Kant Lecture 6

Without sensibility, no object would be given to us; without understanding, no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind. So, we see that, for Kant, concepts—the conceptual dimension—is actually the seeing element in experience. For there to be an experience, in contrast to a sensation, to a bare sensation, to the triggering of events in a sensory organ—that is not an experience. For there to be an experience, there must be an experience of something, and for there to be a something, it has to be an entity subsumable under a general class of things, whether it’s a chair or a person. So, there is a required conceptual framework for experience itself, and it is experience and understanding that together constitute the foundations of all knowledge. Without these concepts, no more than a parade of sensations would take place, and this parade could never rise to the level of a “this” or a “that.”

Now, I’d not want you to understand this as a species of cognitive relativism. This part of Kant’s argument, with appropriate reservations, may be taken to be a chapter in the very anthropology of thought, but not as a species of relativism. And when I say a chapter in the anthropology of thought, recall how frequently Kant reminds us that the argument in place pertains to us, pertains to a creature of a certain kind, pertains to human beings. I think I’ve mentioned in an earlier lecture that he expresses impatience with those who are impatient with this divide he’s established between phenomena and noumena. Doesn’t this lead to skepticism? Why, indeed, can we not comprehend things as in themselves they really are? And Kant is prepared to say, well, imaginably, there is a creature that could, but not us. And people who are impatient with that division are asking—this is very nearly a quote—are asking for the impossible. They’re asking for us not to be human beings. So, it’s not a relativistic epistemology, but it is an anthropology of knowledge. It presupposes a creature of a certain kind, and that’s the only kind Kant can discuss with any authority, and it’s the only kind to which Kant’s argument can relate directly and with authority. He probably would be interested in that literature that we’ve spawned in the last 30 years on “what it’s like to be a bat,” but I don’t think he’d be interested for long.

Now, the manner in which the external world is objectified is according to rules that are at once universal and necessary within the community of rational human beings. This is another way of saying this isn’t a relativism that leads to skepticism. The rules that govern the synthesis of the manifold of sensuous content—these rules are universal and necessary. It’s conceivable that some different creature might subsume appearances under different rules; that, of course, is not only something we don’t know, it’s something we couldn’t know. The emphasis here is on what is knowable in principle by the sort of creature that we happen to be. So, knowledge in the Kantian scheme is an amalgam of sensibility and understanding, such that what cannot in principle enter into experience cannot in principle be known.

And so, when he says, right at the outset—but of course, Hume was right in saying that all of our knowledge arises from experience—that part of Hume, Kant has no trouble with at all, and he emphasizes it. He says the mistake Hume made was that, in assuming that all of our knowledge arises from experience, our knowledge is grounded in experience, and what Hume failed to appreciate is the necessary elements of cognition that must be in place for there to be experience, and for experience to merge with understanding in a rule-governed way, in such a way as to be generative of knowledge. You know, all that to be known, an object must go beyond an element of experience, and it must be located within a conceptual framework.

So, what’s required now is an argument that establishes the necessity and universality of the pure concepts. How come they’re not just haphazard? Required is what Kant refers to as the transcendental deduction of the categories. Now, he says, “Not every kind of knowledge a priori should be called transcendental, but that only by which we know that—and know how—certain representations can be employed or are possible purely a priori.” Transcendental, in the sense of establishing the necessary enabling conditions for something else to take place. So, how do sensations of the most rudimentary sort enter into the formation of concepts, and how does the manifold of otherwise disparate appearances become a unified experience in a given consciousness? Remember, we not only have to get all of this flotsam unified, but it must be unified in a consciousness, and it has to be unified in a consciousness that actually has a street address, so that all this is taking place in you or you. It’s not just out there somewhere. So, there has to be a self-consciousness in which all of this somehow takes place, and this has to be achieved without begging the question.

