We do not wish to pursue the path along which Kant himself arrives at this “critique,” the inner and outer history of the emergence of the work [titled] Critique of Pure Reason. It is characteristic that we learn little even from the letters of this period of silence, but even if we knew more, if we could offer a more precise account of Kant’s influences, and in what order he worked out the individual parts of the work, and so on, we could neither explain the work in this way—the creative is inexplicable—nor would this curiosity of ours about Kant’s workshop serve the understanding, assuming that we do not know and comprehend what Kant wanted and accomplished in his work. This is now our sole concern. More precisely: as a preliminary, to understand the title.
We now know what “pure reason” means. It still remains to ask: what does “critique” mean? Here we intend to offer only a preliminary interpretation of what “critique” means. When the word is mentioned, we are accustomed to hear at once and above all something negative. Critique is for us a matter of faultfinding, tallying errors, emphasizing inadequacies, and the corresponding rejection. When we cite the title of Kant’s work—Critique of Pure Reason—we must hold at bay this common and mistaken, misleading meaning right from the start. It also fails to correspond to the original meaning of the word. “Critique” comes from the Greek κρίνειν, which means “to separate,” “to sort out,” and so “to bring out the particular.” This setting something apart from others emerges from an elevation [of something] to a new order of rank. [122] The sense of the word “critique” is so little negative that it means [rather] the most positive of the positive, the positing of what must be set up in advance as the determining and decisive. Hence critique is decision in this positing sense. Only because critique is separation of and bringing out the distinctive, the uncommon, and, at the same time, the authoritative, is it also consequently a rejection of the commonplace and unsuitable?
In the second half of the eighteenth century, this meaning of the word “critique” appears in a distinctive light in the exposition of art, the forms of the artwork, and our relation to them. Critique means establishment of the standards and rules, legislation, and that means, at the same time, bringing out the universal over against the particular. Kant’s employment of the term “critique” turns in this contemporary semantic direction, a term he also subsequently placed in the titles of two other chief works, the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of the Power of Judgment.
But by way of Kant’s work, this word receives a still fuller sense, which has now to be outlined. On its basis, we can consequently come to understand the negative meaning, which the term also has in Kant. We shall attempt to make this clear in a retrospective glance at what has been presented so far, without having already entered Kant’s own work.
If critique has the designated positive sense, the Critique of Pure Reason will not simply find fault with and reject pure reason, “criticize,” but will aim rather first to delimit what is decisive and distinctive about it and consequently its authentic essence. This demarcation is not primarily separation from [something], but delimitation in the sense of demonstrating the inner structure of pure reason. The setting out of the structural elements and joints of pure reason is a bringing out of the distinctive possibilities of the employment of pure reason and its corresponding rules. As Kant once emphasized (A 768/B796), critique [123] provides a complete estimate of the entire faculty of pure reason; it portrays and outlines, in one of Kant’s own words, the “preliminary sketch” of pure reason (B xxiii). Critique thus becomes the survey that draws limits around the entire domain of pure reason. As Kant explicitly and repeatedly insists, this survey is not accomplished by referring to “facts,” but takes place on the basis of principles [Prinzipien], not by establishing certain properties encountered somewhere but by determining the entire essence of pure reason on the basis of its own principles [Grundzätzen]. Critique is drawing boundaries, a surveying projection of pure reason. Hence what Kant calls architectonic belongs to critique as an essential moment.
Architectonic, the architectural [baumeisterliche] projection of the essential structure of pure reason, is no mere “decoration,” any more than critique is mere “censorship.” (For the use of the term “architectonic,” cf. Leibniz, De Primae Philosophiae Emendatione, and Baumgarten, Metaphysica, §4, ontologia as metaphysica architectonica.)
In the execution of the “critique” of pure reason so understood, the “mathematical” in the fundamental sense is first unfolded and simultaneously elevated to its own limit. This holds of “critique” as well. Precisely this [critique] lies in the train of modern thought as such and of modern metaphysics in particular. But in accord with its originality, Kant’s “critique” leads to a new delimitation of the essence of pure reason and therefore, at the same time, of the mathematical. [124]
It is no accident that Kant’s critique of pure reason is constantly accompanied by reflection on the essence of the mathematical and of mathematics, by a differentiation between mathematical reason in the narrow sense and its metaphysical counterpart, i.e., that [form of reasoning] upon which a metaphysics must be grounded [where metaphysics is] a projection of the being of beings, the thingness of things; for everything truly depends on this grounding of metaphysics. Recall Baumgarten’s definition of metaphysics and of metaphysical truth. Critique of pure reason means the delimitation of the determinacy of the being of beings, the thingness of things, on the basis of pure reason: survey and projection of those principles of pure reason on the basis of which something like a thing in its thingness is determined.
We already gather from this that the basic “mathematical” trait of modern metaphysics is retained in this “critique,” namely, to determine the being of beings in advance and on the basis of principles. The authentic effort concerns the formation and grounding of the “mathematical” in this sense. The principles of pure reason must be grounded and demonstrated in accordance with their own character. At the same time, it lies in the essence of the principles that they present a grounded nexus among themselves, that they belong together in a unified way, on the basis of an inner unity. Kant calls such a unity in accordance with principles a system. Critique as survey of the inner structure and structural foundation of pure reason consequently faces the foundational task of presenting and grounding the system of the principles of pure reason.
We know from what was said earlier that already in Aristotle the proposition as simple assertion became the guiding thread for the determinations of the [125] being (the thingness) of things, i.e., the categories. The assertion “the house is tall” is also called a judgment. Judging is an act of thought. Judgment is a particular way in which reason carries itself out and acts. Kant calls the pure reason that judges “understanding,” the pure understanding. Propositions, assertions, are acts of the understanding. The sought-after system of the principles of all propositions is, therefore, the system of the principles of pure understanding.
We are attempting to understand Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason from its foundational core. Hence, we begin our interpretation at the place titled “System of All Principles of Pure Understanding” (A148/B187). The entire section in question extends to A235/B294.
It is a concern of the interpretation to guide our questioning and knowing through the selected part [of the work] so that an understanding of the entire work emerges. But even this understanding only serves to illuminate the question: “What is a thing?”
In preparation, we can read several isolated sections of the work in which the authentic problematic does not immediately appear but which are, however, suited to shed light on several of Kant’s basic concepts. There are three such sections: (1) A19/B33–A22/B36; (2) A50/B74–A62/B86; and (3) A298/ B355–A320/B377.
On the other hand, you are not yet advised to read the prefaces to the first and second editions (A & B) or even the corresponding introductions, for these presuppose insight into the work as a whole.
In our interpretation, we will not attempt to consider and outline the structure [Bau] of the work from the outside. We place ourselves instead within the building [Bau] itself, in order to experience something of its layout [Gefüge] and to gain the standpoint for the view of the whole.
In this we are only following a directive that Kant himself [126] once established in a reflection he jotted down concerning the evaluation of a philosophical work: “One must begin his evaluation with the whole and direct it toward the idea of the work along with its ground. What remains belongs to the execution, wherein much can be lacking and call for improvement.” (Reflection No. 5025, Akademieausgabe XVIII)
Critique of pure reason is first a measuring and surveying of the essence and structure of pure reason itself. Critique does not reject pure reason but first places it within the limits of its essence and its inner unity.
Critique is the self-knowledge of reason, set before itself and upon itself [vor sich selbst und auf sich selbst]. Critique is the enactment of the innermost rationality of reason. Critique completes the enlightenment of reason. Reason is knowledge from principles and is consequently itself the capacity for principles and basic propositions [Prinzipien und Grundsätze]. A critique of pure reason in the positive sense must therefore present principles of pure reason in their inner unity and completeness, i.e., in their system.
The choice of precisely this part of the entire work initially appears arbitrary. It can at least be justified in light of the fact that this chapter provides us with special insight with regard to our guiding question concerning the thingness of the thing. But even this remains at first an assertion. The question arises, whether precisely this section had special significance for Kant himself and for the way in which he grasped his own work, whether we speak for Kant himself when we call this section the center of the work. The answer to this question is “yes.” For in the establishment and unified grounding of this system of all principles of pure understanding, Kant secures a basis upon which the truth of the [127] knowledge of things is founded. In this way, Kant establishes and delimits a domain (critique) from which it can first be decided how things stand with the determination of the thing and the truth of prior metaphysics, whether the essence of truth is truly determined in it, whether a rigorously axiomatic, i.e., mathematical, knowledge unequivocally pursues its course within it, and thereby reaches its goal, or whether this rational metaphysics—as Kant himself says—is only a “groping about,” and indeed a groping about in “mere concepts,” without demonstration in the things themselves and consequently lacking justification and validity. The survey of pure reason with regard to metaphysics must at the same time assess [ab-messen] how metaphysics, i.e., in accordance with its definition, how the science of the foundations of human cognition, is possible. How do matters stand with human cognition and its truth?
(The following interpretation makes up for what was lacking in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics [1929]; cf. the preface to the second edition, 1950. The title of this work is imprecise and hence easily leads to the misunderstanding that the “problem of metaphysics” concerns a problem the solution of which would entail the renunciation of metaphysics itself. “The problem of metaphysics” means rather the questionability of metaphysics as such.)
At the beginning of the chapter titled “On the Ground of the Distinction of All Objects in General into Phenomena and Noumena,” Kant provides a retrospective look at the second chapter, in which he treats the system of all principles (A235/B294). In an intuitive analogy he clarifies what was at issue in the establishment of the system of all principles of pure understanding: “We have now not only traveled through the land of pure understanding, and carefully inspected each part of it, but we have also surveyed it, and determined the place for each thing in it. But this land is an island, [128] and enclosed in unalterable boundaries by nature itself. It is the land of truth (enchanting name), surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the true seat of illusion, where many a fog bank and rapidly melting iceberg pretend to be new lands and, ceaselessly deceiving with empty hopes the voyager looking around for new discoveries, entwine him in adventures from which he can never escape and yet also never bring to an end.”
a) Kant’s Concept of Experience
The land measured and surveyed, the stable soil of truth, is the domain of grounded and groundable cognition. Kant calls this “experience.” Hence the question arises: what is the essence of experience? The “System of All Principles of Pure Understanding” is nothing but the outline of the essence and essential constitution of experience. According to modern metaphysics, the essence of a matter is that which makes the matter as such possible in itself: possibility, possibilitas, understood as “what makes possible.” The question concerning the essence of experience is the question concerning its inner possibility. What belongs to the essence of experience? But at the same time this question includes the following: what is the essence of that which becomes truly accessible in experience? For when Kant employs the term “experience,” he always understands it in an essentially twofold sense:
(1) Experience as event and act of the subject (the I), and (2) that which is itself experienced as such in such experience. Experience, in the sense of the experienced and of what is capable of being experienced, the object of experience, is nature, and indeed nature in the sense of Newton’s Principia as systema mundi. Hence, the grounding of the inner possibility of experience is for Kant at the same time the answer to the question: how is nature as such possible? The answer [129] is given in the “System of All Principles of Pure Understanding.” Kant, therefore, also says (Prolegomena, §23) that these principles “form a physiological system, i.e., a system of nature.” In §24 he also calls them “physiological principles.” “Physiological” is here to be understood in the original and ancient sense, not in the present-day sense; physiology today is the doctrine of life processes, in contrast with morphology as the doctrine of the forms of living beings. In Kant’s employment of the term, “physiology” means λόγος of φύσις, the basic assertions about nature, but φύσις now thought in Newton’s sense.
Only by explicitly taking possession in a grounded way of the stable soil of demonstrable cognition, the land of experience and the map of this land is a position taken from which we can decide the privilege and pretensions of traditional rational metaphysics, i.e., its possibility.
The establishment of the system of principles is the taking possession of the firm land of the possible truth of cognition. It is the decisive step in the entire task of the critique of pure reason. This system of principles is the result of a distinctive analysis of the essence of experience. Kant once wrote in a letter to his student J. S. Beck1 on January 20, 1792, ten years after the appearance of the Critique of Pure Reason: “The analysis of an experience in general and the principles of its possibility” are “precisely the most difficult in the entire critique” (Correspondence, Cassirer X, 114; Ak. 11:313ff.).2 In the same letter, Kant gives the following instruction for presenting this most difficult part of the Critique of Pure Reason: “In short, since this entire analysis only aims to show that experience is only possible by way of certain synthetic principles a priori, and this can first be made truly comprehensible when these principles are actually exhibited, I think it prudent to keep the work as brief as possible before these principles are presented.”3 Two points are here clearly [130] stressed: (1) what is decisive for the proper insight into the essence of experience, i.e., the truth of cognition, is the actual presentation of the system of principles, and (2) that the preparation for this presentation should be as concise as possible.
We therefore only follow one of Kant’s clear instructions if we single out the system of principles and set up the interpretation of this part [of the work] in such a way that all the preliminary requirements for it are summarized as concisely as possible and provided in the course of the interpretation itself.
b) The Thing as Thing of Nature
The system of the principles of pure understanding is, in the most proper Kantian sense, the inner foundation of the entire work. This system of principles should provide us with some information touching upon the question concerning how Kant determines the essence of the thing. What was said previously about the significance of the system of principles already offers a preinterpretation of the mode and manner of Kant’s delimitation of the essence of the thing and in what way he holds it to be determinable as such.
“Thing”—this is the object of our experience. Since the totality [Inbegriff] of what can possibly be experienced is nature, the thing must in truth be conceived as thing of nature. Admittedly, Kant does distinguish precisely between the thing in appearance and the thing in itself. But the thing in itself, i.e., the thing detached from and stripped of every relation of manifestation to us, remains for us a mere X. In every thing as appearance we unavoidably think this X as well, but in truth, only the thing of nature that appears is determinable and knowable in its way as thing. Going forward, we can summarize Kant’s answer to the question concerning the essence of the thing as something accessible to us in two propositions: (1) the thing is a thing of nature and (2) the thing is the object of possible experience. Each word here is essential, and indeed in the specific sense it has acquired by way of Kant’s philosophical work. [131]
Recall, briefly, the introductory considerations at the beginning of the entire course of lectures. We there placed the question concerning the thing in the domain of what proximally surrounds us and encounters us every day. At that point, the following question arose: how are the objects of physics, thus natural things, related to things encountered immediately? In light of Kant’s essential determination of the thing as thing of nature, we can infer that, from the start, Kant does not pose the question concerning the thingness of those things that [immediately] surround us. This question has no weight for him. His gaze fastens at once on the thing as object of mathematical-physical science.
That this perspective on the determination of the thingness of the thing became authoritative for Kant has its reasons, which we can now easily infer on the basis of our characterization of the prehistory of the critique of pure reason. However, the determination of the thing as thing of nature also has consequences for which Kant himself cannot be held the least bit responsible. One could pay tribute to the opinion that leaping over the things that surround us and the interpretation of their thingness is an omission easily remedied, and the definition of natural things as things can be appended or, if need be, sorted out ahead of time. But this is impossible because the determination of the thing and the way in which it is approached rest upon fundamental presuppositions that stretch out over the whole of being and the sense of being as such. Even if one does not want to admit it, the following can be gathered indirectly and precisely on the basis of Kant’s determination of the thing: an individual thing for itself is not possible, and so the determination of the thing cannot be accomplished with reference to individual things. The thing as thing of nature is only determinable on the basis of the essence of nature as such. The thing, in the sense of what proximally encounters us (before all theory and science), is appropriately and properly definable only in terms of a context that lies before and above all nature. This extends so far that even technological things [die Dinge der Technik], [132] although they are seemingly first produced on the basis of scientific cognition of nature, are (in their thingness) something other than things of nature overlaid with a practical use.
But all of this only means, again, that asking the question of the thing is nothing short of [gaining] a decisive foothold for human beings within beings as a whole. In mastering or failing to master the question of the thing in a sufficiently thoughtful way, or in disregarding it altogether, there are decisions whose field of play and distance in our history are to be considered always only after centuries [have passed]. The confrontation with Kant’s step should provide us with the proper perspective for such decisions.
c) The Threefold Division of the Chapter on the System of Principles
The chapter in the Critique of Pure Reason that we are attempting to interpret begins at A148/B187 and bears the title “System of All Principles of Pure Understanding.”
The entire chapter, which extends to A235/B294, is divided into three sections: (I) “On the Supreme Principle of All Analytic Judgments” (A150/ B189 to A153/B193); (II) “On the Supreme Principle of All Synthetic Judgments” (A154/B193 to A158/B197); and (III) “Systematic Representation of All Synthetic Principles of Pure Understanding” (A158/B197 to A235/B287). There follows a “General Note on the System of Principles” (B288 to B294).
This threefold division of Kant’s doctrine of the principles prompts us to think immediately of the three principles of traditional rational metaphysics: the principle of contradiction, the principle of the I, and the principle of sufficient reason. We may assume that Kant’s threefold division [133] bears an inner connection with the three traditional principles. The interpretation will show in what sense this holds. We note, first, the titles, and initially the titles of the first two sections, and find the concept of the highest principle, and in each case a highest principle for an entire domain of judgments. The general title of the entire chapter comprehends the principles as such of pure understanding. Now, the discourse is about principles of judgment. By what right? The understanding is the capacity to think. But thinking is the uniting of representations in one consciousness: “I think” means “I combine.” In representational terms, I put one represented thing together with another: “The room is warm.” “Wormwood is bitter.” “The sun is shining.” “The unification of representations in one consciousness is judgment. Therefore, thinking is the same as judging or relating representations to judgments in general” (Prolegomena, §22, 4:305).
If, therefore, instead of “pure understanding”—which appears in the title of the chapter [as a whole]—we now hear of “judgment” in the first two sections, the same thing is meant in both instances. Judgment is simply the way in which the understanding, as the capacity to think, accomplishes [the task of] representing. Of course, why we hear of “judgment” and not pure understanding will emerge from the content of the sections. (What “performs” these acts, the performance and the performed, is the unity of representations, and indeed as itself a represented unity, for example, the shining sun in the judgment: “The sun is shining.”)
At the same time, we discern in the first two titles a distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments. In his polemical treatise against Eber-hard—On a Discovery Whereby Any New Critique of Pure Reason Is to Be Made Superfluous by an Older One (1790)—Kant once remarked that, in order to solve the chief problem of the critique of pure reason, it is “of course absolutely [134] necessary to have a distinct and determinate concept, first, of what the Critique understands in general by synthetic as distinguished from analytic judgments” (Ak. 8:228).4 “The aforesaid distinction among judgments has never been properly discerned” (Ak. 8:244).5
Accordingly, the titles of the first and second sections of the chapter on the “System of All Principles of Pure Understanding”—with the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments and the highest principles belonging to them—indicate something decisive for the entire domain of questions in the critique of pure reason. Therefore, it is no accident that Kant comments explicitly and in advance “On the Difference between Analytic and Synthetic Judgments” in the work’s Introduction (A6ff./B10ff.).
But the title of the third section is just as important as the content of the first two titles, which concerns neither principles of analytic judgment nor principles of synthetic judgment, but speaks of synthetic principles of pure understanding. And the systematic “representation” (exhibition [Vorführung]) of these [principles] is precisely the authentic aim of the entire chapter.
It now seems like a given to preface the interpretation of these three sections with an exposition of the difference between analytic and synthetic judgments. But in keeping with the general course of our interpretation, we prefer to deal with this difference when the text immediately demands it. We bypass the chapter’s introductory consideration; for this (A148/B187) is only intelligible relative to the preceding parts of the work, which we shall not get into here. We begin right away with the interpretation of the first section. [135]
The title of the first section refers to the “principle of contradiction,” as one of the three basic axioms of traditional metaphysics. But that this proposition is here called “the highest principle of all analytic judgments” already brings Kant’s own distinctive interpretation of this proposition to expression. In this way, he distinguishes himself from both the prior metaphysics and the subsequent metaphysics of German idealism, especially Hegel’s. Kant’s general intention in his interpretation of the principle of contradiction is to render controversial the leading role this principle had assumed, especially in modern metaphysics. This role of the principle of contradiction as the highest axiom of all cognition of being was already exhibited by Aristotle, if not in the same sense (Metaphysics Γ, 3–6).
At the end of the third chapter (1005 b33), Aristotle says: φύσει γὰρ ἀρχὴ καὶ τῶν ἄλλων ἀξιωμάτων αὕτη πάντων. “From the perspective of being [Vom Sein her gesehen], this proposition is the ground (principle) of all other axioms.”
Already in 1755, in his Habilitationsschrift, Kant had ventured a first, albeit still indefinite, advance against the predominance of the principle of contradiction in metaphysics. This short text bears the following characteristic title: Principiorum primorum cognitionis metaphysicae nova dilucidatio. “A New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition.” The title of this work could also stand above the Critique of Pure Reason, which appeared almost thirty years later [136].
a) Cognition as Human Cognition
To be sure, the exposition of the principle of contradiction in the Critique of Pure Reason moves on another, more properly grounded plane and in a transparent, thoughtfully mastered domain. This is betrayed right away in the first sentence with which the section begins: “Whatever the content of our cognition may be, and however it may be related to the object, the general though, to be sure, only negative condition of all our judgments whatsoever is that they do not contradict themselves; otherwise these judgments in themselves (even without regard for the object) are nothing” (A150/B189).
Here it is said in general: all our cognition stands under the condition that its judgments in themselves are to be free of contradiction. Still, we notice something distinctive in this sentence, beyond its general content, that is decisive for everything that follows.
