed Beck explained it by saying that a representation can be constructed either by going from the parts to the whole or from the whole to the parts. The first n1ethod yields the extensive categories of space, the other the intensive categories of reality. Intuition is the representation of a totality by the movement of thought, a path which goes from part to part. The mind in this way creates the spatial character of things. To represent something by the movement of the thinking activity going from the whole to the part is to determine its character of reality or to determine an empirical real. It

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follows that reality in all its aspects is produced by the synthetic act itself. Finally, Kant needed a schematism to achieve the subsumptive union between the sensible and the intellectual. Beck needed the same doctrine to resolve his third problem, but he rejected, and rightly so, the subsumption, a procedure too external to allow us to enter into the mechanisn1 of the act constituting the unity. The act is determined, according to him, vvhen concurrently with space it constructs time. The representative act was a ll10vement of thought which, in the case of spatial construction, goes from the parts to the whole. To be aware of this movement is to fix it, or to represent a determinate time. The representation of time determines by that very fact the original act which has produced it. This summary description of Beck's position indicates that it certainly diverged farther from Kant than he was prepared to admit. Such a criticism could only come from the mind of a mathematician aware that mathematics avoids the thorny problem of the transcendent by the constructive process which is its very foundation. Now in the second edition of the Critique, the doctrine of objectivity had pr~ sented striking analogies with this procedure in the notion of synthesis which, freed from the psychological apparatus, showed its objectifying function in the creation of the object. By modelling the Critical synthesis on the n1ethod of mathematical construction, Beck considerably simplified the process of the deduction. In this way he elin1inated everything which has to do with the given, and he rejected the sensitiveintellectual duality and made the whole apparatus of given, intuition, and concept proceed from the same syntheticoconstructive act. It cannot be said that Beck attempted to conceal anything from his master. He kept Kant scrupulously well informed once his personal conception of the Standpunkt seemed to him well founded. Nothing in Kant's attitude, as it appears in his letters to Beck, gives any indication of the final disillusionment. He made suggestions leading to greater precision and clarity of exposition, but there is nothing which hints at the revolution about to occur in the camp of the master. From 1794 on, 17 1


Kant locked himself up in the most absolute silel~ce. But he became concerned when Schultze, his faithful fellowcitizen, gave a very unfavourable review of Beck's work in which he said that it eliminated tIle Aesthetic as useless and that it constructed things by the understanding. Now these novelties had been published virtually with Kant's permission, but his patronage became singularly equivocal when it was made to cover contraband merchandise. Without intervening personally he was quite pleased when a young man, Tieftrunk by name, wished to undertake the task of making the reply. Although the second transcendental affair thus ended with Kant's silent displeasure, it l~ad a considerable effect on his thought. I-lis tenacity ill retaining his own expressions and conceptions should not mislead us. The functionalism of Beck passed insensibly to Kant who, perhaps without being aware of it, proceeded to integrate it into the pages of the Opus Postumum. Meanwhile, in the transcendentalist camp, J. G. Fichte was carefully watching the trend of events. He had embarked upon theoretical criticism fronl a sense ofobligation and upon moral criticism from personal taste. The whole moral personality of Fichte can be summed up by saying that, with his active temperament and moral disposition, his need for conviction clashed with the negativism of the theoretical Critique. The latter could not have attracted the mind of the young Fichte if he had not perceived that it was an indispensable introduction to the amazing moral philosophy which had brought about his suddell and total conversion to the Critical philosophy. He enrolled in one of Kant's courses but was received rather coldly. To get into the good graces of the master he produced his Essay on Revelation. This so altered Kant's opinioll about his pupil that he set himself to find a publisher for it. However, Fichte never felt narrowly dependent on Kant, because he too had clearly seen the formal faults inherent in the Critical system. As if the same spirit dominated this whole period, Fichte was to reject, like Reinhold and Beck, the exposition of the Critical philosophy and set out to seek the true foundation of the transcendental philosophy, which Kant had indeed guessed at but which he had not been able

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to develop. He was to be encouraged in this decision when he becan1e aware of the criticism which the sceptics directed against Reinhold's Essay. Although Reinhold's authority had been totally destroyed for him, this criticisn1 made him more and more distrustful of the Kantian doctrine. His faith in philosophy qua talis survived this crisis, and the Wissenschaftslehre, which he developed between 1794 and 1797 in some youthful books and essays, carried traces both of this faith and of his distrust of the comm011 master. The doctrine of Fichte is the science of science. The latter consists in a whole organised by a single principle which resides in the act of pure thought. The whole of knowledge thus begins with an absolutely first act in which the Kantian duality of subject and object of knowledge is fused into one. This act resolves itself into three subordinate acts: the thesis of the subject by itself, the antithesis of the not-self to the self, and their synthesis. In this act the self reveals itself as an activity and the not-self as a passivity. Contrary to Kant, who radically separates receptivity and spontaneity, Fichte attached then1 to one sole indivisible act of the self which posits itself as subject and as object. It is natural that this position should be identified with idealism and we see Fichte eliminating the thing in itself. One of the original features of his doctrine of science consisted precisely in his account of perception which, instead of being organically bound to a foreign given matter, once again takes its place, even more firmly than with Beck and Maimon, among the originating activities of the thinking subject. The Wissenschaftslehre in its turn started bitter controversies. But Fichte was not a nlan to listen in silence to this unfavourable concert. He published in quick succession two introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre, one addressed to Schelling and the other a reply to the orthodox Kantians. At this point the paths of Kant and of Fichte were about to cross, because the Beck affair was connected in Kant's mind with the Fichte affair. In 1797 Kant was challenged by a certain Schlettwein to declare publicly who was to be considered the faithful commentator on his doctrine, Reinhold, Beck, or Fichte. He pronounced himself as against all of 173