Now, I do want to say something—I have before—on the kind of deduction that Kant has in mind, this transcendental deduction of the categories. I mentioned this to you before: Kant did have an interest—Kant had an interest in everything—but he did have an interest in certain political events of the time, jurisdictional disputes, boundary and border disputes in various German principalities, and so forth. He didn’t make a close study of this, but anyone with an interest in that certainly would have been exposed to what were referred to as “deductions.” These are filings, formal filings; today, we talk about them as legal briefs, to establish the authenticity of a claim. And that’s the sort of deduction he has in mind. He’s talking about an argument that a jury would find compelling. In other words, it’s not a logical deduction of the categories; it’s a transcendental deduction. And the deduction in question is to make out this case: since we can do such and such, since this happens across all of us—there’s no question about it—don’t you agree that for this to be the case, that must be the case? For the conceptual lives we live, for the knowledge claims that we routinely make, do you not see that there are certain pure categories of the understanding that must be in place? They must constitute the template, the framework, the necessary conditions for the knowledge we know we have, you see? It’s that kind of argument.

And now, he must provide the argument for the conclusion that we are in a position to make objective judgments regarding entities in the external world. And judgment now becomes pivotal; it’s the linchpin of the cognitive processes that he’s trying to establish. Judgment itself, or Urteil. So, we see that an experience is of a something; it’s not merely a parade of disconnected sensations. There must be a means, not contained in the sensations themselves, by which these experiences are forged. And Kant says the way to begin an understanding of how this takes place is with two supreme principles. So, we now get to the two supreme principles of the first Critique. One pertains to sensibility, and one pertains to understanding.

The supreme principle in relation to sensibility is that “the manifold of intuition,” quote, “should be subject to the formal conditions of space and time.” That’s the transcendental aesthetic, the necessary enabling conditions for there to be sensibility: a spatio-temporal framework, not in the stimulus. That’s something that we bring to the situation. That’s the supreme principle regarding sensibility. The supreme principle in relation to understanding is that, quote, “all the manifold of intuition should be subject to conditions of the original synthetic unity of our perception.” A typical Kantian phrase. You’re sitting there as if you had been paralyzed by a poison dart. If I say it again, your facial expression will not change one whit. I will prove this by saying it again. The supreme principle in relation to the understanding—listen now, you’re Oxford students, meaning nothing gets by you—this will: the supreme principle in relation to the understanding is that, quote, “all the manifold of intuition should be subject to conditions of the original synthetic unity of our perception.”

What’s the manifold of intuition? All that impinging stuff, do you say? Spatio-temporally received, you say? Intuition, Anschauung, this mode of reception. And what has to happen to it? It has to get synthesized, and it has to get unified. I shall give this to you—if it were the States, you could probably put this on Sesame Street. I will give it to you by way of Sesame Street. Part of the manifold of intuition is hot; another part of it is black; a third part of it is viscous; a fourth part of it is wet; and a fifth part of it is a pungent aroma. Absolutely, absolutely synthetic unity of our perception—you will never get a cup of coffee out of this! Ah, now, now the eyebrows lower a bit, and the poison has worn off. So, we’ve got to have the synthetic unity of our perception imposed on these sensuous intuitions, the manifold of sensuous intuitions, which, by the way, do not come carrying a code for unification. We provide the unification; the external world provides the manifold, otherwise known as—we want a technical term for this—otherwise known as the mess, all right? And out of that, we make a cup of coffee. Constantly on my mind during these lectures, by the way.

Now, where the jury—in front of Kant, as he argues his case, and we have to judge whether he’s made his case for the transcendental deduction of the categories. The transcendental, as noted, refers to the necessary conditions for there to be knowledge at all. He puts it this way, as early as A12: “I call all knowledge transcendental if it is occupied not with objects but with the way that we can possibly know objects even before we experience them.” You see, it’s the rule according to which we can have objective knowledge even before our eyes are open. How do we want to understand this? We have a little booklet called the rules of chess, right? So, before you ever buy pieces or open up the board, that’s every permissible move that can take place in a game properly called the game of chess. All knowledge is transcendental—such knowledge is transcendental when, in fact, it’s occupied not with “that’s a watch,” “these are glasses,” but the very possibility of knowing anything before we experience anything, the conditions that must be in place for us to know things in a certain way. What way? Our way of knowing things.