1.The discourse is about “our cognition,” which means human cognition. It does not speak indefinitely about some sort of cognition on the part of some kind of cognizing being nor about a cognition as such, purely and simply, of cognition in an absolute sense. It is rather we human beings, and our cognition alone, that stand in question here, and in the entire Critique of Pure Reason. Only in relation to a cognition that is not absolute does it makes sense to posit the principle of contradiction as a condition, for absolute, unconditioned cognition cannot stand under conditions as such. What counts [ist] as a contradiction for a finite knowing need not be such for an absolute knowing. When, therefore, in German Idealism, Schelling and, above all, Hegel, posit at once the essence of cognition as absolute, it is fitting that the avoidance of contradiction is no condition of cognition for such a knower, but rather the reverse: contradiction becomes precisely the element of cognition. [137]
2.It is said that our judgments must be free of contradiction, not our cognitions; this means that judgments, acts of the understanding, constitute an essential, if still only one, component of our cognition.
3.It is said of our cognition that it has in each case some content and that it relates in some way “to the object [Objekt].” Instead of “ Objekt ” Kant often employs the term “ Gegenstand.”
In order to understand these three accentuated determinations of human cognition in their interconnectedness, and to grasp from this Kant’s subsequent explications of the principles, it is necessary to present as concisely as possible Kant’s basic interpretation of human cognition, as it becomes clear for the first time in the Critique of Pure Reason.
b) Intuition and Thought as the Two Components of Cognition
In full consciousness of the consequences of the definitions he has to give, Kant places at the beginning of his work the following proposition that, in his interpretation, delimits the essence of human cognition: “In whatever way and through whatever means a cognition may relate to objects, that through which it relates immediately to them, and at which all thought as a means is directed as an end, is intuition. But this takes place only insofar as the object is given to us; but this in turn is possible only if it affects the mind in a certain way” (A19/B33).
This essential determination of cognition is at once the first and thoroughly decisive counterstroke against rational metaphysics. Kant thereby achieved a new basic position of the human being within beings or, more precisely, elevated to explicit metaphysical knowledge, and grounded, a position that, at bottom, was always present. [138] That it concerns human cognition is more sharply emphasized in an addition to the second edition: “to us human beings, at least.” Human cognition is a representing self-relation to objects. But this representing is no mere thinking in concepts and judgments but— and this is accentuated by Kant’s use of italics and in the construction of the entire sentence—intuition. Intuition is the authentically sustaining and immediate relation to the object. Although intuition alone constitutes the essence of our cognition as little as thought alone does, thought belongs to intuition and, indeed, stands in its service. Human cognition is conceptual, judgment-forming intuition. Human cognition is, therefore, a distinctively constructed unity of intuition and thought. Kant emphasizes this essential determination of human cognition time and again throughout the entire work. We find an example of this at B406, which first appears in the second edition, which otherwise insists more sharply on the role of thinking in cognition: “I do not cognize any object merely by the fact that I think” (this is said in opposition to rational metaphysics), “but rather I can cognize an object only by determining a given intuition with regard to the unity of consciousness, in which all thinking consists.” And at A719/B747 Kant says essentially the same thing: “All of our cognition is related in the end to possible intuition, for through these alone is an object given.” In the order of the essential construction of cognition, this “in the end” means as much as “first,” in the first place.
Human cognition is intrinsically twofold. This shows itself in the duality of its structural components, here named intuition and thought. But the way in which this duality is articulated is just as essential as the duality itself, in opposition to any simplicity. [139] Insofar as the unification of intuition and thought alone constitutes human cognition, both components must clearly bear within themselves some affinity and commonality, in order to be unifiable. And this consists in the fact that both intuition and thought are [species of] “representation.” To re-present [Vor-stellen] means to bring and to have something before [vor] oneself, to have, as the subject, something present to oneself and to bring something back to oneself: re-praesentare. But how are intuition and thought to be distinguished from one another as modes of representing within the common character of representing? For now, we can elucidate this in the following makeshift way: when we say, “this blackboard,” we address something that stands before us and is represented to us. What is re-presented thereby is this definite flat surface, with this particular color and in this particular light, with a certain hardness and materiality, and so forth.
The properties just enumerated are immediately given to us. We see and touch or feel them without further ado. We see and feel in each case this surface, this color, this illumination. The immediately represented is always “this,” in each case this particular individual, qualified precisely in various ways [das je gerade so und so Einzelne]. Intuition is, in each case, [that mode of] representing that places something before [the subject] immediately, as this particular individual. The essence of intuition becomes clearer if contrasted with the other mode of representing, namely thought. Thought is not an immediate but a mediated representing. What it intends representationally is not the individual “this,” but precisely the universal. When I say “blackboard,” the intuitively given is apprehended and conceived as blackboard; “blackboard”—I thereby place something before myself that also holds for others, something correspondingly given at first to other members of the audience. The representing of that which is valid for many, and indeed as something valid in this way, is the representing of something universal; this universal one, which belongs to all in common, is the concept. Thinking is representing something in general, i.e., in concepts. But concepts are not immediately prediscovered; a certain path and means are necessary to form them; thinking is consequently mediated representing. [140]
c) The Twofold Determination of the Object in Kant
At the same time, it should now be clear, from what we have just said that not only is knowing dual but that the knowable too, the possible object of cognition, must be determined in a twofold way, in order to be an object as such. We can clarify this state of affairs for ourselves initially with the help of the word [“object”]. What we are supposed to know must somehow encounter us from somewhere, must come to meet us as something that stands opposed to us; hence the “opposed” [Gegen] in the object [Gegenstand]. But not anything we please that just happens to greet us—not just any fleeing visual or acoustic sensation, or sensation of pressure or warmth—is already an ob ject, is something that stands opposed to us. What encounters us must be determined as standing, as something that has standing and constancy. But this provides only a preliminary indication that the object must be clearly determined in a twofold way. What an object of human cognition is, in keeping with Kant’s concept of cognition, has not been stated. An object in the strictly Kantian sense is neither what is sensed alone nor what is perceived. When, for instance, I point to the sun and address it as such, what I name and intend is not the object as object in the strictly Kantian sense, no more so than the stone or the blackboard I might point out to you. If we go further and assert something about the sun and stone, we still do not achieve objectivity in the rigorously Kantian sense. And if we repeatedly hold fast [fest-stellen] something about the object, we still do not get the object in grip. We can say, for example, on the basis of repeated observations: when the sun shines on the stone, it becomes warm. In this example, several things are given—sun, sunshine, stone, warmth—and these givens are also determined in a certain judgment-like way, i.e., sunshine and the warmth of the stone are related to one another. But in what sort of relation? We [141] can say more clearly: every time the sun shines, the stone becomes warm; every time I perceive the sun, the perception of the warm stone follows from this (my) perception in me. This being-together of the representations of sun and stone in the assertion “every time x, then y” [jedesmal wann. .., dann] is merely a unification of various perceptions, i.e., a judgment of perception. In this case, my particular perceptions are simply held together (so, too, those of other perceiving subjects), and all that is established [in the judgment of perception] is how what is given to me appears to me alone.
When I say, by contrast, “because the sun is shining, the stone consequently becomes warm,” I give voice to a cognition. The sun is now represented as cause and the stone’s becoming warm as effect. We can also express the cognition in the form of the proposition: “The sun warms the stone.” Sun and stone are here no longer conjoined on the basis of a merely subjectively ascertained succession of corresponding perceptions, but they are subsumed under the concept of cause and effect in general, as they stand in themselves toward one another. Now an ob-ject is grasped. The relation is no longer one of “every time x, then y”; this concerns a mere sequence of perceptions. The [causal] relation is now one of “If-then” (“because-therefore”); it concerns the very thing itself, whether I perceive it to be the case or not. This relation is posited as necessary. What this judgment says is valid for all time and for everyone; it is not subjective but is valid of the object as such.
What encounters us sensibly and perceptually, the intuitively given (sun and sunshine, stone and warmth), this “against” first comes to stand as an intrinsically standing state of affairs when the given is represented and thought in such concepts as cause and effect, i.e., subsumed under the universal principle of causality. The components of cognition, intuition, and concept must be unified in a certain way. The intuitively [142] given must be brought under the universality of certain concepts. The concept must overcome the intuition and determine what is given to it in a certain way. In relation to the earlier example—and fundamentally—the following should be noted: The judgment of perception “every time x, then y” does not gradually pass over into the judgment of experience “if-then” thanks to a sufficiently large number of observations. This sort of thing is as impossible as it is out of the question for a “when” to pass over into an “if” and a “then” [dann] to become a “therefore” [deshalb] and vice versa.
The judgment of experience requires a new step, another mode of representing the given, namely, in the concept. This essentially altered representation of the given, its apprehension as nature, first makes it possible henceforth for observations to be taken as possible intuitive realizations of judgments of experience, so that now, in light of the judgment of experience, the conditions of observation can be modified and the corresponding consequences of these modified conditions can be investigated. What is called “hypothesis” in science is the first step toward an essentially altered, conceptual representation, over against mere perceptions. Experience does not emerge “empirically” out of perceptions but becomes possible only on the basis of metaphysics, through a distinctively preconceiving and new conceptual representing of the given, in this case the concepts of cause and effect. As a result, a new basis for the given is posited [gesetzt]—principles [Grundsätze]. Hence an object in the strictly Kantian sense is above all the represented, wherein the given is determined in a necessary and universally valid way. Such a representing is properly human cognition. Kant calls it “experience.” We can now summarize Kant’s basic interpretation of cognition by saying:
(1) Cognition is for Kant human cognition; (2) authentic human cognition is experience; (3) experience [143] actualizes itself in the shape of mathematical-physical science; (4) Kant views this science, along with the essence of authentic human cognition, in the historical shape of Newtonian physics, which today one still calls “classical.”
d) Sensibility and Understanding: Receptivity and Spontaneity
What we said so far about human cognition should at first only make visible the duality in its essential structure, without placing this structure before our eyes in its innermost articulation. In keeping with the duality of cognition, there resulted an initial understanding of the duality of the object: the merely intuitive “against” [Gegen] is not yet an object, but what is only conceptually thought in general is, as something so constant [als so Ständiges], also not yet an object.
This also helps to clarify what is meant in the first sentence of our section by “content of cognition” and “relation to the object.” The “content” is always determined from (and as) that which is intuitively given: light, warmth, pressure, color, tone. The “relation to the object,” to the object as such, consists in this: that an intuitively given is brought to stand in the universality and unity of a concept (cause-effect). But please note: it is always something intuitive that is brought to stand; conceptual re-presenting here acquires an essentially sharpened sense.
Hence when Kant repeatedly stresses that the object is given through intuition and thought by way of the understanding, the misunderstandings easily surface that the given is already the object, or the object is only an object by way of the concept. Both are equally mistaken. The following is rather the case: the object only stands when the intuitive is conceptually thought, and the object only stands against when the concept determines an intuitively given as such. [144]
Kant consequently employs the term “object” both in a strict and authentic sense and in a wide and inauthentic sense.
The authentic object is only what is represented in experience as experienced; the inauthentic object is anything to which a representing as such— whether intuition or thought—relates. The object in the wider sense is both what is only thought as such and what is only given in perception and sensation. Although Kant is always certain of what he means by “object,” this fluid employment furnishes an indication that Kant unfolded and decided the question concerning human cognition and its truth straightaway, and only in a certain respect. Kant has overlooked the revealed, what encounters us prior to any objectification [of beings] into objects of experience, which has to be questioned and determined in its own essence. Insofar as Kant must apparently return to this domain, as [we see] in the distinction between mere perception and experience, the comparative course always goes in the direction of experience to perception. This means that perception is seen in terms of experience and, in relation to it, as a “not yet.” But it is above all necessary to show as well what experience (as scientific cognition) no longer is, in relation to perception in the sense of prescientific cognition. In light of rational metaphysics and its claims, it was alone decisive for Kant:
1.to assert the intuitive character of human cognition as a grounding component of its essence;
2.on the basis of this altered definition, also properly to determine anew the essence of the second component, of thought and concept.
We can now characterize still more clearly the dual character of human cognition and in various respects. We have so far called the two components intuition and concept, the former the [145] immediately represented individual and the latter the universal that is represented in a mediated way. Each of the distinct [cases of] representing is accomplished in a correspondingly distinct human comportment and performance. In intuition, the represented is re-presented or placed before [vor-gestellt] [the subject] as object, i.e., the representing is a having-before-oneself of what encounters. Insofar as it is supposed to be taken as such, encountering becomes taking up and in. The character of the comportment in intuition is taking-in [Hin-nehmen], reception [Empfangen], recipere-receptio, receptivity. By contrast, the comportment in conceptual representing is such that the representing compares the given manifold from out of itself and in comparing relates the manifold to one and the same [concept] and holds it fast as such. In comparing fir—beech— oak—birch, we draw out, hold fast, and determine wherein these [kinds of tree] agree as one and the same, namely, “tree.” The representing of this universal as such must consequently constitute itself from out of itself and bring the represented before itself. In keeping with this character of the “from out of itself,” thought—as representing in concepts—is spontaneous, spontaneity.
Human intuiting is never able to create the object itself to be intuited through the enactment of its own intuiting as such. This sort of thing is possible, at best, in a kind of imagination, fantasy. But in this way the object is provided and intuited not as an existing being but as something imagined. Human looking [Schauen] is looking-at [An-schauen], i.e., a seeing directed toward and dependent upon something already given.
Because human intuiting is dependent upon the intuitable, which is given to it, the given must display itself. For this it must be able to announce itself. This happens through the sense organs. As Kant says, by means of these organs our senses—sight, hearing, and so on—are “stirred.” Something must approach and be done to them. That which attracts us in this way and the way in which the attraction happens is sensation as affection. By contrast, in thought, in the [146] concept, what is represented is such that we ourselves shape and arrange it in its form. “In its form”—this means the how in which what is thought, conceptually represented, is itself represented, namely, in the how of the universal.6 The what, by contrast, for example, the “tree-like,” must be given in its content. The execution and arrangement, the preparation of the concept is called “function.”
Human intuiting is necessarily sensible, i.e., such that the immediately represented must be given. Because human intuition depends upon giving, i.e., is sensible, it requires sense organs. Hence, we have eyes and ears because our intuiting is a seeing, hearing, and so on; we do not see because we have eyes nor hear because we have ears. Sensibility is the capacity for human intuition. But the capacity to think, wherein the ob ject [Gegen stand] as ob ject [Gegen stand] is brought to stand, is called understanding. We can now clearly arrange in sequence the various characterizations of the duality of human cognition and, at the same time, lay out the various respects according to which these distinctions currently determine human cognition:
Intuition—concept (thought)/the represented as such in the object.
Receptivity—spontaneity/modes of comportment in representing.
Affection—function/the event- and result-character of the represented.
Sensibility—understanding/representing as capacities of the human mind, as sources of cognition.
Kant employs these distinct versions of the two essential components [of human cognition] in each case according to context. [147]
e) The Apparent Priority of Thought: Pure Understanding in Relation to Pure Intuition
In the interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason and in the confrontation with Kant’s philosophy as such, it cannot be avoided that, according to his doctrine, cognition consists of intuition and thought. But it is still a long way from this general realization to a real understanding of the role of these components [in human cognition] and the mode of their unity, but above all to the proper evaluation of this essential definition of human cognition.
In the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant undertakes the “most difficult task” of analyzing experience in its essential structure, the exposition of thought and the acts of the understanding (i.e., the exposition of the second component) not only occupies unusually more space, but the entire direction of questioning in this analysis of the essence of experience tends toward the characterization of thought, the authentic action of which we have already acquainted ourselves with as judgment. The doctrine of intuition, αἴσθησις, is the Aesthetic (cf. Critique of Pure Reason, A21/B35, note). The doctrine of thought, judgment, λόγος, is the Logic. The doctrine of intuition encompasses A19 to A49 (30 pages) and B33 to B73 (40 pages). The doctrine of thought begins at A50/B74 and runs to A704/B732 and occupies more than 650 pages.
The priority in the treatment of logic, its unusually greater scope in the work as a whole, is obvious. We can also repeatedly establish in specific sections that the question concerning judgment and concept, and hence the question concerning thought, stands always in the foreground. We can also easily recognize this fact in the section upon which our interpretation rests and that we described as the inner core of the work. The [section] titles speak clearly enough: the work as a whole concerns judgment. [148] The discourse is properly about λόγος (reason), as we see from the title of the entire work. On the basis of this obvious priority of logic, people [man] have almost universally inferred that Kant sees the authentic essence of cognition in thinking, in judging. This opinion complied with the traditional and ancient doctrine according to which judgment, the assertion, is the locus of truth and falsity. Hence the question of cognition is nothing but the question of judgment, and the interpretation of Kant must begin at this authoritative point.
To what extent this preconception has prevented access to the center of the work cannot and need not be reported here. But it is important for the correct appropriation of the work to have this situation constantly before one’s eyes. The neo-Kantian interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason leads generally to a devaluation of intuition as the fundamental component of human cognition. The Kant-interpretation developed in the Marburg School even went so far as to eliminate intuition from the Critique of Pure Reason as a foreign body. The consequence of this demotion of intuition was that the question concerning the unity of the two components, intuition and thought (more precisely, the question concerning the ground of the possibility of their unification), took a wrong turn, assuming it was seriously posed at all. The effect of all these misinterpretations of the Critique of Pure Reason, which still circulate today in several variations, has been that the significance of this work for the authentically self-enclosed and sole question concerning the possibility of metaphysics has been neither correctly evaluated nor, above all, made creatively fruitful.
But how are we to explain that, despite the fundamental and authoritative significance of intuition in human cognition, even Kant himself places the chief work of analyzing cognition in the exposition of thought? [149] The reason is as simple as it is obvious. Precisely because Kant—in opposition to rational metaphysics, which posits the essence of cognition in pure reason, in merely conceptual thought—singles out intuition as the supporting, basic moment of human cognition, thought must consequently be deprived of its formerly presumed priority, its exclusive validity. But the critique could not be satisfied with the negative task of contesting the presumption of conceptual thought; it had first and foremost to define and to ground the essence of thought anew.
The extended exposition of thought and the concept in the Critique of Pure Reason speaks so little to a demotion of intuition that this exposition of concept and judgment is rather the clearest evidence that intuition will henceforth remain authoritative, without which thought is nothing.
The extensive treatment of one of the components of cognition (namely, thought) is even expanded in the second edition still further, so that it often seems, in fact, as if the question concerning the essence of cognition were exclusively a question concerning judgment and its conditions. But the priority of the question of judgment is not based upon the fact that the essence of cognition is really judgment, but it is anchored in the fact that the essence of judgment must be determined anew, because it is now conceived as a representing related in advance to intuition, i.e., to the object.
The priority of logic, the thorough treatment of thought, is consequently necessary, precisely because thought in its essence does not have priority over intuition but is grounded in intuition and always related to it. The priority of logic in the Critique of Pure Reason is based solely in the non-priority of the object of logic, i.e., in placing thought in the service of intuition. If correct thinking is always related to intuition, [150] then the logic belonging to this thought deals necessarily and precisely with this essential relation to intuition, hence with intuition itself. The narrow scope of the Aesthetic—as an initially separate doctrine of intuition—is only an outward appearance. Because the Aesthetic is now decisive, i.e., plays an authoritative role throughout, it creates so much work for logic. As a result, logic must turn out to be so very extensive and substantial.
This is important to keep in mind, not only for the entire interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason in general but above all for the interpretation of our chapter. For the titles of the first two sections, along with the first sentence of section one, read as if the question concerning human cognition and its principles simply trails off into a question of judgment, hence of pure thought. We shall see, however, that precisely the opposite is the case. We can even say, exaggerating slightly: the question concerning the principles of pure understanding is the question concerning the necessary role of intuition, which necessarily lies at the basis of pure understanding. This intuition must itself clearly be a pure intuition.
“Pure” means “mere,” “free,” free from another, and indeed from sensation. Viewed negatively, pure intuition is sensation-free, although intuition belongs to sensibility. “Pure” means, then, based only upon itself and consequently existing first. This pure intuition, represented purely in an immediate representing, this sensation-free individual, i.e., singularity [hier Einzige], is time. Pure understanding at first means mere understanding, detached from intuition. But because the understanding as such is related to intuition, the definition of “pure understanding” can only mean the understanding related to intuition and, indeed, to pure intuition. The same holds good for the title “pure reason.” It is ambivalent. Pre-critically, it names mere reason. Critically, i.e., within the limits of its essence, it means reason that is essentially [151] grounded in pure intuition and [pure] sensibility. A critique of pure reason is at once the delimitation of this reason, grounded in pure intuition, and, at the same time, the rejection of pure reason as “mere” reason.
f) Logic and Judgment in Kant
However, insight into these contexts, i.e., the achievement of the essential concept of a “pure understanding,” is the precondition for understanding the third section, which is supposed to present the systematic articulation of the pure understanding.
The clarification of the essence of human cognition that we have now carried out enables us to read the first sentence of our section with different eyes than we had at the beginning: “Whatever the content of our cognition may be, and however it may be related to the object, the general though to be sure only negative condition of all our judgments whatsoever is that they do not contradict themselves; otherwise these judgments in themselves (even without regard to the object) are nothing” (A150/B189). We see that our cognition comes here to be examined right away in a certain respect, namely, in terms of the second essential component of cognizing, the act of thought, judgment. More precisely, Kant says that freedom from contradiction is “to be sure only the negative condition of all our judgment whatsoever.” The discussion here is about “all our judgments whatsoever,” not yet of “analytic judgments,” which are posited in the title as the theme. Furthermore, the discourse is about “only [a] negative condition,” not of a highest principle. Indeed, the text speaks of contradiction and of judgments as such [or “in general”], but still not of the principle of contradiction as the highest principle of all analytic judgments. Kant here apprehends judgment [as such], prior to the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments.