them and in favour of his amanuensis Schultze. With that pronouncement the three critics were excommunicated. The following year an anonymous critic repeated in a short article in the Literatur Zeitung of Erlangen that Kant was the master, Reinhold the propagator, and Fichte the transcendental philosopher par excellence, and that it was more than desirable that Kant should explain himself clearly on the subject of the doctrine of Fichte. In 1799, probably with the collaboration of Schultze, Kant wrote the famous' Declaration against Fichte' which constituted his last public contribution to transcendental philosophy. The Literatur Zeitung of Jena, still devoted to him, hastened to publish it on 28 August. What apparently affected Kant most deeply in the apostasy of his three disciples, and above all of Fichte, was the accusation that he had failed to con1plete the Critical philosophy. That wounded him deeply, since the completio11 of the Critical synthesis had obscured the plan sketched in the theoretical Critique, and twenty years of constant reflection on transcendental philosophy had led him to identify criticism and philosophy. It is quite intelligible then that Fichte's claim should have appeared to him to be a complete misunderstanding of his thought. It is no less intelligible that his amour propre should have suffered when he became aware that the public was deserting the orthodox version of the Critical philosophy. Fichte reacted with dignity to Kant's harsh public declaration against him, but it contributed to his decline. However, the one who benefited was not Kant but Schelling. In the first part of his Declaration Kant protested energetically against the identification of the Critical philosophy with Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre. More important for us is the other part. Fichte clainled that the Critical philosophy in the Kantian version is simply a propaedeutic. , Well,' replied Kant, ' in tIle Critique of Pure Reason I made completeness the true criterion of a science of pure reason.' It is therefore quite evident that in Kant's mind the Critical philosophy was the complete system of transcendental philosophy. It is unfortunately 110t Fichte but Kant who is here the victim both of an illusion and of an unfortunate slip of 174

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memory, since he himself had repeated ad nauseam that the Critique is not the transcendental system but the introduction to it. As the whole enterprise represented by the Critical philosophy neared final completion, however, the Critiques became identified with the transcendental philosophy itself. It has already become apparent in Ollf study of the development of Kant's thought that from 1787 onwards the original simple plan sketched in the theoretical Critique (Critiquemetaphysics of nature-metaphysics of morals) underwent considerable modification. The transcendental philosophy, which includes the three Critiques, is as a whole the preface to the twofold metaphysics referred to in the past. Therefore if Fichte was in error Kant had only himself to blame. The argument which he invokes, namely, that he has made the completeness of his achievement into a criterion of its truth as a science of pure reason, carries very little weight in the discussioll. Indeed he nlade similar claims in the Metaphysical Deduction and in the Methodology; but, after only a few intervening pages, he w'as still referring to the Critique as a propaedeutic. When we cast a brief glance backwards we get the impression of having witnessed a psychological drama, the gravity and extent of which is revealed in the Declaration against Fichte. We may speak even of a threefold drama running through tile twilight of Kant's life: a drama of the spirit, a drama of the heart, and the drama of an epoch. Kant saw the defects and the weaknesses of his system being bared to public view. His attempts to reconcile conflicting tendencies in his thinking prevent the system from being straightforward. It is a system full of nuances which are the results of his constant scruples. The resulting system, containing within itself convictions based on diverging sources of inspiration, was packed with explosives which at the first shock were to destroy the weak and narrow framework of his ideas. Theses like that of the existence of the transcendent, of the duality between our faculties, and the simply provisional and introductory character of the Critique, are to be found side by side with the idealist phenomenalism, the tendency to unity, and the desire for completeness. The internal conflict of these theses in the 175

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KANTIAN

THOUGHT

Critique was destined to explode outside the work and was bound to produce a profound schisrYl among its exponents, men whon1 Kant had himself educated and trained in Critical philosophy. The three apostates were simply victims of the rectitude of their thought and of their desire for consistency. On the other hand the end of I

The Development of Kantian Thought

Nietzsche's Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of His Thought

Nietzsche's Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of His Thought

Nietzsche's Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of His Thought

The Kantian Philosophy of Space

Kantian Ethics

Kantian Consequentialism

Culture, Thought, and Development

Culture, Thought, and Development

Kantian Consequentialism

Development of psychological thought in India

Welfare in the Kantian State

The Political Thought of Sun Yat-Sen: Development and Impact

My Kantian Ways

The Power of Thought

The Anatomy of Thought

The language of thought

The Water of Thought

The Water Of Thought

The Water of Thought

The Language of Thought

The Laws of Thought

The Stuff of Thought

The Fundamentals of Thought

The Power of Thought

The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath

Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism

The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath

The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom

The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath

Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism

The Development of Kantian Thought

Nietzsche's Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of His Thought

Nietzsche's Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of His Thought

Nietzsche's Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of His Thought

The Kantian Philosophy of Space

Kantian Ethics

Kantian Consequentialism

Culture, Thought, and Development

Culture, Thought, and Development

Kantian Consequentialism

Development of psychological thought in India

Welfare in the Kantian State

The Political Thought of Sun Yat-Sen: Development and Impact

My Kantian Ways

The Power of Thought

The Anatomy of Thought

The language of thought

The Water of Thought

The Water Of Thought

The Water of Thought

The Language of Thought

The Laws of Thought

The Stuff of Thought

The Fundamentals of Thought

The Power of Thought

The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath

Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism

The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath

The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom

The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath

Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism

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