So, the task of the transcendental deduction, finally, is the question: how do we come to have knowledge of objects? And, more precisely, the task is to establish the warrant or the justification of any knowledge claim we might make that would be validly tied to experience. Let me summarize the approach through a series of steps: from sensation to appearances to concepts, and then to one’s own concepts. The process begins with sensation, a response or reaction on the part of sensory organs to stimuli originating in the external world. And then, by way of the pure intuitions of time and space—the necessary enabling conditions of sensibility itself—the sensations are transformed into appearances. It’s only when these appearances are subsumed under the pure categories of the understanding that we can be said to have an experience of what is present in the external world. As he says at B161, the necessary conditions by which there is the very possibility of experience are the pure concepts of the understanding.

Well, this gets us back to a question that I think I raised the second week: well, does a dog see a tree? A creature without the a priori categories could have the same sensations—indeed, these sensations could give rise to the same appearances as we possess—but not the same experiences. Such a creature would see a tree but not experience it as such. And again, you know, we all know dogs see everything; what they don’t see, they smell. This becomes clearer in Kant’s treatment of judgment, which allows us to trace the argument from the subjectivity of mere perception. And this is a key distinction that I do hope you’ll rivet to the most functional part of your frontal cortex—I should think, and bits of the limbic system—you want to remember this, even viscerally, do you see? So, when you hear it again, you get a funny sensation like, “I heard this before somewhere.” And that’s the distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of experience. Judgments of perception versus judgments of experience.

The subjectivity of our perceptions, being what it is, will give rise to a subjectivity of judgment. But as experiences arise from the subsumption of content under necessary and universal categories, the judgments of experience are common across percipients. Now, that’s going to be part of the argument that has to be made. Now, integral to this entire process is the faculty of imagination. It’s through the imagination that concepts and intuitions become synthesized and become synthesized according to a universal rule, which Kant refers to as a schema. This is the way the understanding will rise to the level of empirical knowledge and objective empirical knowledge. The imagination is what has the power of drawing together certain elements in an otherwise disconnected assortment of sensations, drawing together just those elements that constitute a knowable something. But the imagination, as such, does not yield knowledge; rather, it makes knowledge possible. It’s only when the synthesis of the manifold is then brought under the pure categories of the understanding that knowledge, as such, arises.

Now, you might say, well, the imagination—the word itself is suggestive of a kind of subjectivity. Am I using my imagination when I do this? And Kant wants to be clear that the process of synthesis is not arbitrary. Indeed, if the resulting synthesis generates the same object for all comparably situated observers, then you certainly can’t say that this is the outcome of some merely probable or iffy process. There must be a framework; there must be rules by which the elements of the manifold are pulled and held together. And this, of course, is what the pure concepts of the understanding are all about. So, you begin to see how the famous transcendental deduction unfolds. Kant begins with an indubitable feature of the understanding, namely, the stability of representations, the virtually universal manner in which comparably positioned observers judge the objects of experience.

Now, let me not be cryptic on this point. Look, take a look—well, take a look right now. I’m larger on your retina; my surface reflectance has just changed. An entirely different configuration of stimuli has just occurred, as it has again just occurred. Every aspect of the external world changes as your head movement changes, as you inspire and breathe out. Every time you do this, the position of the external world changes, do you say? Now, you’ve got this incessant system of continuous alteration, constant alteration in a world that, nonetheless, contains things that retain their resemblance throughout all these transformations. How does that happen? It happens insofar as some aspect of the external world remains of this, and it remains of this by being conceptualized. So that you are no longer limited to judgments of perception, which can be exquisitely detailed, but you now are in a position to make judgments of experience. Yes, as the chap on the hill approaches me, his retinal projection gets larger and larger—a judgment of perception, which, by the way, in classical psychophysics would be called the stimulus error—is now corrected by the fact that you happen to know it’s a person whose size doesn’t change as he gets closer to you, do you see what I’m talking about? The difference between something that’s perceptually governed and something that’s conceptually governed. Right, percepts and concepts are quite different.