In what respect is judgment seen in this case? What is a judgment as such? How does Kant determine the essence of [152] judgment? The question sounds straightforward, and yet the problematic soon becomes complicated. For we know that judging is an act of thinking. In Kant’s essential determination of human cognition, thinking undergoes a new characterization: it essentially enters the service of intuition. The same, therefore, must also be valid for judgment as an act of thought. Now one could say that by accentuating the service of thinking and judging [in relation to intuition], only a particular aim of thought has been introduced. Thought itself and its definition remain in essence untouched thereby; instead, the essence of thinking (judging) in general must already be defined, in order for thought to be pressed into this service.
Since antiquity, the essence of thinking (judging) has been determined by logic. Although Kant did establish a new concept of cognition along the lines indicated earlier, in relation to thought itself he could do nothing more than add to the familiar definition of the essence of thinking (judging) the further qualification that thought stands in the service of intuition. He could [only] take over unaltered the current doctrine of thought (logic), in order to add, by way of supplement, that logic, so long as it concerns human cognition, must always in this case stress the relation of thought to intuition.
In fact, this is how Kant’s stance toward traditional logic, and hence its essential determination of judgment as well, looks. What is still more important is that Kant himself often perceived and presented the situation in this way. Only slowly and with difficulty did he come to realize [erkennen] that his discovery of the distinctive office, the essential determination of thought, and thus of logic as well, is fundamentally altered in consequence. There is a statement of Kant’s on logic, which is often quoted, but usually understood in the opposite sense (hence falsely), and which furnishes evidence of his secure presentiment of the revolution he initiated. [153] It is located—not by accident—in the second edition (preface, B viii): “That from the earliest times logic has traveled this secure course can be seen from the fact that since the time of Aristotle it has not had to go a single step backwards, unless we count the abolition of a few dispensable subtleties or the more distinct determination of its presentation, which improvements belong more to the elegance than to the security of the science. What is further remarkable about logic is that until now it has also been unable to take a single step forward, and therefore seems to all appearance to be finished and complete.” Roughly speaking, this means that from now on this seeming [Schein] proves itself void. Logic is to be transformed and grounded anew.
In some places Kant has clearly reached this insight, but without having developed it; to do so would have signified nothing short of the construction of metaphysics upon ground first cleared by the Critique of Pure Reason. This, however, was not Kant’s intention, since for him “critique”—in the aforementioned sense—had to be primarily and exclusively essential. But it also was not within Kant’s power, for such a task transcends the capacity of even the greatest thinkers, which requires nothing short of leaping over one’s own shadow. Nobody can do that. But the highest exertion in the attempt of this impossibility—that is the decisive, fundamental movement of thoughtful action. We can experience something of this fundamental movement, if in different ways, in Plato, Leibniz, and above all Kant, later in Schelling and Nietzsche. Hegel alone seemingly succeeded in leaping over this shadow— but only in such a way that he eliminated the shadow (i.e., the finitude of the human being) and leapt into the sun itself. Hegel leapt over the shadow, but he did not thereby surpass the shadow. Still, every philosopher must want [wollen] this. This “must” is his calling. In any case, the longer the shadow, the farther [154] the leap. This has nothing to do with a psychology of the creative personality; it concerns only the form of movement that belongs to the work itself as it works itself out in him.
Kant’s attitude toward such a seemingly dry question—“Wherein consists the essence of judgment?”—reveals something of this fundamental movement. The relationship between the first and second editions of the Critique of Pure Reason shows how difficult it had been for Kant to set in motion a correspondingly essential determination of judgment on the basis of his new concept of cognition, with all that this entails. In terms of content, all decisive insights were achieved in the first edition. But only in the second edition does Kant succeed in expressing, at the decisive place, that delimitation of the essence of judgment that accords with his own basic position.
If Kant accentuates time and again the fundamental significance of his newly established distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments, then this can only mean that the essence of judgment as such has been newly determined. This distinction is only a necessary consequence of this essential determination and hence, at the same time, a way of characterizing the newly apprehended essence of judgment in retrospect.
What we have said provides the necessary directive, if we are not to take the question “Wherein consists the essence of judgment for Kant?” too lightly, and if we are not to be surprised when we cannot find our way through his definitions uniformly and without further ado. For Kant nowhere developed a systematic presentation of his essential determination of judgment on the basis of insights he himself reached, certainly not in his surviving Lectures on Logic, where one would most likely expect to find it. The lectures should in general be consulted with caution, and for two reasons: (1) lecture course notebooks and transcripts are already questionable, especially in those sections that explicate difficult things; and (2) in his lectures, Kant adhered strictly to [155] the traditional doctrines and took their scholastic order and presentation as his guiding thread, instead of the inner systematic of the things themselves, as they presented themselves in his thinking. Kant used as the textbook for his Lectures on Logic Meier’s Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason, a schoolbook whose author was a student of Baumgarten, the pupil of Wolff mentioned earlier.
This position on the treatment of the question of judgment in Kant forces us, in strictest conformity to Kant, to provide a freer systematic, if brief, presentation of his essential determination of judgment. In keeping with what we have said, this will lead of itself to a clarification of the decisive distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments.
The question “Wherein consists the essence of judgment?” can initially be posed in two respects, in the direction of the traditional determination of thought, on the one hand, and in the direction of Kant’s new delimitation, on the other. The latter does not simply exclude the characteristics of judgment given by the tradition but incorporates them into the essential structure of judgment. This indicates that this essential structure is not as simple as pre-Kantian logic long believed, and as one sees the matter again today as well—despite Kant. The innermost ground of the difficulty of seeing the full essence of judgment does not lie in the incompleteness of Kant’s system, but in the essential structure of judgment itself.
We should here recall that we already had the occasion earlier to indicate schematically to what extent, since Plato and Aristotle, the λόγος, the assertion, furnishes the guiding thread for the determination of the thing and to point out the articulated structure of judgment in light of the fourfold meaning of “assertion” (cf. pp. 35f.). What we touched on there now finds its essential amplification in a brief but systematic presentation of the essential definition of judgment in Kant. [156]
a) The Traditional Doctrine of Judgment
We will proceed from the traditional doctrine of judgment. The differences and transformations that arise in its history must be left aside. Recall only the general Aristotelian determination of the assertion (judgment), the λόγος: λέγειν τι κατά τινος, “to assert something of something”: praedicere. To assert is, therefore, to relate a predicate to a subject—“The board is black.” Kant expresses this universal characteristic of judgment such that, at the beginning of the important section “On the Difference between Analytic and Synthetic Judgments,” he remarks: in judgments “the relation of a subject to the predicate is thought” (Introduction, A6/B10). The judgment is a relation in and through which a predicate is attributed to or denied of a subject; there are accordingly attributive (affirmative) or denying (negative) judgments. “This board is not red.” It is important to keep in view that since Aristotle, and also in Kant, the simple, affirmative (and true) assertion has been continuously posited as the basic authoritative form of all judgment.
In keeping with the tradition, Kant says of judgment that “the relation of a subject to the predicate is thought” in it. This statement generally holds good. But the question remains, whether the essence of judgment is exhausted thereby or grasped simply in its core. In relation to Kant’s own dicta, we can ask whether he would admit that the characteristic of judgment adduced, and employed by Kant himself, hits upon its essence. Kant would not admit this. On the other hand, one does not readily see what should be added still further to the essential determination of judgment. In the end, it is also unnecessary to add further determinations. On the contrary, it is necessary to see that the given definition already excludes essential moments of the judgment, [157] such that what really matters is to see how indications of the authentic, essential moments still lie in the given definition.
However, in order to carry out Kant’s new step both with and after him, we would do well first to consider briefly the interpretation of judgment that ruled at the time and of which he took account. For this purpose, we choose the definition of judgment Wolff provided in his great Logic. In §39 it says: actus iste mentis, quo aliquid a re quadam diversum eidem tribuimis, vel ab ea removemus, iudicium appellatur. “Each action of the mind in which we attribute to a certain thing [Sache] something distinct from it— tribuere (κατάφασις)—or hold [something] away from it— removere (ἀπόφασις)—is called judgment (iudicium).” Section 40 accordingly says: Dum igitur mens iudicat, notiones duas vel coniungit, vel separat. “While (insofar as) the mind judges, it either combines or separates two concepts.” In accordance with this, §201 remarks: In enunciatione seu propositione notiones vel coniunguntur, vel separantur. “In the assertion or the proposition concepts are either combined or separated.”
The student of a student of this master of conceptual analysis, Professor Meier, defines the judgment in his Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason in §292 in the following way: “A judgment (iudicium) is a representation of a logical relation of several concepts.” It is especially “logical” that in this definition [Definition] the Logos is defined as the representation of a logical relation, but that said, the definition of judgment in the textbook used by Kant only trivially reproduces the Wolffian definition. Judgment is “the representation of a relation between several concepts.” [158]
b) The Insufficiency of the Traditional Doctrine: Logicism [Logistik]7
We first contrast this traditional definition from scholastic philosophy with that Kantian definition that most sharply expresses the most extreme difference. We find it in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, and indeed in the context of a section that Kant thoroughly revised for the second edition, removing certain obscurities, but without altering anything of the basic position. It is the section on the “Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding.” The essential definition of judgment occurs in §19 (B140ff.). The paragraph itself begins with the words: “I have never been able to satisfy myself with the explanation that the logicians give of a judgment in general: it is, they say, the representation of a relation between two concepts.” “Explanation” [Erklärung] means to make something clear [klar], not to derive something causally. What Kant rejects here as insufficient is precisely the definition of Meier, which is to say of Baumgarten and Wolff. The target is the definition of judgment as assertion, λέγειν τι κατά τινος, familiar in logic since Aristotle. But Kant does not say that this characterization is false but only that it is unsatisfactory. He himself can, therefore, employ this definition of judgment, and he does still employ it often in the period after the appearance of the Critique of Pure Reason, even after the second edition. In investigations carried out around the year 1790, Kant says: “The understanding shows its capacity only in judgments, which are nothing else but the unity of consciousness in relation to concepts as such” (What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made in Germany Since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff?, Ak. 20:271).8 Where a relation is represented, a unity is always represented that supports the relation and becomes conscious through the relation, so that what is conscious in the judgment has the character of unity. Aristotle already gave voice to the same conception in de anima III.6, 430a 27f.: the judgment contains a σύνθεσίς τις ἤδη νοημάτων ὥσπερ ἓν ὄντων, [159] “always something like a positing-together of representations in a certain unity.” This characterization of judgment holds of judgment in general.
Some examples, which shall preoccupy us later, are useful: “This board is black.” “All bodies are extended.” “Some bodies are heavy.” In every case, a relation is represented. Representations are combined. We find linguistic expression of this combination in the “is” or “are”; hence this “little relation-word” (Kant) or “bond” is called the copula. The understanding is accordingly the capacity to combine representations, i.e., to represent this subject- predicate relation. The characterization of the assertion as combination of representations is correct, but unsatisfactory.
This correct but insufficient definition of assertion became the foundation for a conception and treatment of logic that is discussed a great deal today, and has been for several decades, and that goes by the name of Logicism. With the help of mathematical methods, the attempt is made to calculate the system of combinations among assertions; hence, we also call this logic “mathematical logic,” which sets itself a possible and legitimate task. Now, what Logicism furnishes is, of course, anything but logic, i.e., reflection upon the λόγος. Mathematical logic is not even a logic of mathematics, in the sense that it would be if it were to determine the essence of mathematical thought and mathematical truth and could do so in general. Logicism is itself rather mathematics applied to propositions and their forms. All mathematical logic and Logicism necessarily places itself outside of every domain of logic because, in keeping with their most proper goals, they must posit the λόγος, the assertion, as a mere combination of representations, i.e., in principle in an inadequate manner. The presumptuousness of mathematical logic, as the scientific logic that is valid for all sciences, falls apart as soon as the conditioned nature of its premises and the failure to think them through become visible. It is also characteristic that Logicism considers everything that goes beyond its [160] own definition of the assertion as a combination of representations to be a matter of “fine distinctions” that do not concern it. But here it is not a question of fine or gross distinctions but whether or not the essence of judgment has been hit upon.
When Kant says, as we saw, that the “explanation” of judgment in the logic of the schools is unsatisfactory, this failure to satisfy is nothing merely personal, an appraisal anchored in Kant’s own peculiar wishes. Rather, the explanation fails to satisfy those demands that stem from the essence of the very thing itself.
c) The Relatedness of the Judgment to the Object and to Intuition; Apperception
How does Kant’s new definition of judgment run? Kant says “that a judgment is nothing other than the way to bring given cognitions to the objective unity of apperception” (B141). We still cannot fully and immediately understand this definition and its individual elements. Meanwhile, something conspicuous strikes the eye. The discourse is no longer about representations and concepts but of “given cognitions,” i.e., of the given in cognition, consequently of intuitions. It speaks of “objective unity.” Here, judging as an act of the understanding is not only related in general to intuition and object, but its essence is defined on the basis of this relation, even as this relation. By way of this essential definition of judgment, anchored in intuition- and object-relation, this relatedness is first outlined and explicitly introduced into the unitary structure of cognition. A new concept of the understanding develops out of this. Understanding is now no longer only the faculty of the combination of representations, but (according to §17): “ understanding is, generally speaking, the faculty of cognitions. These [161] consist in the determinate relation of given representations to an object” (B137).
We can clarify this new state of affairs with the help of a diagram, which shall later serve as our clue when we develop the essential difference between analytic and synthetic judgments, on the basis of this new interpretation of judgment.
The definition of judgment cited first concerns simply a relation of concepts, subject, and predicate. That the representing of such a relation requires an actus mentis is self-evident, for a mode of action on the part of the understanding belongs to every act of the understanding. In the new definition, by contrast, we hear of the objective unity of cognitions, i.e., of the unity of intuitions, which is represented as a unity belonging to the object and determining the object. This relation of representations is as a whole object-related. But for Kant, there is also thereby immediately posited the relation to the “subject,” in the sense of the I that thinks and judges. In the authentic definition of judgment, this I-relation is called apperception. Percipere is the simple apprehension [Vernehmen] and grasping [Erfassen] of the objective; in apperception, the relation of the I to the grasped object is itself grasped (percipiert) along with it (ad) in a certain way. The standing-over-against [Das Entgegenstehen] of the object [Gegenstand] as such [162] is not possible unless what encounters is present in its standing-over-against for a re-presenting that has itself co- present, too, though not indeed as another object but rather only to the extent that what encounters, in its over-againstness [Entgegen] as such, requires a direct relation to that for which what encounters is present.
According to the way in which we have now contrasted the two definitions of judgment—the traditional and Kant’s own—it looks as if Kant only added something to the definition of judgment that was previously omitted. But his definition does not concern a “mere extension” [of the concept of judgment] but a more original grasp of the whole. Hence, we must proceed from Kant’s essential definition in order to be able to evaluate how things stand with the traditional definition. If we take this [the traditional definition] by itself, it clearly shows that we emphasize one structural element and that this, so taken, displays only an artificial construction, uprooted from the supporting ground of the relations to the object and to the cognizing I.
It is thereby easy to gauge why the traditional definition of judgment could never satisfy Kant, i.e., bring him peace with the very thing itself; in light of the question concerning the possibility of metaphysics, the question concerning the essence of human cognition had to become decisive for Kant.
If we wish to understand Kant’s new definition of judgment more clearly, this can only mean that we have to clarify the distinction already mentioned between analytic and synthetic judgments. We ask: In what respect are the judgments here distinguished? What does this guiding respect mean for the new determination of the essence of judgment?
The various tortured, skewed, and fruitless attempts to cope with Kant’s distinction all suffer in advance from the same defect: they rest upon the traditional definition but not on the definition achieved by Kant.
The distinction brings into view nothing other than [163] the transformed interpretation of the Logos [Logos] and everything that belongs to it, i.e., the “logical.” Previously, one saw the essence of the logical in the relation and connection of concepts. Kant’s novel determination of the logical—in contrast with the traditional one—is something absolutely strange and almost nonsensical, insofar as it says that the logical consists precisely not in this mere relation of concepts. With apparently full knowledge of the consequences of his new definition of the logical, Kant placed this in the title of the crucial §19, which runs: “The Logical Form of All Judgments Consists in the Objective Unity of the Apperception of the Concepts Contained Therein.” To read this as a methodical indication means just this: every exposition of the essence of judgment must begin with its full essential structure, as it is established in advance in terms of the relations to the object and to the cognizing human being.
d) Kant’s Distinction between Analytic and Synthetic Judgments
What is meant by this distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments? In what respect does the clarification of this distinction furnish us with a more complete insight into the essence of judgment? So far what we know about this distinction is only that the division of our chapter into its first two sections is guided by it. We cannot gather much at first from naming. In pursuit of [mere] names, we can easily fall into error, precisely because the distinction in question can also be met with in the traditional definition of judgment and even came into circulation already in the era of its first formation in Aristotle. Analytic, analysis, dissolving, taking apart, διαίρεσις; synthesis, in contrast, putting-together.
If we attend once again to the positing of judgment as the relation between subject and predicate, then it immediately follows [164] that this relation, i.e., the attribution of the predicate to the subject, is a synthesis, for example, of “board” and “black.” But, on the other hand, both elements of the relation must be taken apart, in order to be able to be put together. Every synthesis includes analysis and vice versa. Hence, every judgment as a relation of representations is—not incidentally but necessarily—at once analytic and synthetic. Therefore, because every judgment as such is analytic and synthetic, the difference between analytic and synthetic judgments is meaningless. This observation is correct. Yet Kant does not base his distinction upon the customarily intended essence of judgment. What Kant means by “analytic” and “synthetic” is not determined by way of the customary but by virtue of a new, essential delimitation. In order to catch a glimpse of the distinction and its guiding respect, we call upon the diagram [above] for help, along with examples of analytic and synthetic judgments.
According to Kant, “all bodies are extended” is an analytic judgment, while “some bodies are heavy” (Prolegomena §2a) is a synthetic judgment. In light of these examples, one could take the difference between analytic and synthetic judgments to be that the former speaks of “all” and the latter, by contrast, of “some.” This difference between the two sorts of judgment is certainly not arbitrary but in order to grasp the distinction we are seeking, it does not suffice, especially not if we only understand it in the sense of traditional logic, to say: the first judgment is universal, the second particular. “All bodies” here means “body in general and as such.” According to Kant, this “in general” is represented in the concept. “All bodies” means the body taken in accord with its concept, with regard to what we mean by “body” as such. Of body taken in accord with its concept, in accordance with what we represent by it, we can say, indeed must say: it is extended, whether it be [165] a purely geometrical body or a material, physical one. The predicate “extended” lies in the concept [of body] itself: a mere analysis of the concept finds this element [in it]. In the judgment “the body is extended” the represented unity of the relation between subject and predicate, the belonging together of both has its determining basis in the concept of body. If I judge of body in any way at all, I must already possess a certain cognition of the object in the sense of its concept. If nothing further is asserted of the object, save what lies in the concept, i.e., if the truth of the judgment is grounded in nothing but analysis of the concept of the subject, then this merely analytically grounded judgment is analytic. The truth of the judgment rests upon the explicated concept as such.
We can clarify what has been said in the following diagram:
According to the new definition, a relation to the object (x) belongs to the judgment, i.e., the subject is meant in its relation to the object. But this relation can now be represented in various ways. First in such a way that the object is only represented as far as it is named in general, in the concept. In this case, we already have a cognition of the object and can—bypassing the object (x), without the detour through it, remaining purely with the subject-concept “bodily”—draw the predicate [“extended”] from it. Such an analyzing judgment only presents more clearly and more explicitly what we already represent in the concept of the subject. Hence the analytic judgment, according to Kant, is [166] only clarifying; it does not extend our cognition in terms of content. Consider another example. The judgment “The board is extended” is analytic. Being-extended lies in the concept of the board as something corporeal. This judgment is self-evident, i.e., the positing-in-relation of subject and predicate has its basis in the concept we already possess of the board. By contrast, when we say that “The board is black,” what we assert is not self-evident. The board could also be gray or white or red. The being-red does not already lie in the concept of a board, in the way that being-extended does. How the board is colored, that it is black, can only be made out by appeal to the object itself. Hence, in order to arrive at the determining ground in which the relation of subject and predicate is based, representing must take another path than the analytic judgment, namely, the path [that leads] through the object and its determinate givenness.
To speak in this way of analytic judgments means that here we cannot remain within the concept of the subject and appeal only to what belongs to a board as such. We must proceed beyond the subject and its concept and take the path through the object itself. But this means that, in addition to the concept of the object, the object itself must now be represented; this representing-along-with [Mit-dazu-vorstellen] of the object is a synthesis. Such a judgment, in which the predicate is attached to the subject by passing through the x and in recourse to it, is synthetic. “For by the term synthesis it is clearly indicated that something outside of the given concept must be added as substrate” (“On a Discovery . . .” Ak. VIII. 245).9
In the sense of the traditional definition of judgment, too, a predicate is posited in the subject in the analytic judgment. With respect to the subject-predicate relation, the analytic judgment is also synthetic. Conversely, the synthetic judgment is also [167] analytic. But this perspective is not the guiding one in Kant’s distinction [between analytic and synthetic judgments]. We now see more clearly what this general relation of judgment comes to, when it is lifted out of context and treated as the sole relation of judgment [at issue]. Then it is only the indifferent, neutralized relation of subject and predicate present in general in both analytic and synthetic judgments, if in essentially different ways in each case. This leveled and faded form comes to be stamped as the essence of judgment. The disaster remains that this statement is always correct. Our diagram now becomes misleading, insofar as it could give the impression that the subject-predicate relation was the first and last support, and the rest mere accessories.
The decisive respect according to which the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments is established is the relation of the subject-predicate relation as such to the object. If this [object] is only represented in its concept, and this is posited as the pregiven, then the object is indeed the measure, at least in a certain way, but only as its given concept; this [object as concept] can yield determinations only by way of dissection, such that only what is dissected and thrown into relief is attributed to the object. The grounding [of the judgment] is accomplished in the domain of the dissection of concepts. The object is co-authoritative in the analytic judgment, too—but merely in its concept (cf. A151/B190: “Of that which as concept already lies and is thought in the cognition of the object”).
But if the object is immediately authoritative for the subject-predicate relation, if the assertion takes the demonstrative path by way of the object itself, and the object serves thereby as ground of the assertion, then the judgment is synthetic.
The distinction classifies judgments according to the different possible grounds for determining the truth of the subject-predicate relation. If the determining ground lies in the [168] concept as such, then the judgment is analytic; if it lies in the object itself, then the judgment is synthetic. The latter brings something from the object itself to our previous acquaintance with the same; it is ampliative, while the analytic judgment, by contrast, is only explicative.
It should now be clear that the distinction in judgments we have been discussing presupposes the new concept of judgment, the relation to the objective unity of the object itself, and that it serves, at the same time, to provide a definite insight into the full essential structure of judgment. Nonetheless, we still do not see clearly what this distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments has to do with the task of the critique of pure reason. We defined this positively as the essential delimitation of pure reason, i.e., what it may do, and negatively as the rejection of the presumptions of metaphysics based upon mere concepts.
e) A Priori—A Posteriori
To what extent does the distinction cited [between analytic and synthetic judgments] possess fundamental significance for the execution of critique? We can answer this question as soon as we have characterized analytic and synthetic judgments in yet another respect, one that has been intentionally postponed until now.
Our clarification of the essence of the mathematical and the presentation of the development of mathematical thought in modern natural science, and modern modes of thought in general, hit upon a remarkable fact. Newton’s first law of motion, for example, and likewise Galileo’s law of falling bodies, both have the peculiarity that they leap ahead of what verification and experience in the literal sense have to offer. In relation to things, such principles [Sätzen] have anticipated [vorweggenommen] something. Such anticipations are in rank higher than and prior to all further determinations of things; in Latin they are called a priori, earlier than others. [169] This does not mean that these anticipations are recognized first in the historical order of the formation of our cognition, but that these anticipatory principles are first in the order of rank, when it concerns the grounding and construction of cognition itself. Hence a natural scientist can for a long while possess manifold cognitions of nature, without knowing the highest law of motion as such; nonetheless, what is posited in this law is, in accord with the matter itself, always already the basis for all particular assertions made in the domain of statements about courses of motion and their regularity.
The priority of the a priori concerns the essence of things; what enables the thing to be what it is comes before the thing, in accord with the matter [Sache] and “nature,” although we first apprehend what comes before after taking-cognizance of some of the more immediate qualities of the thing (concerning the prioritas naturae, cf. Leibniz’s letter to De Volder, 21 January 1704, ed. Gerhardt, II, 263). In the order of explicit apprehension, what comes before in the thing itself arrives later. The πρότερον φύσει is ὕστερον πρὸς ἡμᾶς. The fact that that which comes before materially is what comes later in the order of discovery easily leads time and again to the error [of thinking] that it is also something that comes after the fact in the thing itself, and so is unimportant and basically a matter of indifference. This widespread as well as lazy opinion corresponds to a distinctive blindness for the essence of things and for the authoritative significance of essential cognition. The predominance of such essential blindness is always an obstacle to a transformation of knowing and of the sciences. On the other hand, the decisive transformations in knowing and in the cognitive stance of the human being rest upon the fact that what comes before (in the thing itself) is also grasped by questioning in the right way as the prior [das Vorherige] and as constant projection. [170]
The a priori is a title for the essence of things. How the thingness of the thing is grasped and the being of beings understood decides how, in each case, the a priori and its prioritas is interpreted. We know that for modern philosophy the principle of the I [der Ichsatz] is the first principle in the rank order of truth and of principles, i.e., that which is thought in the pure thinking of the I, as the preeminent subject. And so it happens that, conversely, everything thought in the pure thinking of the subject is valid as the a priori. A priori is that which lies ready in the subject, in the mind. The a priori is that which belongs to the subjectivity of the subject. By contrast, everything else, what first becomes accessible by going outside of the subject and entering into the object, into perceptions, is—viewed from the subject—subsequent: a posteriori.
We cannot enter here into the history of this distinction—a priori, preceding according to rank and a posteriori, correspondingly later. In his own way, Kant takes this distinction over from modern thought and, with its help, characterizes the difference between analytic and synthetic judgments. An analytic judgment, which has the determining ground of the truth of its subject-predicate relation merely in the concept, remains in advance in the domain of mere thinking; it is a priori. All analytic judgments are in essence a priori. Synthetic judgments are a posteriori: here we must first go beyond the concept to the object, from which we “subsequently” draw determinations.
f) How Are Synthetic Judgments A Priori Possible?
Let us now cast a glance at traditional metaphysics in light of Kant’s clarification of the essence of judgment. A critique of the same must delimit the essence of thinking and judgment enacted in and demanded by it. What mode of judgment does traditional, modern metaphysics demand, in light of Kant’s doctrine of judgment? [171] As we know, rational metaphysics is cognition from mere concepts, hence a priori. But this metaphysics does not wish to be logic, dissecting concepts alone, but it claims to know the supersensible domains—God, world, and the human soul—hence to know the objects themselves. Rational metaphysics wishes to expand our cognition of such things. The judgments of this metaphysics claim to be synthetic, but at the same time a priori, because they are gained from mere concepts, from mere thinking. The question concerning the possibility of rational metaphysics can be brought forth in the following formula: how are the judgments demanded by it possible, i.e., how are those synthetic judgments that are also a priori possible? We say “also” here because how synthetic judgments a posteriori are possible can be seen without difficulty. Our cognition (synthesis) is amplified whenever we go beyond the concept and allow the givens of perception and sensation (the a posteriori, what comes after)—viewed from the perspective of thought as what comes before—to come to language.
On the other hand, it is also clear how analytic judgments a priori are possible; they only reproduce and clarify what already lies in the concept. By contrast, it remains initially inscrutable how synthetic judgments a priori are supposed to be possible. In keeping with what was said above, at least, the very concept of such a judgment contains a contradiction. Since synthetic judgments are a posteriori, we need only replace “synthetic” with “ a posteriori ” to perceive the absurdity of the question, which would run: how are a posteriori judgments possible a priori ? Since all analytic judgments are a priori, we could also replace “ a priori ” with “analytically” and the question would run: how are synthetic judgments analytically possible? That is as much as to say: how is fire possible as water? The answer is self-evident: it is impossible.
The question concerning the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori [172] looks like the demand to make out something binding and defining about the object, but without going back to the object and entering into it.
Nevertheless, Kant’s decisive discovery consists precisely in bringing to light that and above all how synthetic judgments a priori are possible. To be sure, the question concerning the how of possibility possesses a twofold meaning in Kant: (1) in what sense and (2) under what conditions.
As we shall see, synthetic judgments a priori are possible only under precisely determined conditions, conditions which rational metaphysics is not able to fulfill. Synthetic judgments a priori are consequently not attainable within it. The most proper intention of rational metaphysics collapses. Please note: it is not because rational metaphysics fails to reach its intended goal as a result of external obstacles and limits, but because the conditions of that cognition demanded by its own character cannot be fulfilled on the basis of its character. Of course, the rejection of rational metaphysics on the basis of its inner impossibility presupposes the positive demonstration of those conditions that make synthetic judgments a priori possible. In terms of the mode of these conditions, it can also be determined how, i.e., in what sense alone, synthetic judgments a priori are possible, in a sense that philosophy and human thought in general prior to Kant knew nothing about.
In securing these conditions—and that means, at the same time, in delimiting the essence of this sort of judgment—Kant recognizes not only the extent to which they are possible but also the extent to which they are necessary. They are necessary, namely, in order to make possible human cognition as experience. According to the tradition of modern thought, which Kant clung to, despite everything, cognition is grounded in principles. Those principles that necessarily underlie our human cognition as conditions of its possibility [173] must have the character of synthetic judgments a priori. The third section of our chapter offers nothing save the systematic presentation and grounding of these synthetic and yet, at the same time, a priori judgments.
g) The Principle of Contradiction as the Negative Condition of the Truth of Judgment
In light of what has now been said, we can better understand why this third section is preceded by two sections, the first of which concerns analytic judgments, and the second of which concerns synthetic judgments. Against the background of these first two sections, what is distinctive and novel in the treatment of the third and the meaning at the center of the entire work become visible. On the basis of the achieved clarification of the difference between analytic and synthetic judgments, we also understand why the discourse concerns the supreme principles of these judgments, i.e., what this means.
Analytic and synthetic judgments are distinguished with respect to the different modes of their respective [je] relation to the object, i.e., with respect to the specific sort of determining ground of the truth of the subject-predicate relation. The supreme principle is the positing of the first and authentic basis in which the truth of the sort of judgment in question is grounded. Hence, we can now say, coming full circle.
The first two sections of our chapter convey the original insight into the essence of analytic as well as synthetic judgments, insofar as they concern what constitutes the essential difference between both kinds of judgment. As soon as the discourse turns toward analytic and synthetic judgments in Kant’s sense, judgments and the essence of judgment in general are understood in and out of their relation to the object, hence in accord with the [174] new concept of judgment achieved in the Critique of Pure Reason.
If, therefore, our chapter concerns judging throughout, this no longer means that thinking is under consideration for itself [alone], but that the relation of thinking to the object, and hence to intuition, stands in question.
This brief attempt to reflect systematically on Kant’s doctrine of judgment was supposed to enable us to understand the subsequent exposition of the first section, i.e., to provide a preview of the inner contexts of what Kant brings to language in the following section.
A judgment is either analytic or synthetic, i.e., it has the determining ground of its truth either in the given concept of the subject or in the object itself. We can consider a judgment merely as subject-predicate relation; we thereby grasp, as it were, only a residue of the structure of judgment, and even this residue, in order to be what it is, and to furnish a subject-predicate relation at all, still stands under a condition, namely, that subject and predicate are in general unifiable, i.e., attributable to each other and are not contradictory. But this condition does not provide the complete basis for the truth of the judgment, because the judgment is still not fully grasped [in this way].
The mere ability of subject and predicate to be unified means only that an assertion in general, as λέγειν τι κατά τινος, a dictum, is possible, insofar as no contradiction gets in the way. However, this ability to be unified, as condition of speech, does not yet reach into the domain of the essence of judgment. Judgment is still under consideration in this case without regard for the giving of grounds and the object-relation. The mere ability to be unified of subject and predicate tells us so little about the truth of the judgment that, despite its freedom from contradiction, a subject-predicate relation can be false or even groundless. “But even if there is no contradiction in our judgment, it can nevertheless [175] combine concepts in a way not entailed by the object, or even without any ground being given to us either a priori or a posteriori that would justify such a judgment, and thus, for all that a judgment may be free of internal contradiction, it can still be false or groundless” (A150/B190).
Kant now first gives us the formula of “this famous principle of contradiction”: “No predicate pertains to a thing that contradicts it” (A151/B190). In his Lectures on Metaphysics (Pölitz, p. 15) the formula runs: nulli subjecto competit praedicatum ipsi oppositum. “No predicate pertains to a subject that is opposed to it.” These two formulations do not essentially differ. The formulation in the Critique of Pure Reason names the thing to which the concept of the subject is related, while the lecture course names the concept of the subject itself.
In the final paragraph of the first section, Kant spells out why he deviates from the tradition in this formulation of the principle of contradiction: “There is, however, still one formula of this famous principle, although denuded of all content and merely formal, which contains a synthesis that is incautiously and entirely mixed into it. This is: ‘It is impossible for something to be and not to be at the same time ’ ” (A152/B191).10 In Aristotle the principle of contradiction runs: τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ ἅμα ὑπάρχειν τε καὶ μὴ ὑπάρχειν ἀδύνατον τῷ αὐτῷ καὶ κατὰ τὸ αὐτό (Metaphysics Γ 3, 1005b19). “It is impossible for the same to occur as well as not to occur at the same time and with respect to the same.” In §28 of Wolff’s Ontology it runs: Fiere non potest, ut idem simul sit et non sit. “It cannot happen that the same is and is not at the same time.” In these formulations, the ἅμα, simul, “at the same time”—hence time-determination—is conspicuous. In Kant’s own formulation, we do not find the phrase “at the same time.” Why is it omitted? “At the same time” is a time-determination and thereby characterizes the object as temporal, i.e., as object of experience. [176] But insofar as the principle of contradiction is only to be understood as a negative condition of the subject-predicate relation in general, the judgment is meant separately from the object and its temporal determination. But even if one attributes a positive significance to the principle of contradiction, as one readily does, the “at the same time” as a time-determination does not, according to Kant, belong in its formula.
h) The Principle of Contradiction as Negative Formulation of the Principle of Identity
In what way can a positive employment of the principle of contradiction be made, so that it does not present only a negative condition of the possibility of the subject-predicate relation in general, i.e., for all possible judgments, but also presents a supreme principle for a definite kind of judgment? Traditional rational metaphysics was of the opinion that the principle of contradiction was the principle of all judgments in general, i.e., the analytic as well as the synthetic, as Kant would have it. This distinction between two kinds of judgment enables Kant to delimit more sharply than before the range of the axiomatic validity of the principle of contradiction, i.e., in the negative and positive [employments]. In contrast to a merely negative condition, a principle, or basic proposition, is a proposition in which a basis for possible truth is posited, i.e., one that suffices to support the truth of a judgment. In this context, a ground or reason [Grund] is always represented as what supports and suffices in supporting; it is ratio sufficiens [a sufficient reason]. If the judgment is taken only as a subject-predicate relation, then it is not considered with regard to the determining grounds of its truth. By contrast, it is in this respect that the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments becomes definitive. The analytic judgment takes the object merely in its given concept and wishes only to retain this in the self-sameness of its content, in order to elucidate it. The self-sameness of the concept is [177] in this case the sole and sufficient standard for the attribution and denial of the predicate. The proposition that posits the ground of the truth of the analytic judgment must, therefore, posit the self-sameness of the concept as ground of the subject-predicate relation. Understood as a rule, it must posit the necessity of retaining the concept in its self-sameness identity. The supreme principle of analytic judgments is the principle of identity.
But did not we say that the supreme principle at stake in the first section is the principle of contradiction? Were we not justified in saying this, since Kant nowhere speaks of the principle of identity in the first section? But it is puzzling to hear of a twofold role for the principle of contradiction. To speak of the positive employment of the principle of contradiction does not only gesture toward the application of this principle as determining ground, rather, it is also to say that this application is itself only possible if the negative content of this principle is simultaneously converted into its positive one. Presented in a formula: to advance from “A ≠ non-A” to “A=A.”
The positively employed principle of contradiction is the principle of identity. To be sure, Kant does not name the principle of identity in our section, but in the introduction chapter he designates analytic judgments as those “in which the connection of the predicate with the subject” is thought “through identity” (A7/B10). In this context, identity is offered as the ground of the analytic judgment. Similarly, in the polemical writing “On a Discovery,” analytic judgments are defined as those “that rest entirely upon the principle of identity or contradiction” (Ak. 8:245). In the second section (A154/5, B194) identity and contradiction are mentioned together. The relationship between these two principles remains undecided even today. Nor can it be decided in a purely formal way; for this decision remains dependent upon the interpretation of being and of truth as such. In rational, scholastic metaphysics, the principle of contradiction has priority. [178] This is why Kant leaves aside the exposition of the principle of contradiction in our section. For Leibniz, by contrast, the first principle is identity, especially since, for him, all judgments are identities. In his Habilitationsschrift, Kant himself shows, against Wolff (Part One: de principio contradictionis, propositio I): Veritatum omnium non datur principium UNICUM, absolute primum, catholicon. The third propositio shows the praeferentia of the principium identitatis. . . prae principio contradictionis.
In analytic judgments, the object is thought only in accordance with its concept and not as an object of experience, i.e., as time-determined; hence the formula of the principle of these judgments need not contain any time-determination.
i) Kant’s Transcendental Reflection: General and Transcendental Logic
The principle of contradiction and the principle of identity belong solely to logic and have to do only with judgment in a logical respect. To be sure, when Kant speaks in this way, he looks beyond the very distinction in the employment of the principle of contradiction that he himself introduced and considers all thought as merely logical that, in its grounding, does not take the path over the object itself. As “general logic,” logic disregards every relation to the object (A55/B79). It knows nothing like synthetic judgments. But all metaphysical judgments are synthetic. Hence—and this alone is what matters now—the principle of contradiction is no principle of metaphysics.
Hence—and this is the further decisive consequence that mediates between the first and second sections—metaphysical cognition, and every objective, synthetic cognition in general, demands another grounding. Other principles must be established.
In light of the importance of this step, we shall attempt [179] to grasp more clearly still the restriction of the principle of contradiction as the principle of analytic judgments, and indeed with respect to the guiding question concerning the thingness of the thing. The traditional determination of the thingness of the thing, i.e., of the being of beings, takes the assertion (the judgment) as its guiding thread; being is determined on the basis of thought and the laws of what can and cannot be thought. Nonetheless, the first section of our chapter, which we have now discussed, says nothing less than this: mere thinking cannot be the court of appeal for the determination of the thingness of the thing or, as Kant would say, the objectivity of the object. Logic cannot be the basic science of metaphysics. But insofar as it is nonetheless necessary, in the determination of the object (which, for Kant, is the object of human cognition), for thought to participate, and precisely as intuition-related, i.e., as synthetic judgment, logic as doctrine of thought has some say in metaphysics. In accord with the transformed determination of the essence of thinking and judging, the essence of logic related thereto must also be transformed. It must be a logic that holds thought in view, in a manner that includes its relation to the object. Kant names this kind of logic “transcendental logic.”
The transcendental is what concerns transcendence. Viewed transcendentally, thought is considered in its crossing-over [Hinübersteigen] to the object. Transcendental reflection is not directed toward objects themselves nor toward thought as mere representation of the subject-predicate relation, but toward this crossing-over [Überstieg] and the relation to the object—as this relation. (Transcendence: (1) over to—as such and (2) over and away.) (For Kant’s definition of the “transcendental,” cf. Critique of Pure Reason, A12/B25. In a note [Ak. 18, no. 5738] we read: “Definition of a thing in view of its essence as thing is transcendental.”) [180]
In accord with this direction of reflection, Kant names his philosophy “transcendental philosophy.” The system of principles is its foundation. In order to see more clearly here and in what follows, we wish to bring into relief several points of view on the [transcendental line of] questioning.
We take care to express our cognitions, but also our questions and modes of reflection, in propositions. The physicist and the jurist, the historian and the doctor, the theologian and the meteorologist, the biologist and the philosopher—all speak similarly in propositions and assertions. And yet the domains and objects to which the assertions relate remain distinct. Hence the content of what is said differs in each case.
And so it happens, too, that one commonly discovers no difference save one in content when we speak, say, along biological lines of questioning and concern ourselves with cell division, growth, and propagation, or when we concern ourselves with biology itself—its direction of questioning and speaking themselves. Whoever can do the former, and precisely such a one, must also be able to do the latter. But this is an illusion, for one cannot deal with biology biologically. Biology is nothing like algae and moss, frogs and salamanders, cells and organs. Biology is a science. Unlike the objects of biology, biology itself cannot be placed under the microscope.
The moment we speak “about” a science and reflect upon it, all the means and methods of this familiar science fail. For the question concerning a science requires a point of view the enactment and accomplishment of which is even less self-evident than the mastery of a science. When it comes to the exposition of a science, the opinion easily takes root that such reflections are “universal,” in [181] contrast to the “particular” questions of the science. But what is at stake here is not only a quantitative difference of the more or less “universal”—a qualitative distinction comes into view, a distinction in essence, line of sight, concept-formation, and grounding, but, in fact, this distinction already lies within each science itself. It belongs to it, insofar as it is a free, historical action of the human being. Hence constant self-reflection belongs to every science.
Consider the example of the assertion [we met with earlier]: “The sun warms the stone.” If we pursue this assertion and its ownmost direction, we are directed immediately to sun, stone, and warmth. Our representing opens onto what the object itself offers. We do not attend to the assertion as such. To be sure, we can turn away from sun and stone and attend to the assertion as such, in a distinctive turn of our representational regard. A turn of this sort took place, for example, when we characterized the judgment as subject-predicate relation. This subject-predicate relation has nothing at all to do with the sun and the stone. We now take the assertion, the λόγος—“the sun warms the stone”—in a purely “logical” way. We not only disregard the fact that the assertion is related to objects of nature. We do not attend to its objective relation at all. In addition to the first direction of representation—immediately to the object—and besides this second—to the objectless relation of assertion in itself—there is a third as well. In characterizing the judgment “the sun warms the stone,” we said that the sun is understood as cause and the warmth of the stone as effect. If we retain this in relation to the sun and the warm stone, we are, to be sure, directed to the sun and the stone themselves, and yet not immediately. We mean not just the sun itself and the warm stone itself, but we now consider the object “sun” with respect to how this object is an object for us, [182] in what respect it is meant, i.e., how our thought thinks it.