I mentioned St. Augustine’s engagement of that problem. I didn’t mention that, did I? Shall I take a moment? Because it shows up again. In fact, Descartes uses exactly the same example that Augustine does, and in a different context. Augustine uses his to become a saint, and Descartes to retain his credentials as a philosopher. Well, how do you become—well, you can become a saint in a lot of different ways, but St. Augustine was on the way to becoming a saint by effectively battling heresies. Now, here’s a heresy for you. Of course, it couldn’t take place today; nobody would think this way today. When people talk about God and tell you what they really mean by God, they assign attributes that, by the very nature of God, are beyond the range of possible experience. God is an infinite this, a maximum that, all you can ask for, etc., etc., has no moving parts, occupies no space, the whole cosmos is somehow in His imagination—you know the story. So, there isn’t any empirical grounding for epistemic claims regarding God. So, when you talk about God, quite literally, technically, you’re talking about something you couldn’t possibly know anything about, because there is no perceptual grounding for the knowledge claim, right? This is the sort of thing—I won’t name names, but I mean, we could bring in an estimable group of Oxford leading lights probably saying, “My point exactly.”

Well, so, St. Augustine said, well, look, every normally sighted person can perceive a geometric object with four equal sides, pairs of sides subtending angles of 90 degrees. We call that a square, and as everyone can perceive such a figure, so everyone can conceive of such a figure. Of course, everyone can also conceive of a chiliagon, which is a thousand-sided figure, but though you can conceive of a chiliagon, you can’t perceive it, because the angular changes are so slight as not to be resolvable by way of our visual acuity. So, you see, you can have quite a clear conception of something that really exists without perceiving it. Descartes uses exactly that example, by the way, a few years later. Descartes died in 1650; St. Augustine was hitting home runs earlier, end of the 4th century A.D. Ah, well, whatever. What does that have to do with this? Well, what it has to do with is this: we will all have the same objective—we will all have the same judgments of experience when it comes to chiliagons; we might have radically different judgments of perception when it comes to chiliagons.

So, intersubjective agreement, not to mention the stable cognition of objects under widely varying conditions, is now explained by way of—and here I quote Kant—remember what we’re trying to explain now: intersubjective agreement and stable cognitions of objects under widely varying conditions, explained by way of, quote, “a catalog of all the originally pure concepts of the synthesis which the understanding contains a priori, and these concepts alone entitle it to be called a pure understanding, inasmuch as only by them can it render the manifold of intuitions conceivable, in other words, think an object.” This division is made systematically from a common principle, namely, the faculty of judgment, which is just the same as the power of thought.

This, then, is the outline of the transcendental deduction. For our representations to serve as possibilities for knowledge, they must become conceptually grounded. The categories delineated in what Kant calls the metaphysical deduction now are seen as necessary for knowledge to be derived from experience. Now, he’s going to give us a metaphysical deduction, followed then by a transcendental deduction. The metaphysical deduction, to some extent, tracks Aristotle’s famous delineation of the categories. Kant’s complaint with Aristotle—it’s not so much a complaint—he said, look, you know, Aristotle had these categories. Kant’s categories are going to be different, and they’re going to be much more carefully arranged. He said what Aristotle was doing—it’s a mild complaint—Aristotle was just listing the properties of things that one knows about and subsuming them under general categories. He was pretty much governed by empirical considerations. Kant comes—well, I don’t want to say he comes close to saying, you know, Aristotle, that Greek human—well, Aristotle was not, not, not a human at all, and I don’t think Kant would have seen him that way, but he sees Aristotle as sort of just putting together a lot of categories, because if you get enough of them in place, it’ll pretty much account for all the properties of things that we know about.

A metaphysical deduction is different. A metaphysical deduction has to do with the number—the minimum and defined number of categories—for all conceivable possible objective knowledge. The argument as to what you would have to have, minimally and devoid of all empirical content—this is what you have to have before the eyes are open. Now, once that metaphysical deduction is in place, the transcendental deduction then becomes the argument to the effect that what you would have to have is what we have, and that’s what grounds our objective knowledge of the external world. So, the transcendental deduction then becomes the means by which what would have to be in place is seen to be in place and operating with necessity and universality.

In the Prolegomena, at 297 to 302, Kant does draw very clearly this distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of experience. Do keep in mind that judgments of perception are subjectively valid. When I judge honey to be sweet, I’m connecting two entities: a physical object that is honey and a subjective sensation of sweetness. There’s no guarantee that others will have the same experience, or that I will on repeated encounters, or that my own sensation is not the result of something other than honey. Quite simply, they are not the stuff of which a science of nature is made. But judgments of experience, as noted, are quite different. With these, we begin with what is given by way of sensuous intuition, but this is then subsumed under concepts that are based on the pure categories of the understanding, and these are universally operative within the realm of human cognition. Unlike the judgments of perception, the judgments of experience hold good not only for us but for everybody. And so, we now have an objective validity, which, says Kant, is the same as necessary universality. Objective validity, he equates with necessary universality. It’s in this sense that the possibility of nature becomes tied to the possibility of experience itself.