We do not now take the object (sun, warmth, stone) immediately but in light of the mode of its objectivity. In this respect, we refer to the object in advance, a priori: as cause, as effect.
We are now not directed to the object of the assertion nor are we directed to the form of the assertion as such but rather to how the object is an object of assertion, how the assertion represents the object in advance, how our cognition crosses over to the object, transcendit, and thereby how—in what objective determinateness—the object encounters. Kant calls this mode of reflection “transcendental.” The object stands in view in a certain way, so too the assertion, because the relation between assertion and object is to be grasped.
But this transcendental reflection is not an external coupling of psychological and logical modes of reflection, but something more original, from which each has been one-sidedly singled out. As soon as we reflect upon a science within the science itself in some manner or other, we step into the line of sight and onto the plane of transcendental reflection. We are mostly unaware of it. Consequently, our reflections are in this respect often arbitrary and confused. But just as we cannot take a well-grounded and fruitful step in any science without being familiar with its objects and procedures, so, too, we cannot take one step in reflection upon the science without the proper experience and exercise of the transcendental point of view.
If we are always pursuing the question concerning the thingness of the thing in this course of lectures and endeavor to situate ourselves in this domain of questioning, this pursuit is nothing but the exercise of this [183] transcendental point of view and problematic. It is the exercise of the representing in which every reflection on the sciences necessarily moves. The securing of this domain, taking possession of it knowingly, the ability to enter into and to stand within its dimensions, is the basic presupposition of every scientific Dasein that wishes to understand its historical position and task.
j) Synthetic Judgments A Priori Necessarily Lie at the Basis of All Cognition
When we approach the object-domain of a science, the objects of this domain are already determined in certain ways in advance, not contingently, and not for any lack of attention on our part, as if this predetermination of the object could ever be prevented. It is in fact necessary, so necessary that in its absence we could never stand before objects, as before something toward which our assertions are directed and by which they are measured and demonstrated. How, then, is a scientific judgment supposed to correspond with the object? How can a judgment in art history, for example, be an art-historical judgment about an actual work of art unless the object is determined in advance as a work of art? How can a biological assertion about an animal be a biological judgment in truth, if the animal is not predefined as a living being?
We must always already possess a cognition with content, a cognition of what the object is according to its objective essence (for Kant, a synthetic cognition), and indeed in advance, a priori. Without synthetic judgments, a priori objects could never stand over against us as such, toward which we “then” direct ourselves in specific investigations, inquiries, and proofs that matter to us in our vocation.
Synthetic judgments a priori, prejudgments in a genuine and necessary sense, already speak in all scientific judgments. [184] The scientific quality of a science depends in each case upon the explicitness and definiteness with which a science concerns itself with its prejudgments, but it does not depend on the number of books written or the number of institutes [devoted to it], and certainly not the various uses it serves. There is no presuppositionless science; for the essence of science consists in such presupposing, in prejudging objects. Kant has not only asserted as much but also shown it, and not only shown it, but grounded it. He placed this ground in our history in the form of a work called the Critique of Pure Reason.
If we understand the essence of truth in the traditional sense as the correspondence of assertion with the object—and Kant, too, understands the essence of truth in the same way—then truth, understood as correspondence, cannot be, if the object has not already been brought to stand against [us] in advance through synthetic judgments a priori. Kant, therefore, calls synthetic judgments a priori, i.e., the system of principles of pure understanding, the “source of all truth” (A237/B296). The internal connection between what has been said [about the system of principles] and our question concerning the thingness of the thing is obvious.
For Kant, truthful things, i.e., things of which a truth can be for us, are objects of experience. But the object only becomes accessible to us when we go beyond the mere concept toward that other, which must first be placed beside [us] and made available [was erst dazu- und beigestellt werden muß]. Such making-available [Beistellung] occurs as synthesis. In the Kantian sense, we encounter things first and only in the domain of synthetic judgments, and accordingly the thingness of the thing only within the sphere of the question concerning how a thing in general and in advance is possible as a thing, i.e., how synthetic judgments a priori are at the same time possible. [185]
If we take together and into view everything we have said about Kant’s efforts to delimit the class of analytic judgments, then the first two paragraphs of the second section become intelligible:
The explanation of the possibility of synthetic judgments is a problem with which general logic has nothing to do, indeed whose name it need not even know. But in a transcendental logic it is the most important business of all, and indeed the only business if the issue is the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori and likewise the conditions and domain of their validity. For by completing this task, transcendental logic can fully satisfy its goal of determining the domain and boundaries of pure understanding.
In the analytic judgment, I remain with the given concept in order to discern something about it. If it is an affirmative judgment, I only ascribe to this concept that which is already thought in it; if it is a negative judgment, I only exclude the opposite of this concept from it. In synthetic judgments, however, I am to go beyond the given concept in order to consider something entirely different from what is thought in it as in a relation to it, a relation which is therefore never one of either identity or contradiction, and one where neither the truth nor even the error of the judgment can be seen in the judgment itself. (A154–55/B193–94)
That which is “entirely different” is the object. The relation of that which is “entirely different” to the concept makes the object available [Beistellen] representationally in a thinking intuition [denkenden Anschauen]: synthesis. An object only encounters us when we enter into this relation and remain in it. The inner possibility of the object, i.e., its essence, is therefore codetermined by the possibility of this relation to it. In what does this relation to the object consist? In what is it grounded? [186] The ground upon which it rests must be exposed and posited properly as ground. This occurs in the establishment and justification of the supreme principle of all synthetic judgments.
The condition of the possibility of all truth is grounded in this posited ground. The principles of pure understanding are the source of all truth. The principles themselves, and hence this source of all truth, lead back to a deeper source that is brought to light in the supreme principle of all synthetic judgments.
The entire Critique of Pure Reason reaches its deepest self-laid ground in the second section of our chapter. The supreme principle of all synthetic judgments—or, as we could also say, the original determination of human cognition, its truth, and its object—is formulated at the end of the second section: “The conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience ” (A158/B197).
Whoever understands this sentence understands Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Whoever understands this not only knows one book in the philosophical literature but masters a basic position of our historical Dasein, which we can neither skirt nor overleap nor otherwise disown. But we must settle the matter in the future in an appropriating transformation.
The second section is also prior in rank to the third, which is only the unfolding of the former. Consequently, a fulfilled and definite understanding of the decisive section is only possible if we are already acquainted with the third. We shall, therefore, skip over the second section and only return to it after the interpretation of the third, at the conclusion of our presentation of the question of the thing in the Critique of Pure Reason. [187]
All synthetic principles of pure understanding are systematically brought forth in the third section. Everything that makes an object an object, that delimits the thingness of the thing, is presented in its inner coherence. In the interpretation of the third section, too, we begin at once with the presentation of the individual principles. The preliminary consideration is only to be elucidated as far as is necessary to gain, on the one hand, a more definite concept of the principle in general and, on the other hand, the point of view for the division of the principles.
To that end, the first sentence of the third section provides the key: “That there are principles anywhere at all is to be ascribed solely to the pure understanding, which is not only the faculty of rules in regard to that which happens, but is rather itself the source of the principles in accordance with which everything (that can even come before us as an object) necessarily stands under rules, since, without such rules, appearances could never amount to cognition of an object corresponding to them” (A158–59/B197–98).
a) The Principles Make Possible the Objectivity of the Object: Demonstrability of the Principles
In pursuit of the question concerning the thingness of the thing, we were led to Kant’s doctrine of the principles of pure understanding. In what way? For Kant, the thing accessible to us is the object of experience. For Kant, experience means the humanly possible, theoretical cognition of beings. This cognition is twofold. Hence, Kant says: “With us understanding and sensibility can determine objects only in combination ” (A258/B314). An object is determined as object by way of [durch] combination, i.e., the unity of [188] what is intuited in intuiting and thought in thinking. To the essence of the object [Gegenstand] belongs both the against [Gegen] and the standing [Stand]. The essence of this against, its inner possibility and ground, as well as the essence of this standing, its inner possibility and ground, and, finally and above all, the original unity of both—the againstness and the constancy [Ständigkeit]—constitute the objectivity of the object.
That the determination of the essence of the object as such takes place by way of principles is not evident without further ado. It becomes intelligible, however, when we attend to the traditional direction of the question of the thing in Western philosophy, according to which the basic mathematical trait is decisive: the return to axioms in every determination of beings. Kant remains within this tradition. But the way in which he grasps and grounds the axioms brings about a revolution. The hitherto supreme principle of all judgments, the principle of contradiction, is deposed of its hegemony. What principles take its place?
What is striking at first is that Kant does not speak of axioms. “Axioms” are, for Kant, a definite kind of a priori principle, namely, those that are immediately certain, i.e., demonstrable without further ado from the intuition of the object. Such principles are not at issue in the present context, which, as we have already indicated, concerns principles of pure understanding. But as principles (or basic propositions), they must contain at once the grounds of other propositions. Hence, they themselves can no longer be grounded in earlier and more general cognitions (A148–49/B188). This does not rule out the possibility that a justification can be discovered that suits such principles. The question remains only wherein they have their foundation and justification. Principles that ground the essence of the object cannot be based upon the object. The principles cannot be experientially derived from objects, as they themselves first make possible the objectivity of the object. [189] But nor can the principles be grounded in mere thought alone, as they are supposed to serve as principles of the object. Hence the principles also do not possess the character of general, formal-logical propositions, such as “A is A,” which one claims to be self-evident. Appeal to the healthy human understanding fails here. In the domain of metaphysics, it is “a refuge, which always shows that the cause of reason is desperate” (A784/B812). What the ground of proof for these principles of pure understanding is and how they distinguish themselves by way of the mode of their ground of proof must show itself from the system of principles itself.
b) Pure Understanding as Source and Faculty of Rules: Unity, Categories
We take the fact that Kant’s determination of the thing leads back to principles as a sign that Kant remains in the tradition. But this historical characterization is still no substantive elucidation. If Kant defines the essence of thinking in a new way, he must also show why and in what way principles belong to this new formulation of the essence of the understanding.
Kant is the first to be able not simply to embrace and affirm the rule of principles but to ground it from the essence of the understanding itself. The first sentence of the third section points to this connection. There Kant says explicitly that “the pure understanding” is “itself the source of principles.” It is necessary to show in what way this holds true and, indeed, in relation to everything we have heard so far about the essence of the understanding. General logic, which defines judgment as the relation of subject-predicate representations, is familiar with the understanding as the capacity to combine representations. So, just as the logical interpretation of judgment is correct, but insufficient, this interpretation of the understanding also remains true enough but is still unsatisfactory. [190] The understanding must be grasped as a representing related to the object, as a combining of representations so constructed [that it is able to relate to objects]: as that representing that takes up and constitutes this relation to the object as such.
The combining of subject and predicate is not simply a combining in general, but always a determinate combining. Recall the objective judgment, “The sun warms the stone.” Sun and stone are here objectively represented, as the sun is conceived as cause, and the stone in its becoming-warm as effect. The combination of subject and predicate takes place on the basis of the universal relation of cause and effect. Combination is always a representing positing-together in light of a possible kind of unity characterizing the together. In this characterization of judgment, the original sense of the λόγος as gathering still faintly shines through.
Every kind of subject-predicate combination in judging presupposes and bears, as its leading point of view, the representation of a unity in itself according to which and in whose sense it becomes combined. The representing that grasps such unities in advance, which guides the combination, belongs to the essence of the understanding. According to the definition given earlier, the representations of these unities as such and in general are “concepts.” Concepts of such unities belonging to the understanding’s act of combining are, however, not derived from any pregiven objects and are not drawn from the perception of individual objects. The representations of these unities belong to the actions of the understanding, to the essence of combining. They lie purely in the essence of the understanding itself and are therefore called pure concepts of the understanding: categories.
General logic has laid out a multiplicity of forms of judgment, ways of subject-predicate combination that can be arranged in a table of judgments. Kant took over this [191] table of judgments, the exhibition and ordering of the various modes of subject-predicate combination, from the tradition and completed it (cf. A70/B95). The standpoints from which the division is made are quantity, quality, relation, and modality. The table of judgments can, therefore, provide an indication of just as many kinds of unity and concepts of unity that guide the various [acts of] combining. In keeping with the table of judgments, a table of these concepts of unity of the pure understanding, its root concepts, can be established (cf. A80/B106). If something in general is represented as a condition for the unifying and the unified positing of a manifold, this represented condition is thereby taken as a rule of combining. Because the representing that grasps in advance the unities that regulate this combining belongs to the essence of the understanding (as combination of representation), and because these regulating unities belong to the essence of the understanding itself, the understanding is at bottom the capacity for rules. Hence, Kant says: “Now we can characterize it [the understanding] as the faculty of rules,” and he adds that “this designation is more fruitful, and comes closer to its essence” (A126). We also hear that the understanding is the “faculty of rules” in our passage [Stelle] at the beginning of the third section. Here the metaphysical determination of the essence of the understanding is revealed.
But in the present section, the essential determination of the understanding goes back to a still further level in its essence. The pure understanding is “not only the faculty of rules” but also the source of rules. This means that the pure understanding is the ground of the necessity of rules in general. In order for what encounters, shows itself, i.e., appears to come before us in general as standing-against, it must be possible in advance for what shows itself to come somehow to stand and attain constancy. But what stands within itself and does not scatter is collected in itself, i.e., something unified, and is present in this [192] unity and hence constant. Constancy is the unitary presence [An-Wesen], in itself and from itself. This co -presence is made possible by the pure understanding, the action of which is thought. But thinking is an “ I think,” I represent something to myself in general, in its unity and belonging-together. The presence of the object is revealed in representing, in becoming-present to me by way of a representing that is also a thinking (i.e., combining). But to whom this presence of the object is made present, whether to me as a contingent “I”—with its moods and wishes and opinions—or to me as an I that puts aside everything “subjective,” letting the object be what it is, depends upon the I, namely, upon the scope and breadth of the unity and the rules under which the combining of representations is brought. This depends at bottom upon the range and kind of freedom by virtue of which I myself am a self.
The combining that places before [vor-stellende] is only possible for the understanding if it contains within itself modes of unifying, rules of the unity of combining and determining, i.e., if the pure understanding allows rules to emerge, and is itself the origin and source of rules. The pure understanding is the ground of the necessity of rules, i.e., the occurrence of principles, because this ground, the understanding itself, is necessary, and indeed in accordance with the essence of that to which the pure understanding belongs, in accordance with the essence of human cognition.
If we human beings are only open to the pressing throng of everything within which we hang suspended, we are no match for this throng. We only become master of it when we serve it from a superior position, i.e., when we allow the throng to stand over against us, bring it to stand, and thereby form and preserve a domain of possible constancy. The metaphysical necessity of the pure understanding is grounded in this requirement of having freely to subsist amid the throng. In accordance with its metaphysical origin, the pure [193] understanding is the source of principles. These principles, in turn, are the “source of all truth,” i.e., the possibility that our experiences are able in general to correspond with objects.
Such correspondence with x is only possible if the with-which [Womit] of the correspondence already comes before us in advance and stands before us. Only in this way does something objective address us in the appearances; only in this way does it become knowable with respect to an object that speaks in them and corresponds to them. The pure understanding furnishes the possibility of correspondence with the object, thanks to the objectivity of appearances, i.e., the thingness of the thing for us.
c) The Mathematical and Dynamical Principles as Metaphysical Propositions
On the basis of what has been presented, we can understand the decisive sentence with which the third section is introduced (A158f./B197f.). The principles of pure understanding lay the ground for the objectivity of objects. In them—namely, in their interrelation—those modes of representation are expressly enacted by virtue of which the against [Gegen] of the object and its stand [Stand] are opened up, and indeed in their original unity. The principles always concern this unitary duality of the essence of the object. Therefore, they must first lay the ground in the direction of the against, againstness, and at the same time in the direction of the stand, constancy. Hence there arises from the essence of the principles a resulting division into two groups. Kant calls them the mathematical and the dynamical principles. But what is the substantive basis of this distinction? How is it intended?
Kant defines the thing of nature as the thing accessible to us, the body that is as object of experience, i.e., [194] mathematical-physical cognition. The body is in motion or at rest in space, such that motions, as changes of place, can be numerically determined in terms of their relations. For Kant, this mathematical determinateness of natural body is nothing contingent—is no form of calculating processes merely attached to it—but rather the mathematical, in the sense of what is moving in space, belongs first and above all to the determination of the thingness of the thing. If the possibility of the thing is supposed to be metaphysically conceived, principles are required in which this mathematical character of the natural body is grounded. Hence one group of principles of pure understanding is called “mathematical principles.” This designation does not mean that the principles are themselves mathematical, i.e., that the principles belong in mathematics, but that they are related to the mathematical character of the natural body, as metaphysical principles that lay the ground for it.
But the thing, in the sense of the natural body, is not only something moving in space and taking up space, i.e., something extended, but also something that fills space, occupying it, extending, dividing, and maintaining itself in this occupation—resistance, i.e., force. Leibniz first established this character of natural bodies, and Kant took over these determinations. We get to know what fills space, is spatially present, only by way of forces that are effective in space (A265/B321). Force is the character in which the thing in space comes to presence. Only insofar as it works or acts [wirkt] is the thing actual [wirklich]. The actuality, the presence of the “existence” [Dasein] of the thing is determined in terms of force (dynamis), i.e., dynamically.11 Hence Kant calls those principles of pure understanding that determine the possibility of thing in respect of its “existence” the dynamical principles. We should also notice here what was said in relation to the designation “mathematical.” These principles are not principles of dynamics, as a discipline of physics, but [195] metaphysical principles that first make possible the physical principles of dynamics. It is no accident that Hegel titled an important section of his Phenomenology of Spirit, in which the essence of the object is delimited as thing of nature, “Force and Understanding.”
We discover this twofold direction of determining the natural body, the mathematical and the dynamical, clearly prefigured for the first time in Leibniz (cf. Gerh. IV, 394f.). But only Kant succeeded in presenting and grounding their inner unity in the system of principles of pure understanding.
The principles contain those determinations of things as appearances that belong to them in advance, a priori, and in compliance with the possible forms of unity of the understanding’s combining, i.e., the categories. The table of categories is divided into four subsets. This division corresponds to that of the principles. The mathematical and dynamic principles are in each case two groups, and the entire system is divided into four:
(1) Axioms of Intuition; (2) Anticipations of Perception; (3) Analogies of Experience; and (4) Postulates of Empirical Thought, in general. In what follows, we shall endeavor to understand these titles of the principles in light of Kant’s own presentation. Kant remarks explicitly: “I have chosen these titles with care, in order not to leave unnoted the distinctions with respect to the evidence and the exercise of these principles” (A161/B200). At issue are the principles of quantity, quality, relation, and modality.
The understanding of the principles can only be gained by thorough consideration of their proofs, for these proofs are nothing less than the exhibition of the “principles” themselves, the grounds from which they are drawn, and are what they themselves are. Hence, everything depends upon these proofs. The formulae of the principles do not say much, especially since they are not self-evident. [196] Kant has consequently invested a great deal of work on these proofs and has reworked them, especially the first three groups, for the second edition [of the first Critique]. Each is constructed in accordance with a definite schema, which coheres with the essential content of these principles. The formulations of specific principles differ in the first and second editions. These differences provide important indications of the direction Kant’s clarifying intention assumes and how the authentic sense of these propositions is to be understood.
Again, we take everything in view in order to have present in advance what is essential in this presentation and grounding of the principles of pure understanding. The principles are “principles of the exposition” of appearances. They are the grounds upon which it is possible to set out an object in its appearance, the conditions of the objectivity of the object.
On the basis of what is now been said about the principles of pure understanding in general, we can also already discern more clearly the sense in which they are synthetic a priori and how their possibility must be demonstrated. Synthetic judgments expand our knowledge of the object. This commonly happens in such a way that we derive the predicate a posteriori, by recourse to the perception of the object. But we now have to deal with predicates—determinations of the object—that accrue to it a priori. These determinations are those that first determine, on their own ground and in general, what belongs to an object as such, that make up the determinateness of the object’s objectivity. They must be revealed a priori, for only insofar as we know something of objectivity in general are we able to experience this or that possible object. But how is such a thing possible? How to determine the object as such in advance—before experience and yet for experience? [197] This possibility is shown in the proofs of the various principles. But the specific proofs do nothing less than bring to light the ground of these principles themselves, which must finally be one and the same and encountered in the supreme principle of all synthetic judgments. The authentic principles of pure understanding are, accordingly, those which express in a specific shape the overarching principle of the propositions in each of the four groups. Hence the authentic principles are not the axioms, anticipations, analogies, and postulates themselves, but the principles of the same.
Notice right away the difference noted earlier between the formulations in the first and second editions (A162/B202).
In the first edition (A): “Principle of pure understanding: All appearances are, as regards their intuition, extensive magnitudes.”
In the second edition (B): “Their principle is: All intuitions are extensive magnitudes.”
The formulation in B is not always more apt than in A. They supplement each other and are, therefore, of particular value, since Kant did not clarify the great domain he himself discovered as thoroughly as he had in mind as the task of a system of transcendental philosophy. But for us who come later, precisely the instability, the back and forth, the fresh starts, the clearing of a path along the way are more essential and fruitful than a smooth system in which all the joints are securely in place and covered over.
Before we go through the course of the first principle’s proof we need to ask what the discourse is about that concerns the “elements.” We know that it concerns the determination of the essence of the object. The ob-ject [Gegen-stand] is determined by intuition and thought. The object is [198] the thing insofar as it appears. The object is appearance, where “appearance” never means “illusion” but the object itself in its presence and standing-there. In the same place where Kant names the two elements of cognition (intuition and thought), at the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason, he also characterizes appearance. “I call that in appearance that corresponds to sensation its matter, but that which allows the manifold of appearance to be intuited as ordered in certain relations I call the form of appearance” (A20/B34). Form is the wherein of the order of colors, sounds, and so forth.
α) Quantum and Quantitas
In the first principle, the discussion deals with appearances “as regards their intuition,” hence with the object in the guiding perspective of the against, encounter, the coming-before-us. From this perspective, we can say that appearances as intuitions are extensive magnitudes.
What, then, is magnitude and extensive magnitude in particular? The German expression Größe [magnitude] is generally ambiguous and especially in relation to Kant’s exposition; for this reason, Kant prefers to place various Latin terms in parentheses, or he often only employs the Latin expression, in order to specify a distinction that he himself first established clearly. We find the two distinct titles for magnitude at the end of one paragraph and at the beginning of the following (A163–4/B204): magnitude as quantum and magnitude as quantitas (cf. Reflections, no. 6338a). Magnitude as quantitas answers the question “How big?” It is the measure, the how much of a unit taken several times. The magnitude of a room amounts to so many meters in length, breadth, and height. But this magnitude of the room is only possible because the room, as spatial in general, has [ist] an up, down, back, front, and beside, because the room is a quantum. Under this heading, Kant understands what we [199] can call the sizeable [Großhafte] in general. Magnitude as quantitas, as measure and measurement of the sizeable, is in each case a definite unity in which the parts precede the whole and this positing-together [in the act of counting]. By contrast, in magnitude as quantum, in the sizeable, the whole is prior to the parts; it is indefinite in regard to the aggregate of parts and continuous in itself. Quantitas is always quantum discretum; it is only possible through a subsequent division and corresponding combination (synthesis) within and on the basis of quantum. But this itself [quantum] never first comes to be what it is through synthesis. Because it is determined by so many parts, magnitude as quantitas is always something that allows for comparison, while the spatial—aside from quantitas—is always in itself the same.
Magnitude as quantitas always concerns the generation of magnitudes. If this occurs in the advance from parts to parts, through successive piecing together of separate [auseinanderliegenden] parts, then the magnitude (quantitas) is extensive. “The magnitude of the quantity (aggregate) is extensive” (Reflection 5887, cf. 5891).
Magnitude as quantitas is always unity of a repeated positing. The representation of such unity contains at first only what the understanding in such repeated positing “does for itself”; it “contains nothing therein that demands perception” (Reflection 6338a). Quantity is a pure concept of the understanding. This is not true of magnitude as quantum; it is not produced through positing but is especially given for an intuiting.
β) Space and Time as Quanta, as Forms of Pure Intuition
Now, what does it mean that appearances as intuitions are extensive magnitudes? It is apparent from the comparative definition of magnitude as quantitas and as quantum that quantitas always presupposes quantum, that magnitude as measure, as so-much, is always the measure of something measurable [eines Großhaften]. [200] Appearances as intuitions, i.e., as intuitions as such, must accordingly be quanta, measurable, if they are able to be quantities in general. But for Kant, space and time are such things (quanta). Space is a magnitude—this does not mean that space is so-and-so big. Initially, space is precisely never so-and-so big, but what first makes possible magnitude in the sense of quantitas. Space is not assembled out of spaces. Space does not consist of parts, but each space always exists only as a limitation of the whole of space, so that even limits and bounds presuppose space and spatial extension and, like the spatial part, remain in space. Space is a magnitude (quantum) in which the finite, measurably determinate divisions and composites always come too late, where the finite of this sort simply has no right and achieves nothing for the determination of its essence; space is consequently called an “infinite magnitude” (A25). This does not mean “endless” with respect to finite determinations, as quantitas, but as quantum, which presupposes nothing endlike [Endhaftes] as its condition but rather, conversely, is itself the condition of every division and finite partitioning.
Space and, likewise, time are quanta continua, originally measurable [Großhaftes], in-finite magnitudes and consequently possible extensive magnitudes (quantities). The principles of the Axioms of Intuition run: “All appearances are, as regards their intuition, extensive magnitudes.” But how can intuitions be extensive magnitudes? In order to be extensive magnitudes, they must originally be quanta. Kant rightly calls space and time quanta, as we saw. But space and time [as such] are still not intuitions but: space and time.
Earlier we defined intuiting as the immediate representing of a particular. Through this representing, something is given to us. Intuiting is a representing that gives, not a making or forming by way of assembly. Intuition in the sense of the intuited is the represented in the sense of a [201] given. But in the place where Kant defines space as infinite magnitude, he says: “Space is represented as a given infinite magnitude” (A25). “Space is represented as an infinite given magnitude” (B40). The representing that brings space before us as such is a representing that gives, i.e., an intuiting; space itself is something intuited and intuition in this sense. Space is immediately given. Where is it given? Is space as such somewhere? Is it not rather the condition of the possibility of every “where” and “there” and “here?” The beside-one-another, for example, is a spatial characteristic. However, we do not acquire this “beside” by first comparing objects lying beside one another. In order to experience these objects as beside one another we must already immediately represent the beside-one-another, as well as the before-, behind-, and above-one-another. These extensions do not depend upon the appearances, on that which shows itself, for we can think away all objects in space but not space itself. In all self-showing of things in perception, space as a whole is represented universally and immediately given, and indeed in advance. But this one, universally given, represented no concept and is not something represented in the universal, like “tree in general.” The universal representation “tree” contains all particular trees under itself, as that of which it can be asserted. But space contains all particular spaces within itself. Particular spaces are only particular delimitations of the one, originally single space, as a unique particular. Space as quantum is immediately given as a unique “this.” The immediate representing of a particular is called intuiting. Space is something intuited, and indeed something intuited and standing in view before all appearances of objects within it. Space is not sensed in sensation but something intuited in advance— a priori—i.e., purely. Space is a pure intuition. As this purely intuited, it is that which determines everything empirically given to us—[202] sensibly intuited—in advance as that “within which” the “manifold . . . can be ordered” (A20/B34).12 Kant also calls that which determines the form, in contrast to the matter, as the determinable. Seen in this light, space is the pure form of sensible intuition, and indeed the pure form of outer sense. In order for certain sensations to be relatable to something outside me (i.e., to something in another place in space than that in which I find myself), this extension of the outer and the out-toward [Hinaus-zu] must already be given.
According to Kant, space is neither a thing on hand in itself (Newton) nor a manifoldness of relations that result from the relations in themselves of things on hand (Leibniz). Space is the unique whole of the beside-, behind-, and above-one-another, represented immediately and in advance in our reception of what encounters [us]. Space is nothing other than the form of all appearances of outer sense, i.e., a way in which we receive what encounters [us], hence a determination of our sensibility. “We can accordingly speak of space, extended beings, and so on, only from the human standpoint. If we depart from the subjective condition under which alone we can acquire outer intuition . . . then the representation of space signifies nothing at all” (A26/B42f.).
The same holds for time. Now, the general elucidation of the essence of space was only concerned to make intelligible what it means that Kant defines space as pure intuition and thereby wants to have gained the metaphysical concept of space in general. For it remains strange at first in what way something in general should be delimited by being characterized as intuition. Trees, tables, houses, human beings are also intuited intuitions. But the essence of the house in no way consists in being an intuition. The house is intuited insofar as it encounters [us], but being a house does not mean being intuited. Nor would Kant ever define the essence of the house in this way. [203] But what is right for the house should also be true [billig] of space. This is certainly the case, if space were a thing of the same sort as the house, a thing in space. But space is not in space.
Kant also does not simply say that space is intuition but “pure intuition” and “form of outer intuition.” And yet intuiting is and remains a way of re-presenting something, a mode of access to something and a mode of givenness of something, but not this something itself.
Only if the mode of something’s being-given constitutes this something in its “being” would such a characterization as intuition be possible and even necessary. Space taken as intuition, then, means not only that space is given in such a way but that spatial being [Raumsein] consists in such being-given. In fact, this is precisely what Kant means. The spatial being of space consists in the fact that it grants [einräumt] what shows itself the possibility of showing itself in its extension. Space makes room [räumt ein], gives location and place, and this granting or making-room [Einräumen] is its being. Kant expresses this making-room saying that space is something purely intuited, what shows itself in advance, before everything and for everything, and as such it is [a] form of intuition. Being-intuited is the room-making spatial being of space. We know no other being of space. We also have no possibility of asking about it. That certain difficulties reside in Kant’s metaphysics of space cannot be denied—ignoring altogether the fact that a metaphysics that contains no more difficulties has also already ceased thereby to be one. Now, the difficulties in the Kantian interpretation of space do not lie where one would most like to find them, neither on the side of psychology nor on the side of mathematical natural science (relativity theory). The chief difficulty does not lie in the formulation of the question of space itself but in the assignment of space as pure intuition to a human subject, the being of which is insufficiently defined. (On how the question of space is erected on the principled overcoming of the subject-relation, cf. Being and Time, §§19–24 and §70.) [204]
It is now important for us to show only how space and time in general are thinkable as intuitions. Space gives itself only in this pure intuiting, wherein space as such is held before [vor-gehalten] us and in advance of us, is placed before [vor-gestellt] as viewable, “pre-formed” as that measurable region of the beside-, above-, and being-one-another, a manifoldness that gives from out of itself the possibility of its own delimitations and boundaries.
Space and time are pure intuitions. The Aesthetic deals with intuition. Intuition is accordingly what belongs a priori to the objectivity of the object, what allows appearances to show themselves; pure intuition is transcendental. The Transcendental Aesthetic gives only a preview. Its authentic thematic first reaches its goal in the treatment of the first principle.
γ) The Proof of the First Principle; All Principles Are Grounded in the Supreme Principle of All Synthetic Judgments
What has been said so far has prepared what is essential for understanding the proof of the first principle and hence the principle itself. The proof consists of three propositions that are clearly distinguished from each other. The first proposition begins with “All. . .,” the second with “Now . . . is,” and the third with “Thus.” The three propositions stand unmistakably connected in the form of a syllogism: major premise, minor premise, and conclusion. Each of the following proofs—for the Anticipations of Perception and Analogies of Experience—are constructed in this way and, like the proof of the axioms, are only found in the second edition.
We carry out the three steps of the syllogism by simultaneously elucidating what remains unclear in each of its propositions.
The proof begins with the suggestion that all appearances show themselves in space and time; regarding the manner of the appearing, in terms of their form, they contain an [205] intuition of the sort mentioned [earlier, namely a priori or pure]. What does this mean with respect to the objective character of the appearances? We say: “The moon stands in the sky.” In accord with its sensible givenness, in the way of sensation, it is something shining, colored with manifoldly distributed brightness and darkness; it is given outside us, there, in this definite form, of this magnitude, in this distance from other heavenly bodies. Space—the wherein of the moon’s givenness—is here bounded and limited to this form, of this magnitude, in these relations and distances. The space is a determinate space, and only this determinateness constitutes the moon’s space, its spatiality. The determinateness of this form, this extension, this distance from other bodies is grounded in a determining. The determining is an ordered composing [Zusammensetzen], a highlighting of particular pieces of extension that are themselves homogeneous in their parts, for example, the parts of the shape’s circumference. Only when the manifoldness of space, indeterminate in itself, is divided into parts, and out of these parts composed in a determinate sequence and with a determinate end point, can what is brightly colored show itself to us as a moon-shape of this magnitude and distance, i.e., come to be taken up and received by us in the domain of what is in each case already encountered by us and stands-over-against-us.
What appears, according to its intuition and the form of its intuitedness, i.e., with respect to space and its initially undifferentiated manifoldness, is something determined in a certain way: a composed homogeneity. The composedness, however, is such only on the basis of a unity of the shape represented in a certain way therein, the magnitude. Unity holds sway over and regulates the representation or consciousness of such a thing in the synthesis. We have in this way set in relief the essential content of the major premise. The minor premise begins immediately with what was just mentioned, i.e., with the consciousness of the synthetic unity of the manifold (B203). [206]
“Now the consciousness of the homogeneous manifold in intuition in general, insofar as through it the representation of an object first becomes possible, is the concept of magnitude (quanti).” Here Kant tells us how the unity of the manifold in general becomes possible. We begin with the homogeneous manifold itself. The succession of aligning and composing the many equal units into one is homogeneous, a succession of indistinguishable multiplicity. The unity of such [a succession of combination] is in each case a “so-and-so much,” i.e., quantity in general. Unity in general of a multiplicity in general is the guiding representation of a combining, an “I think,” a pure concept of the understanding. But insofar as this concept of the understanding—“unity”— as a rule of unification relates to the measurable, to quantum in general, it is the concept of a quanti. This concept—“quantity”—brings in each case the homogeneous manifold to a stand in a state of being unified or gathered together. In this way, the representation of an object first becomes possible, the “I think” and the “over-against” for the I. Now, as we hear in the major premise, insofar as appearances appear in the form of space and time, the first determination of what encounters as such is this articulated, formative unification in light of quantitas.
The conclusion is now compelling: it is therefore the same unity and unification that allows us to encounter the appearances as having-form, of such-and-such a size, in the separateness [Auseinander] of space and time, and brings a multiplicity to stand in the composition of the homogeneous as quantities. Hence the appearances, according to their intuition and the mode of their encountering and standing against [begegnenden Gegenstehen], are in advance extensive magnitudes. The quantum—space—is in each case determined in these appearing spatial forms only in the synthesis of quantity. This same unity of quantity allows what encounters [us] to stand over against us as gathered together [gesammelt entgegenstehen]. The principle has thereby been demonstrated. But it is also thereby shown why all principles that express something about the pure manifoldness of extension—for example, [207] “The shortest distance between two points is a straight line”—obtain as mathematical propositions of appearances themselves, why mathematics is applicable to objects of experience. This is not self-evident and only possible under certain conditions, which are established in the proof of the principle. Kant therefore also calls this principle the “transcendental principle of the mathematics of appearances” (A165/B206). These [mathematical propositions] themselves are not established and discussed under the heading “Axioms of Intuition.” The principle [Grund-Satz] is demonstrated insofar as the ground [Grund] of the objective truth of the axioms is established, i.e., their ground as the necessary conditions of the objectivity of objects. The applicability of the axioms of the mathematics of extension and number, and thereby of mathematics in general, is necessarily justified because the conditions of mathematics itself, those of quantitas and quantum, are at the same time conditions of the appearances to which mathematics is applied.
We thereby hit upon that ground that makes this ground and all other grounds possible, to which each proof of each principle of pure understanding refers back. It is the connection that we must now for the first time bring into view.
The condition of experiencing appearances, here with regard to shape and magnitude (namely, the unity of the synthesis as quantity), is at the same time the condition of the possibility of the object of experience. In this unity, the encountering manifoldness of the “against” [Gegen] first comes to a stand [zum Stand]—and is an object [Gegenstand]. The specific quantitas of spaces and times makes possible the taking up of the encountering, its apprehension, the first letting-stand-against of the object [das erste Gegenstehenlassen des Gegenstandes]. The principle and its proof answer our question concerning the thingness of the thing, i.e., the objectivity of the object, in the following way: because objectivity in general is unity of the gathering of [208] a manifold in a representation of unity and a preconception, while this manifold encounters [us] in space and time, what encounters must itself stand-over-against [us] in the unity of quantity as extensive magnitude.
Appearances must be extensive magnitudes. Something is thereby expressed about the being of objects themselves, something that does not already lie in the concept of a something in general, about which we assert in the judgment. With the determination of being as extensive magnitude, something is attributed to the object synthetically but a priori, not on the basis of the perception of particular objects, but in advance, from the essence of experience in general.
What is the pivot around which the entire proof turns, or the basis upon which the principle rests? What is thus expressed originally by the supreme principle itself and brought thereby to light?
What is the ground of the possibility of this principle as a synthetic judgment a priori ? In this [principle], the pure concept of the understanding (quantity) is transferred to the quantum space and hence to the objects appearing in space. How in general can a pure concept of the understanding become determinative for something like space? These entirely heterogeneous elements must agree, in some respect, in order to be united as determinable and determining, and indeed, in such a way that by virtue of this unification of intuition and thought an object is.
Because these questions are repeated in each of the principles and their demonstrations, they will not be answered here. We first wish to see that these questions constantly and inescapably return in the treatment of the principles. But we also do not want to postpone the answer until the conclusion of the interpretation of the principles, but to present it after the exposition of the subsequent principle [the Anticipations of Perception], in the transition from the mathematical to the dynamical principles. [209]
e) The Anticipations of Perception
In the principles, the ground, the inner possibility of the object is posited. The mathematical principles grasp the object in light of the “against” [Gegen] and its inner possibility. Hence the second principle, like the first, also speaks of appearances with respect to their appearing. In the first edition: “ The principle, which anticipates all perceptions as such, runs thus: In all appearances the sensation, and the real, which corresponds to it in the object (realitas phaenomenon), has an intensive magnitude, i.e., a degree” (A166). In the second edition: “Its principle is this: In all appearances the real, which is an object of the sensation, has intensive magnitude, i.e., a degree” (B207).
Appearances are regarded differently here than in the first principle. In the first principle, appearances are understood as intuitions with respect to the form of space and time, in which the encountered encounters. In the principle of the Anticipations of Perception, it is not the form that is attended to but rather that which is determined through the determining form, to the determinable as the matter of the form. “Matter” here does not mean material stuff that is present. Matter and form are considered as “concepts of reflection” and indeed as the most universal, the result of a reflection on the structure of experience (cf. A266ff./B322ff.).
In the proof of the anticipations the talk is of sensations, the real, and again about magnitude, namely intensive magnitude. What is at issue now is no longer the axioms of intuition but the principles of perception, i.e., the sort of representing “in which there is at the same time sensation” (B207). [210]
α) Ambiguity of the Word “Sensation”; the Doctrine of Sensation and Modern Natural Science
In human cognition, what can be cognized must encounter [us] and be given, because the being is something other than ourselves and because we have not made and created it. One need not first show a shoe to a shoemaker in order to let him know what a shoe is; he knows this apart from the shoe that he encounters and knows it much better and more authentically because he can produce the same. By contrast, what he cannot produce must be brought to him from elsewhere. Since we human beings have not created that which is as such and as a whole, and never can do so, that which must be shown to us for us to know it.
In this showing of the entity in its manifestness, that activity has an important task that shows things by creating them in a certain way, namely, the creation of the work of art. Work makes world [Werk wirkt Welt]. World first reveals things within itself. The possibility and necessity of the work of art is only one proof that we first know about beings when they are properly given to us.
This usually happens, however, in the encountering of things in the domain of everyday experience. For this to happen, they must get to us, concern us, intrude and impose and impress [themselves]. On this occasion, impressions, sensations, result. Their manifoldness is divided into the various fields of our senses—sight, hearing, and so on. In sensation and its pressing throng, we find that which “constitutes the real difference between empirical and a priori cognition” (A167/B208–9). The empirical is the a posteriori, what comes second (as the first from our point of view), always belated and playing alongside us. Like “representation,” the term “sensation” has an equivocal meaning: it means, on the one hand, the sensed, the perceived red, the sound, the sensations of red and sound. On the other hand, it means sensing as a state of ourselves. But the matter does not rest with this distinction. What [211] is designated by “sensation” is so ambiguous, because it occupies a peculiar intermediate position between things and human beings, between object and subject. The interpretive construal of the essence and role of sensation changes in each case according to how we construe the objective, as well as with our concept of the subjective. Here we can only mention an interpretation that already spread very early in the course of Western thought and, in many ways, is still not overcome today. The more one proceeded to see things in accord with their mere visible aspect, according to shape and position and extension (Democritus and Plato), the more obtrusive became that which fills up the intervals and locations, the givens of sensation, in contrast to relations of position. In consequence, the givens of sensation—color, sound, pressure, and impact—became the first and authentic building blocks from which a thing is assembled.
As soon as things were broken up into a manifold of given sensations, the interpretation of their unitary essence could only proceed by saying: things essentially are only collections of data of sensation but, in addition, they also have a use-value and an aesthetic-value and—insofar as we know them—a truth-value. Things are collections of sensations with values attached to them. Moreover, sensations are represented in their own right. They are then made into things, without a prior account of what the thing might be, through whose disintegration the fragments—the sensations—remain as ostensible originals.
But the next step is to interpret the thing-fragments [Splitterdinge], the sensations, as the effects of a cause. Physics establishes that the cause of color is waves of light, endless periodic changes of state in the ether. Each color has its definite frequency; red, for example, has a wavelength of 760 μm and a frequency of 400 THz.13 [212] That is red; it holds as the objective red, in contrast to the merely subjective impression of the sensation of red. It would be even better if one could also reduce this sensation of red as a state of stimulation to electrical currents running along neural pathways. When we get this far, we know what things objectively are.
Such an explanation of sensation appears to be very scientific, and yet it is not, insofar as the domain of the givenness of sensation, and what is supposed to be explained (namely, color as given), has been abandoned at once. What is more, it is not noticed that a difference exists between the determinate color of a thing (this red on the thing) and the sensation of red given in the eye. The givenness of red in the eye is not itself immediately given. A rather complicated and artificial attitude is called for, in order to grasp the sensation of color as such in contrast to the color of the thing. But if we keep at a distance every epistemology and attend to the givenness of the color of the thing, the green of a leaf, for example, we do not discover the slightest cause that elicits an effect in us. We never perceive the green of the leaf as an effect upon us but as the green of the leaf.