Well, now we can get to B75 again, this maxim: “Without sensibility, no object would be given to us, and without understanding, no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.” So, in the absence of the categories, our perceptions would, quote, “be without an object, merely a blind play of representations, less even than a dream,” you see? If you couldn’t conceptualize things, note that the various elements of the objects of thought are synthesized, but a given object is encountered, as I noted, under radically different conditions at different times. It retains its identity as this or that, surely not as a result of anything delivered by the senses. In fact, to the extent that we are in the thrall of our sensory processes, it can never be the same object on any successive sampling, all right?

So, that’s the transcendental deduction of the categories. It has spawned a huge literature, much of it critical, and there are problems that arise within the argument itself. Some of these were duly noted—if I may say, with all due respect—were rather more discerningly noted by Kant’s contemporaries than by many of my contemporaries, but those are not the same contemporaries, by the way, in case you’re wondering about that. Kant is clear on the need for a process by which otherwise various and varying representations are held together. He describes the process of synthesis as, quote, “the act of putting different representations together and grasping what is manifold in them in one cognition.”

Now, integral to this process is what we’ve referred to in an earlier lecture: spontaneity. Sensations, as such, are devoid of structure; synthesis yields structure, and spontaneity gives rise to creative and flexible cognitions. We’re not zombie-like in our modes of representation. But then, serious questions do arise, and Kant, in a letter to Marcus Herz, repeats a question that has been raised by Solomon Maimon and others, persons who have had many criticisms of the Critique. The question is this: how does Kant account for the agreement between the a priori intuitions and the a priori concepts? They come together so perfectly, it looks almost contrived, do you see? How is it that sensuous representations are properly taken up in just the right way by the pure concepts of the understanding? You know, the question is, it’s almost like a kind of card trick, you know, or the shell game sort of thing. Is it some Darwinian sort of thing, that there might have been species that didn’t do it the right way, and they all went belly up, and then, oh, you know, we came on the scene, and we do it right? What kind of an argument is it?

Kant says to this—I answer, I don’t know that you’ll find this a compelling answer, it’s Kant’s answer to this—I answer: “All of this takes place in relation to an experiential knowledge only possible for us under these conditions, a subjective consideration, to be sure, but one that is objectively valid as well, because the objects here are not things in themselves but mere appearances. Consequently, the form in which they are given depends on us.” What he’s saying is, he doesn’t completely de-subjectivize it, but he says, look, the pure categories—this is something that the cognizer is imposing on the sensuous manifold, and as this is the necessary and universal set of conditions for human understanding, it shouldn’t be surprising that we all do it the same way. Of course, we all do it the same way. But, analogically speaking, we all conform to the same rules when we play chess—no surprise—because everything we’re doing is governed by a rule structure.

So, so, so, again, with Kant, he says, “All of this takes place in relation to an experiential knowledge that is only possible for us under these conditions, a subjective consideration, to be sure, but one that’s objectively valid as well, because the objects here are not things in themselves but mere appearances. Consequently, the form in which they are given depends on us.” On the other hand, they are dependent on the uniting of the manifold in consciousness, that is, on what is required for the thinking and cognizing of objects by the understanding. It’s only under these conditions, therefore, that we can have experiences. So, to the extent that the categories, that the pure concepts of the understanding, are universally distributed in creatures of a certain kind, are the necessary preconditions for the understanding, that the understanding itself must merge with experience in the right way to constitute knowledge—to the extent that this is the case, we have an anthropological perspective on knowledge, but a universalist anthropological perspective. It can’t be subjective in the sense that it is subject to the willy-nilly subjective states of a percipient, because the knowledge claimed does not arise, is not grounded in perception. It’s grounded in the pure concepts of the understanding, as necessarily and universally distributed.

I said that I would be performing a transcendental deduction in this room, in case you hadn’t noticed it. I did.