But when thing and body are represented as extended and resistant, as in modern mathematical physics, the intuitable manifold collapses into such givens of sensation. For today’s experimental atomic physics, the given is only a manifold of specks of light and streaks on the photographic plate. Interpreting this given requires no fewer presuppositions than does the interpretation of a poem. It is only the reliability and concreteness of the measuring device that arouse the appearance that this interpretation stands on firmer ground than the allegedly merely subjective notions upon which the interpretations of the poets in the human sciences rest. [213]
But fortunately, there is, for the time being, still the color and shine of the things themselves, beyond waves of light and nerve currents—the green of the leaf and the gold of the cornfield, the black of the crow and the gray of the sky. The relation to all this is not only there as well but must also constantly be presupposed as that which physiological-physical inquiry immediately shatters and reinterprets.
The following question arises: what is more in being [Was ist seiender], that rough-hewn chair with the tobacco pipe that shows up in van Gogh’s painting, or the waves of light that correspond to the colors employed therein, or the states of sensation that we have “in us” in the contemplation of the image? Sensations play a role each time, but each time in a different sense. The color of the thing, for example, is something other than the stimulus given in the eye, which we never grasp immediately. The color of the thing belongs to the thing [itself]. Nor does it give itself as the cause of a state in us. The thing’s color itself, yellow, for example, is only this yellow as belonging to the cornfield. The color and its shining are determined each time by the original unity of the colored thing itself and by the kind of thing it is. This is not first composed out of sensations.
These suggestions should only serve to make clear that it is not clear, without further ado, what one means when one speaks of sensation. The unrestricted ambiguity of the term and the uncontrolled variety of the intended state of affairs reflect only the uncertainty and puzzlement that prevent a sufficient determination of the relation between human being and thing.
The opinion rules widely that the interpretation of the thing as a mere manifold of givens of sensation is the presupposition for the mathematical- physical determination of bodies; the doctrine of cognition, according to which cognition consists essentially of sensations, is the basis for the emergence of modern natural science. However, the reverse is true. The consequence of the mathematical point of departure [214] regarding the thing, as extended and moveable in space and time, is that the givens of everyday getting around in the world are construed as mere material and splintered into a manifold of sensations. The mathematical point of departure first brought about that keen ear for a corresponding doctrine of sensations. Kant also sticks to the level of this point of departure; like the tradition before and after him, he leaps right away over that domain of things in which we know ourselves [to be] immediately at home, things as the painter also shows them to us: the simple chair with the tobacco pipe, just laid down or forgotten, in van Gogh.
β) Kant’s Concept of Reality: Intensive Magnitudes
Although Kant’s critique resides from the start in the domain of the experience of the object of mathematical-physical natural cognition, his metaphysical interpretation of the givenness of sensation remains in principle distinct from everything that came before and after him, i.e., it surpasses them all. Kant carries out the interpretation of the objectivity of the object along the lines of the given in sensation in the establishment and proof of the principle of the Anticipations of Perception. It is characteristic of previous Kant- interpretation either to ignore this section altogether or to misinterpret it in every respect. The proof of this is the puzzlement with which one mishandles a basic concept that plays an essential role in this principle, i.e., the concept of the real and reality.
The clarification of this concept and Kant’s employment of it belongs in the first preliminary [Vorschule] introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason. The expression “reality” is understood today in the sense of actuality or existence. Hence one speaks of the question concerning the reality of the external world and means thereby the discussion of whether there is something [215] actual and truly existing outside of consciousness. To think in terms of Real-politik means to reckon with actually existing conditions and circumstances. Realism in art is the mode of presenting that ostensibly only copies the actual and what one holds to be actual. We must strike the meaning of reality current today, in the sense of actuality, from the sense [of reality] in order to understand what Kant means by “the real in the appearance.” What is more, the meaning of “reality” current today corresponds neither to the original sense of the word nor to the initial [anfängslichen] use of the term in medieval and modern philosophy until Kant. But the present-day use presumably emerged, thanks to a failure to understand Kant’s linguistic use and a misunderstanding of the same.
“Reality” comes from realitas; realis is that which belongs to a res. The latter means the matter, thing, affair.14 The real [Real] is what belongs to a thing or matter, what belongs to the what-content of a thing [eines Dinges], for example, what constitutes a house or a tree, what belongs to the essence of a thing, its essentia. Reality occasionally signifies the whole of these essential determinations of a thing [Sache] or specific elements of the same. So, for example, extension is a reality of the natural body, as well as weight, density, and resistance. All things of this sort are real, belong to a res, to that thing we call a “natural body,” regardless of whether the body actually exists or not. Materiality, for example, belongs to the reality of a table; the table need not thereby be actual in the present-day sense of “real.” Being-actual itself, existence, is something that first comes to the essence, and in this respect existentia itself holds as a reality. Kant was the first to show that actuality, mere presence, is not real a predicate of a thing; i.e., one hundred possible dollars do not differ in the least from one hundred actual dollars, taken in their reality. In each instance, it is the same thing [Sachheit], namely $100, the same “what” or res, whether possible or actual.
We distinguish between actuality, possibility, and [216] necessity; Kant grasps all three categories together under the heading of modality. From the fact that “reality” is not to be found in this group, it is to be gathered that reality does not mean actuality. In what group does reality belong? I.e., what is its most general sense? It is quality—quale—a so-and-so, this or that, a what. “Reality” as whatness [Sachheit] answers the question what a thing is, not the question whether it exists (cf. A143/B182). The real, that which constitutes the res, is a determination of the res as such. Pre-Kantian metaphysics elucidates the concept of reality in this way. In the employment of this metaphysical concept of reality, Kant follows the textbook of Baumgarten, which deals with the tradition of medieval and modern metaphysics in a scholastic fashion.
In Baumgarten, the basic character of realitas is determinatio, determinateness. Extension and materiality are realities, i.e., determinations belonging to the res “body.” Considered more precisely, realitas is a determinatio positiva et vera, a determinateness belonging to the true essence of a thing [Sache] and posited as such. The counter-concept is a “what” that does not determine a thing [Ding] positively, but [only] in light of what it lacks. Thus, blindness is a lack, the failure to see. It is, to be sure, not a positive determination, but a negative one, i.e., a “negation.” The counter-concept to reality is negation.
Like all the basic concepts he takes from traditional metaphysics, Kant gives realitas a new critical interpretation as well. Objects are things as they appear. Appearances always bring something (a “what”) to self-showing. What above all pushes forward in this way, assails and approaches us, this first “what” is called “ the real ” in the appearance. Aliquid sive obiectum qualificatum is the occupation of space and time (Ak. 18:663, note 6338a.).15 The real in the appearances, the realitas [217] phaenomenon (A168/B209), is the first what-content that must occupy the emptiness of space and time in order for something in general to be able to appear and for appearing, the throng of an “against,” to be possible.
In Kant’s sense, the real in the appearance is not what is actual in the appearance, in contrast to what is not actual and could be mere semblance and vapor. The real is what must be given in general in order for us to be able to decide between something’s actuality or lack of actuality. The real is the pure and originally necessary “what” as such. Without the real, without whatness [Sachheit], the object is not only not actual but nothing at all, i.e., without a “what,” according to which it can be determined as this or that. In this “what,” the real, the object is qualified as encountering in this or that way. The real is the first quale of the object.
Alongside this critical concept of reality, Kant also uses the term in the wider, traditional sense for that whatness that codetermines the essence of the thing, the thing as object [Objekt]. Accordingly, we often meet with the expression “objective reality” precisely in [the context of] a basic question of the Critique of Pure Reason. This turn of phrase has prompted and promoted the epistemological misinterpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason. The expression “objective reality” was elucidated in light of the exposition of the first principle. The question here is whether and how the pure concepts of reason, which are not derived empirically from the object, nonetheless belong to the content [Sachgehalt] of the object, whether, for example, [the concept of] quantity has “objective reality.” This question does not ask whether quantity is actually present, whether it corresponds to something outside of consciousness. What is asked about is rather whether and why quantity belongs to the object as object, to the object as such. Space and time have “ empirical reality.”
Along with sensation and the real, the discourse of the second principle is on intensive magnitude. The distinction [218] within the concept of magnitude between quantum and quantitas has already been elucidated. If the discussion concerns extensive magnitude, then magnitude is called quantitas, the measure of a magnitude, and indeed that of an aggregate pieced together. The intensive, intensio, is nothing other than the quantitas of a qualitas, of something real: for example, a shining surface (the moon). We grasp the extensive magnitude of an object when we take the measurement of its spatial extension in a stepwise fashion, its intensive magnitude, by contrast, when we do not attend to the extensive magnitude, and ignore the surface as surface, but attend to the pure “what” of its shining, the “how much” of the shining, the coloring. The quantitas of the qualitas is the intensity. Every magnitude as quantitas is the unity of a multiplicity, but extensive and intensive magnitudes are this in distinct ways. In extensive magnitude, the unity is always apprehended on the basis and in the taking-together of the many immediately posited parts. Intensive magnitude, by contrast, is immediately perceived as a unity. The multiplicity that belongs to intensity can only be represented in it in such a way that an intensity of negation—down to zero—is approached. The multiplicities of this unity do not lie spread out in it, so that the spreading out [of the many] gives rise to unity, by adding together the many segments and parts. The individual multiplicities of intensive magnitudes correspond rather to the delimitation of the unity of a quale; they are themselves in each case a quale, are many unities. Such unities are called degrees. A loud sound, for example, is not composed of a definite number of these sounds, but there is a gradation of degrees from soft to loud. The multiplicities of the unity of an intensity are many unities. The multiplicities of the unity of an extensity are single unities of a multiplicity. But both, intensity and extensity, allow themselves to be ordered as numerical quantities, but the degrees and gradations of intensities do not thereby become a mere aggregate of parts. [219]
γ) Sensation in Kant in the Transcendental Sense; Proof of the Second Principle
We now understand the principle in its general content:
The Principle , which anticipates all perceptions, as such, runs thus: In all appearances the sensation, and the real , which corresponds to it in the object (realitas phaenomenon ), have an intensive magnitude , i.e., a degree. (A166)
In the second edition, it runs: “In all appearances, the real, which is an object of the sensation, has intensive magnitude, i.e., a degree” (B207).
But we comprehend this principle only on the basis of the proof, which shows wherein this principle—as principle of pure understanding—is grounded. The course of the proof is at the same time the interpretation of the principle. Only by mastering the proof will we be able to appreciate the differences between the first and second editions and to decide on the superiority of one version over the other. It remains to be seen that the principle says something about sensations, not on the basis of an empirical, psychological description or even a physiological explanation of their emergence and provenance but along the path of a transcendental reflection. This means that sensation is taken into view in advance as something that comes into play within the relation of a stepping-over to the object and in the determination of its objectivity. The essence of sensation is delimited on the basis of its role within the transcendental relation.
Kant thereby gains a different sort of basic position in the question concerning sensation and its function in the appearance of things. Sensation is not a thing for which causes are [to be] sought, but a given the givenness of which is to be rendered intelligible on the basis of the conditions of the possibility of experience. [220]
The understanding of the designation of these principles as Anticipations of Perception also rests upon the same state of affairs.
The proof has the same form again, although the major and minor premises and the conclusion are spread out over more sentences. The minor premise begins: “Now from empirical consciousness to pure consciousness . . .” (B208). The transition to the conclusion begins: “Now since sensation in itself. . . .” And the conclusion: “so it has . . . thus. . . .”
We will attempt to reconstruct the proof in a simplified form but in such a way that its joints emerge more sharply. Since we have canvassed the essential determinations of “sensation,” “reality,” and “intensive magnitude,” a certain difficulty regarding content no longer exists. Recall first the probandum of the proof. It is necessary to show that the pure concept of the understanding—in this case the category of quality—determines appearances in advance with respect to what is encountered in them, that in consequence of this quality of appearances a quantity—in the sense of intensity—is possible, and the application of number, mathematics guaranteed thereby. The proof also simultaneously establishes that an “against” cannot encounter without the holding-forth [Vorhalt] of a What in general, that an anticipation of a What must lie already in the reception [of what encounters us].
Major premise: As what shows itself in perception, all appearances contain, in addition to spatiotemporal determinations, what impresses itself upon us—Kant calls it the “matter”—what concerns and gets to us is offered to us and so occupies the spatiotemporal domain.
Transition: Such an offering and presence [Auf- und Vorliegendes] (positum) can only be perceivable as present and lying-before [als Vor-liegendes] insofar as it is represented in advance in the light of a what-character, in the opened domain of the real in general. The sensible can be sensed only on the basis of the open background of the what-like [Washaftem]. Such [221] acceptance of the encountering What is “momentary” and does not rest on the succession of a composing interpretation. The perceiving of the real is a simple having-there, letting-be-posited, is the positio of a positum.
Minor premise: It is possible that what occupies this open field of the real alternates between the maximum of a full impression and the emptiness of the spatiotemporal domain. In accordance with this span of impression, there lies in sensation something measurable that does not arise by piecing together a growing aggregate but concerns in each case the same quale, but always in such-and-such different magnitudes.
Transition: But the how-much, the quantity of a quale, i.e., of something real, is in each case a definite degree of the same What. The magnitude of the real is intensive magnitude.
Conclusion: Hence what gets to us in the appearance, the sensible as real, has a degree. Insofar as the degree, as quantity, allows itself to be determined by number, and this, however [jedoch], is a positing in accord with the understanding of the “how-many-times one,” the sensed as encountering What can be established mathematically.
The principle is thereby demonstrated. In the second edition, it runs as follows: “ In all appearances the real, which is an object of the sensation, has intensive magnitude, i.e., a degree” (B207). The principle ought to run, more precisely: in all appearances, the real, which constitutes the characteristic of standing-against [das Gegenhafte-Ständige] of the sensed, and so on. But the proposition by no means says: the real has a degree because it is object of sensation. Instead it says: because the impressing What of sensation is a reality for the representing letting-stand-over-against, and the quantity of a reality is intensity, it follows that sensation—as material content [Sachheit] of the object—has the objective character of an intensive magnitude.
The formulation of the principle in the first edition is, by contrast, liable to be misunderstood, and almost against the sense of what it authentically intends. It comes close to the misconception that sensation first has a [222] degree and then also the reality corresponding to it, distinct from the sensation in thingness and standing behind it. But the principle means to say: the real as quale has, first and authentically, a quantity of degree—and hence also the sensation; its intensity as objective rests upon the pregivenness of the reality-character of the sensible. The formulation in the first edition is, therefore, to be altered as follows: “In all appearances sensation, and that means first the real that allows it (acc.) to show itself as something objective, has an intensive magnitude.”
It seems that we have arbitrarily interfered with Kant’s text here. But the different formulations in the first and second editions show how much Kant toiled to press his novel insight into the transcendental essence of sensation into the intelligible form of a proposition.
δ) The Strangeness of the Anticipations: Reality and Sensation
We can easily recognize how new the principle was for Kant himself in the fact that Kant wondered again and again about the strangeness of what the principle expresses. And what is stranger than this—that even when (as in the case of sensation) we have to deal with what befalls us, what we only receive, that precisely in this “toward us,” a counter-conceiving and preconceiving [Entgegen- und Vor-greifen] from out of ourselves is possible and necessary? At first glance, perception as pure reception and anticipation, as counter-apprehending preconceiving, are thoroughly opposed. And yet sensation is a receivable, encountering this or that only in the light of a counter-preconceiving representation of reality.
To be sure, we take sensing something or perceiving something to be the most ordinary and simplest thing in the world. We are sentient beings. Certainly! But no human being has ever sensed a “something” and a “what.” Through what sense organ could such a thing take place? A [223] “something” does not permit of being seen or heard, smelled, tasted, or touched. There is no sense organ for the “what” or for the “this” and “that.” The what-character of the sensible must be re-presented in advance and anticipated within the sphere, and as the sphere, of the receivable. No reality, nothing real. Nothing real, nothing sensible. Because one would least expect such an anticipation in the domain of receiving and perceiving, and in order to make this strangeness discernible, Kant calls the principle of perception “anticipation.” Viewed generally, all of the principles, in which the prior determination of the object come to expression, are anticipations. Kant occasionally employs this term in the wider sense as well.
Human perceiving is anticipating. The animal also has perceptions, i.e., sensations, but it does not anticipate; it does not allow what imposes itself to encounter in advance as the What standing in itself, as the other that stands toward the animal itself as the other, and so shows itself as a being. As Kant elsewhere remarks (Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason), no beast can ever say “I.”16 This means that it cannot position itself, as that against which a counter-standing other could itself stand. This does not rule out that the animal relates to food, light, air, and to other animals, even in a well-ordered fashion—recall animals at play. But in all this there is no comportment to beings nor to non-beings. Their life runs its course on this side of the openness of being and non-being. Here the far-reaching question might surface how we know what occurs in the animal and what does not. We can never know it immediately but still gain a metaphysical certainty about animal-being in a mediated way.
Anticipation of the real in perception is strange, not only in comparison with animals but also in comparison with the previous interpretation of cognition. We recall the “in advance” that was indicated on the occasion of the [224] difference between analytic and synthetic judgments. The synthetic judgment has the peculiarity that it must step out beyond the subject-predicate relation toward something entirely other, toward the object. The first fundamental reaching-out [Hinausgriff] of representing in the direction of the having-there [Da-haben] of an encountering “what” as such is the anticipation of the real, that synthesis, making-available, in which a what-domain in general is re-presented, from which appearances should be able to show themselves. Hence Kant says in the concluding paragraph of the Anticipations of Perception: “But the real, which corresponds to sensation in general, in opposition to negation = 0, only represents something whose concept in itself contains a being [i.e., a presence of something], and does not signify anything except the synthesis of an empirical consciousness in general” (A175/6/B217).
The preconceiving representation of reality opens up the view of what-being in general (where this means “being”) and thereby forms the relation on the basis of which empirical consciousness in general is consciousness of something. The What in general is the “transcendental matter” (A143/B182) that belongs in advance to the enabling of an againstness [Gegenhaften] in the object [Gegenstand].
Psychology may, as usual, simply describe sensations; physiology and neurology may explain sensations as stimulus-processes, or some other way; physics may demonstrate the causes of sensations in vibrations of the ether and electrical waves—all these are possible cognitions. But they fail to move in the sphere of the question concerning the objectivity of the object and our immediate relation to this. Kant’s discovery of the anticipations of the real in perception is especially astonishing when one considers that, on the one hand, his esteem for Newtonian physics and, on the other hand, the basic orientation in Descartes’s concept of the subject are completely ill-suited to advance the free view of what is extraordinary about the anticipations in the receptivity of perception. [225]
ε) Mathematical Principles and the Supreme Principle: The Circularity of the Proofs
If we now take both principles together in abbreviated form, we can say: all appearances are as intuitions extensive, as just sensations are intensive magnitudes—quantities. Such are possible only in quanta. But all quanta are continua. They have the property that no discernible part in them is ever the smallest possible. Hence all appearances in the what of their encountering and in the how of their appearing are continuous. Kant deals with this character of appearances, continuity, which concerns both their extensity and their intensity, in the section on the second principle, but for both principles together (A169ff./B211ff.). Hence the Axioms of Intuition and the Anticipations of Perception belong together as mathematical principles, i.e., as principles that metaphysically ground the possibility of an application of mathematics to objects.
The concept of magnitude—in the sense of quantity—finds its support in science and its sense in number. It presents quantities in their determinateness.
Mathematics is applicable to objects because appearances come to stand as an againstness [Gegenhaftes] in general and in advance on the basis of the preconceiving collection, in the sense of the concepts of unity (the categories), quantity, and quality. Hence, on the basis of a mathematical construction, it is possible to meet up with something corresponding [to the mathematical] in the object and itself and to demonstrate it by way of experiment. The conditions of the appearing of appearances, the specifically quantitative determinateness of their form and matter, are at the same time conditions of the standing-against, the collectedness, and constancy of appearances.
Both principles—of the extensive and intensive magnitudes of all appearances—express (if only in a definite respect) the supreme principle of all synthetic judgments. [226]
We must attend to this fact if the character of the executed proofs of the principles is to be understood. Leaving aside the specific content-related difficulties of these proofs, there is still something strange about them, for we are constantly tempted to say that all [their] courses of thought move about in a circle. This difficulty of the proofs does not need to be specifically indicated at first. Nonetheless, a clarification of the reason for the difficulty is called for. It does not lie solely in the specific content of the principles but in their essence. The reason for the difficulty is a necessary one. The principles should be demonstrated as those determinations that first make possible an experience of objects in general. How is such a thing to be proven? By showing that they are themselves only possible on the basis of the unity and belonging-together of the pure concepts of the understanding with what encounters in intuition.
This unity of intuition and thought is itself the essence of experience. Hence the proof consists in showing that the principles of pure understanding are possible by virtue of what they are supposed to make possible—experience. That is a manifest circle. Certainly—and for understanding the course of the proof and the character of the thing itself, it is indispensable not only to be suspicious of this circle, and thereby to generate suspicion about the tidiness of the proof, but also to grasp the circle clearly and to put it into effect as such. Kant would have understood little of his most proper task and intention if the circularity of these proofs did not come before his inner eye. His assertion that these propositions are principles, even if, for all their certainty, never as self-evident as 2 × 2 = 4, signifies as much (A733/B761). [227]
f) The Analogies of Experience
The principles are rules according to which the standing-against of the object forms itself for human re-presenting. The Axioms of Intuition and the Anticipations of Perception concern the making-possible of the againstness of an against, and in two respects: first, the wherein of what is against and, second, the what-character of the against.
In relation to the possibility of an object in general, the second group of principles, by contrast, concerns the possibility of an object’s standing, its constancy, or, as Kant says, the “existence,” “the actuality” of the object, in our way of speaking: mere presence.
The following question arises: Why do not the Analogies of Experience belong to the principles of Modality? The answer must run: because existence [Dasein] is determinable only as a relation of the states of appearances between themselves and never immediately as such.
An object first stands and is first opened up as standing when it is determined in independence of the occasional act of its perception. But “independence of” is only a negative determination. It does not suffice to ground the standing of the object in a positive way. This is obviously only possible if the object is exposed in its relation to other objects, and this relation itself has the constancy, the unity of something that coheres on its own, within which particular objects stand. The constancy of the object is consequently grounded in the connection (nexus) of appearances—more precisely, in that which makes such a connection possible in advance. [228]
α) Analogy as Correspondence, as Relation of Relations, as Determination of Thatness [Daßseins]
Like compositio, connection (nexus) is a mode of combination (coniunctio) and presupposes in itself the guiding representation of unity (B201, n.). But what is now at stake is not those combinations that compose the given (the encountering) in its what-content, in accordance with spatiality and reality and their degrees, not the combination of the homogeneous in the what-content of appearance (compositio, i.e., aggregation and coalition), but a combination of appearance with respect to its temporally specific existence [jeweiligen Dasein], its presence. But appearances change, exist [sind] in each case at different points of time with different durations, and so are not homogeneous with respect to their existence [Dasein]. Because what is now at stake is the determination of the constancy of the object, hence its standing with everything else in the unity of a nexus, and, consequently, the determination of its existence in relation to the existence of other objects, what concerns us now is a combination of the heterogeneous, the unified standing-together in different time-relations. This standing-together of the whole of appearances in the unity of the rules of their being-together, i.e., in accordance with laws, is, however, nothing other than nature. “By nature (in the empirical sense) we understand the combination of appearances as regards their existence, in accordance with necessary rules, i.e., in accordance with laws. There are therefore certain laws, and indeed a priori, which first make nature possible” (A216/B263). Kant reserves the title “Analogies of Experience” for these “original laws” expressed in the principles. These principles no longer concern intuition and perception—as was the case in the preceding principles—but cognition as a whole, wherein the whole of objects, nature in its presence, is determined, i.e., experience. But why “analogies?” What does “analogy” mean? We shall here attempt a procedure in reverse—[229] to prepare an understanding of these principles by way of clarifying the title.
Let us first once again familiarize ourselves with the general contrast between these principles and the previous [mathematical] ones. The mathematical principles concern those rules of unity in [the act of] combining according to which the object is determined as an encountering What in its what-content. The possible shapes of what encounters are constructed in advance, on the basis of the rules of quantitative composition in the domain of the extensive in space and the intensity of the sensed. The mathematical construction of the visible aspect, the what-content of appearances, can be evidenced in and demonstrated by way of experience through examples (A178/B221). The subsequent principles concern, not the determination of that which encounters [us] in its what-content but the determination of whether, that, and how what encounters does encounter and stand there, the determination of the temporally specific existence [Dasein] of appearances within their nexus.
The existence [Dasein] of an object—whether it is merely present and that it is present—can never be immediately compelled and brought before us a priori through the mere representing of its possible existence. We can only infer the existence of an object—that it must be there—from the relation of the object to other objects; it cannot be obtained immediately. We can seek out this existence according to definite rules, even reckon it as necessary, but it still cannot and never can be conjured up in this way. It must first allow itself to be found. When it has been found, we can know it as the thing we sought in accordance with determinate marks, “identify” it, in short.
These rules of search and discovery for the existence-nexus of appearances—the existence of one, non-given [object or appearance] in relation to the given existence of others—these rules for the determination of the relations of the existence of [230] objects are the Analogies of Experience. “Analogy” means “correspondence,” a relation, namely, of the “as-so.” What thereby stand in this relation are yet again relations. Grasped in accordance with its original concept, analogy is a relation of relations. One distinguishes between mathematical and metaphysical analogies in each case according to what stands in this relation. For mathematics, the relation of the “as-so” includes relations that, in short, can be construed as homogeneous: as A is to B, so C is to D. If the relation between A and B is given along with C, then (by analogy) one can determine or construe D, can make D available by such construction itself. The metaphysical analogy, by contrast, does not concern purely quantitative relations but qualitative ones, relations between the heterogeneous. Here the encountering of the real, its presence, does not depend on us but we depend on it. If in the domain of what encounters a relation between [two] encountering [objects] is given, along with a third corresponding to one of the two givens, the fourth itself cannot now be inferred in such a way that it would already be present as well through such an inference [alone]. Rather, according to the rule of correspondence, only the relation of the third to the fourth can be inferred. We gain by way of the analogy only the indication of a relation of a given to something not-given, i.e., an indication of how we have to search for the non-given in light of the given, and as what we must encounter it when it does show itself.
It now becomes clear why Kant can call, and indeed must call, the principles of the determination of the relations of the existence of appearances among one another “analogies.” Since they concern the determination of existence, whether and that something is, but the existence of the third can never be procured a priori, but can only be met with [in some other way], and indeed in the relation to something extant, the necessary rules are here always rules for a correspondence: analogies. In such rules, there consequently lies the [231] anticipation of a necessary nexus of perceptions and appearances in general, i.e., of experience. The analogies are Analogies of Experience.
β) The Analogies as Rules of Universal Time-Determination
Hence the “principle” of the Analogies of Experience runs (in the second edition): “ Experience is possible only through the representation of a necessary connection of perceptions ” (B218). More fully in the first edition: “As regards their existence, all appearances stand a priori under rules of the determination of their relation to each other in one time” (A176–77).
The word “time” provides the catchword that indicates the nexus in which these principles as rules anticipate in their movement. Kant, therefore, explicitly calls the analogies “rules of universal time-determination” (A178/B220). “Universal” time-determination means that determination of time that lies in advance of all empirical measurement of time in physics, and indeed necessarily lies in advance of it as the very ground of its possibility. Since an object can stand in relation to time with respect to its duration, its place alongside other objects in a succession or relation of simultaneity, Kant distinguishes between “three rules of all temporal relations of appearances,” i.e., of the existence of appearances in time with respect to their [various] relations to time (A177/B219).
The discourse on the previous principles was not immediately concerned with time. Why does the relation to time move into the foreground in the Analogies of Experience? What has time to do with what these principles regulate? The rules concern the relation of appearances to each other with respect to their “existence,” i.e., the constancy of the object in the entire duration of appearances. Constancy means at once standing-there, presence. But constancy also means endurance, persistence. In the term “constancy” [232] we hear both at once. It means enduring presence, existence of the object. We readily see that presence, the present, contains a relation to time, so too do endurance and persistence. Principles that concern the determination of the constancy of the object, therefore, have necessarily to do with time, and in an exceptional sense. The question for us is: in which sense? The answer arises when we think through one of the principles and run through its proof. For this purpose, we choose the First Analogy (A182ff./B224ff.).
In preparation, we should now briefly show how Kant delimits the essence of time. We thereby confine ourselves to what is needed in order to understand these principles. But rightly viewed, we first experience what is essential in Kant’s concept of time, precisely through his establishment of the analogies and their proofs.
So far, we have discussed time only in passing and in connection with the characterization of the essence of space. There we said that what was said about space corresponds to something that holds of time as well. We also discover that Kant introduces the exposition of time along with that of space in the Transcendental Aesthetic. We deliberately say “introduces”—for the exposition of time there [i.e., in the Aesthetic] neither exhausts what Kant has to say nor in general furnishes what is decisive.
Corresponding to space, and through the same grounds of proof, time is at first shown to be pure intuition. Simultaneity and succession are represented in advance. Only by way of this re-presenting-in-advance [Voraus-vorstellung] can one represent that several encountering [objects] belong [ist] to one and the same time (are simultaneous) or in different times (succeed one another). For “different times are not simultaneous, but successive (just as different spaces are not successive, but simultaneous)” (A31/B47). Different times are, however, only parts of one and the same time. Different times are only as limitations of a single whole of time. [233] The whole of time is not first composed by piecing times together but is itself unlimited, infinite, is not composed at all but simply given. This originally one, single whole of succession is represented immediately and in advance, i.e., time is something intuited a priori, is “pure intuition.”
Space is the form wherein all outer appearances encounter [us]. But time is not limited to outer sense. It is also the form of inner appearances, i.e., the occurring and succession of our modes of comportment and lived experiences. Hence, time is the form of all appearances in general. “In it alone is all actuality [i.e., existence, presence] of appearances possible”17 (A31/ B46). The existence of every appearance as existence stands in a relation to time. Time itself is “unchangeable and lasting” and “does not elapse” (A144/ B183). “Time itself does not alter, but only something that is within time” (A41/B58). In each Now time is the same now; it is constantly itself. Time is that persistence that always is. Time is pure lasting, and only insofar as it lasts are succession and change possible. Although time has now-character in every now, each now is unrepeatably this singular now, distinct from every other now. Accordingly, time allows itself different relations of appearances in relation to itself; what encounters [us] can stand in different relations to time. If it relates to time as the persisting, hence to time itself as quantum, as measurable, then existence [Dasein] is taken according to its temporal magnitude and determinable in its duration, i.e., in the how-much of time as a whole. Time itself is taken as magnitude. If the appearing relates to time as a series of nows, then it is taken as it is successively in time. If it relates to time as sum-total, the appearing is taken as it is above all in time. Kant accordingly designates the three modes of time as persistence, succession, and simultaneity. Corresponding to these three [234] possible relations of the existence of appearances to time (the time-relations), there are three rules for the determination of the same, three principles that have the character of analogies:
First Analogy: Principle of persistence.
Second Analogy: Principle of temporal sequence, according to the law of causality.
Third Analogy: Principle of simultaneity, according to the law of interaction or community.
We are attempting to understand the First Analogy, i.e., to reenact its proof. To this end, recall once again the general essence of the analogies. They are supposed to be established as those rules that determine in advance the constancy of the object, the existence of appearances in their relation to each other. But because the existence [Dasein] of appearances is not at our disposal, this rule [i.e., the First Analogy] is powerless to produce or procure existence [Dasein] through a priori construction. It provides merely an indication for seeking out relations, along which we can infer from one existence [Dasein] to another. The proof of such a rule has to show why these principles are necessary and where they find their grounds.
γ) The First Analogy and Its Proof; Substance as Time-Determination
In the first edition, the principle of persistence runs: “All appearances contain that which persists (substance) as the object itself, and that which can change as its mere determination, i.e., [as] a way in which the object exists” (A182).
In order to read the proposition at once as an analogy, it is important to attend to the “and,” i.e., to the mention of the relations of that which persists and that which can change.
Kant points out that “at all times,” not merely philosophy but also the common understanding presupposes something like substance, persistence in the change of appearances. [235] The principle of persistence tacitly lies at the basis of all experience. “A philosopher was asked: How much does the smoke weigh? He replied: If you take away from the weight of the wood that was burnt the weight of the ashes that are left over, you will have the weight of the smoke. He thus assumed as incontrovertible that even in fire the matter (substance) never disappears but rather only suffers an alteration in its form” (A185/B228). But—as Kant further stresses—it is not enough for one to merely “feel” the need of the principle of persistence as underlying ground, but it must be demonstrated: (1) that and why in all appearances something persists and (2) that the changeable is nothing but a mere determination of that which persists, hence something that stands in a time-relation to persistence as a time-determination.
Kant’s proof is once again laid out in the form of a syllogism. Since the proof concerns rules for the determination of existence [Dasein], where existence means “being in a time,” and existence, as Kant remarks, has to be taken as a mode of time (A179/B222), it follows that the authentic hinge around which the proof turns must be time itself, its peculiar essence in its relation to appearances. Because a proof in the form of a syllogism has its formal turning point in the minor premise, what is decisive must be expressed in the minor premise, which mediates between the major premise and the conclusion.
Major premise: All appearances—i.e., what encounters us human beings— encounter [us] in time and therefore stand, with respect to the unity of their nexus, in the unity of a time-determinateness. Time itself is the originally persistent—originally, because only as long as time persists is the persisting possible, as enduring in time. Therefore, persistence in general is what lasts in advance of all that encounters us and spreads out beneath it: substance.
Minor premise: Time itself, absolute, cannot be perceived by itself, i.e., time (wherein everything that encounters [236] has its place) is not perceivable as such, otherwise the particular temporal locations of what encounters [us], as well as what encounters in its temporal location, could be determined a priori. By contrast, time as what persists in all appearing requires that all determining of the existence [Dasein] of appearances, i.e., their being-intime, take up this persisting in advance and before every relation.
Conclusion: Therefore, the standing of the object must be conceived, first and above all, on the basis of persistence, i.e., the representation of the persisting throughout change belongs in advance to the material reality of the object.
But the representation of the persisting throughout change is what is meant in the pure concept of the understanding “substance.” Hence in accordance with the necessity of this principle, the category of substance has objective reality. There is constant alteration in the object of experience (nature), i.e., that mode of existence that follows upon another mode of existence of the same object. The determination of alterations—hence of natural occurrences—presupposes persistence. That is to say, alteration is only determinable in relation to what persists, since only what persists can be altered, while the changeable suffers no alteration but only a change. The accidents—which one apprehends as the determinations of substance—are, therefore, nothing but different modes of the persisting, i.e., of the existence [Dasein] of substance itself.
All constancy of objects is determined on the basis of the relations of alterations to each other. Alterations are modes of the presence of forces. Consequently, the principles that concern the existence of objects are called “dynamical.” But alterations are alterations of a persisting thing. Persistence must determine in advance the horizon within which objects are constant in their nexus. But for Kant, persistence as constant presence is the basic character of time. Hence, time plays an authoritative role in the determination of the constancy of objects. [237]
In every proof of the dynamical principles, this role of time is prominent, thanks to the decisive assertion on the essence of time emphasized in every case in the minor premise. On the one hand, time is the sum-total within which all appearances encounter [us], wherein, therefore, the standing of objects is determined in their relations to the persisting, the successive, and the simultaneous. But on the other hand, as the minor premise always insists, time in itself cannot be perceived. In relation to the possible determination of the presence of objects at any time, this means nothing less than this: the momentary temporal location and the temporal relation of an object can never be construed a priori on the basis of the pure course of time as such, i.e., presented or procured intuitively. What is actual and immediately present of time is only this particular now. Hence, the following possibility alone remains: to determine a priori the temporal character of an object that is not immediately given but still actual in terms of the momentarily present and its possible temporal relation to this, and to gain a guiding thread regarding how the object is to be sought. This existence [Dasein] itself must always fall to us [uns immer zu-fallen]. If, accordingly, we are supposed to be able to experience the whole of appearances in its objectivity in general, then certain well-founded rules are needed that contain an indication of the time-relations in which the encountering must stand, so that the unity of the existence [Dasein] of appearances, i.e., a nature, is possible. These transcendental time-determinations are the Analogies of Experience, the first of which we have now thoroughly discussed.
In the second edition, the Second Analogy runs as follows: “ All alterations occur in accordance with the law of the connection of cause and effect ” (B232). In the first edition: “Everything that happens (begins to be) presupposes something which it follows in accordance with a rule ” (A189).
The proof of this principle provides, for the first time, the [238] foundation of the law of causality as a law of objects of experience.
In the second edition, the Third Analogy runs as follows: “ All substances, insofar as they can be perceived in space as simultaneous, are in thoroughgoing interaction ” (B256). In the first edition: “All substances, insofar as they are simultaneous, stand in thoroughgoing community (i.e., interaction with one another)” (A211).
This principle and its proof, along with its content, are especially significant for Kant’s confrontation with Leibniz, as the analogies in general throw a special light on the changes in the basic positions of both thinkers.
To conclude, we must provide at least some hints regarding the second subgroup of the dynamical principles, which constitute the last group in the entire system of the principles.
g) The Postulates of Empirical Thought
α) Objective Reality of the Categories: the Modalities as Subjective Synthetic Principles
We know that the system of the principles of pure understanding is ordered and divided in accordance with the order and division of the table of categories. The categories are representations of unity that have their source in the essence of the act of the understanding itself and serve as rules of combination in judgment, i.e., the determining of an encountering manifold in the object. The four groups of categories bear the titles Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Modality. In retrospect, we now see more clearly:
The Axioms of Intuition show in what way quantity (as extensive magnitude) belongs necessarily to the essence of the object as something encountering.
The Anticipations of Perception show how quality (reality) determines in advance the encountering as such. [239]
In analogies, the principles of correspondence, of what stands-in-relation and its determination, it is shown how the object with respect to its constancy can only be determinable on the basis of a prior view of the relations in which the encountering (appearances) stand. Since these relations must represent and include in advance all objects that can possibly come to appearance, they can only be relations of the sum-total of all appearances, namely time-relations. The three groups of principles corresponding to the categories of Quantity, Quality, and Relation have this in common: they determine in advance what belongs to the substantive essence of the object as encountering and constant. In relation to these three groups of categories, the first three groups of principles show that and in what way the categories constitute in advance the substantive essence of the object, its thinghood [Sachheit] in general, and as a whole. These categories are the realities of the essence of the object. The corresponding principles prove that these categories—as realities—make the object possible, belong to the object as such, and so have objective reality.
The principles discussed so far lay that ground by virtue of which a horizon in general is first formed, within which this, that, and several can encounter and stand in context as an object.
What, then, about the fourth group of principles, the Postulates of Empirical Thinking in General? This group corresponds to the categories of Modality. The title already signifies something characteristic. Modality: modus, way, a How—in contradistinction to the What, to the real in general. Kant introduces the exposition of the fourth group of principles by remarking that the categories of Modality have something “peculiar” in themselves (A219/B266). The categories of Modality (possibility, actuality or existence, necessity) do not belong to the substantive essence of an [240] object. Whether, for example, a table is possible, actual, or necessary does not touch the material content [Sachheit] of the table, which remains always the same [whether merely possible, actual, or necessary]. Kant expresses this by saying that the categories of Modality are no real predicates of the object. Accordingly, they belong neither to the material essence of objectivity in general nor to the pure concept of that which delimits the essence of the object as such. By contrast, they assert something about how the concept of the object is related to existence and its modes and how, according to which modes, the existence of the object is to be determined.
In contrast to the first three groups of principles, the principles that constitute something on this score cannot, therefore, concern the question whether and how the categories (possibility, actuality, necessity) can be said to have objective reality, since they do not belong as such to the reality of the object. Because the principles can assert nothing of this sort, they can also not be demonstrated in this respect. There are consequently no proofs for these principles but only elucidations and clarifications of their content.
β) The Postulates Correspond to the Essence of Experience: The Modalities Are Related to Experience, No Longer to Conceivability
The Postulates of Empirical Thinking in General provide only what is required to determine an object as possible, as actual, and as necessary. At the same time, there lie in these requirements, “postulates,” the essential delimitation of possibility, actuality, and necessity. The postulates correspond to the essence of that by virtue of which objects in general are determinable: the essence of experience.
The postulates are only assertions of a demand that lies in the essence of experience. This consequently comes into relief as the standard according to which the modes of existence, and thereby the essence of being itself, is measured. The postulates accordingly run: [241]
1.“Whatever agrees with the formal conditions of experience (in accordance with intuition and concepts) is possible.” (A218/B265)
Kant understands possibility as agreement with what regulates in advance the appearing of appearances, with space and time and their quantitative determination. The possibility of an object can only be decided when the representing adheres to what was said about the object in the first group of principles. By contrast, previous rational metaphysics defines possibility as noncontradiction. For Kant, what does not contradict itself is indeed to be thought possible, but this thought-possibility still settles nothing about the possibility of the existence of an object. What cannot appear in space and time is for us an impossible object.
2.“Whatever is connected with the material conditions of experience (of sensation) is actual.” (A218/B266)
Kant understands actuality as connection with what shows us something real, with material content, hence with sensation. The actuality of an object can only be decided when the representing adheres to what was said about the object in the second group of principles. By contrast, previous rational metaphysics apprehends actuality only as a complement to possibility in the sense of conceivability: existential as complementum possibilitatis. But this still settles nothing about actuality itself. What could still be thought along with the possible by the pure understanding is only the impossible, but not the actual. What actuality means for us is fulfilled and experienced only in relation of representing to the encountering of a real of/in sensation.
Here we have reached the point where misunderstanding of the concept of reality begins. Because the real, and indeed as something given, alone bears out the actuality of an object, one (wrongly) identifies reality and actuality. But reality is only a condition for the givenness [242] of something actual, but not yet the actuality of the actual.
3.“That whose connection with the actual is determined in accordance with general conditions of experience is or exists necessarily.” (A218/B266)18
Kant understands necessity as determinateness through that which establishes a connection with the actual—out of agreement with the unity of experience in general. The necessity of an object can only be decided when the representing adheres to what was said about the constancy of the object in the third group of principles. By contrast, previous rational metaphysics understood necessity merely as that which cannot not be. However, because existence [Dasein] is defined only as a complement of the possible and the possible, in turn, only as the conceivable, this determination of the necessary also remained in the domain of the conceivable. The necessary is that which cannot be conceived as nonexistent. But that which we must think need not thereby exist. We can never cognize in general the existence of an object in its necessity but always only the existence of a state of an object in relation to another.
γ) Being as the Being of Objects of Experience: Modalities in Relation to the Cognitive Power
From this elucidation of the content of the postulates, synonymous with an essential determination of the Modalities, we gather that Kant, while he determined the modes of being, simultaneously limited being to the being of objects of experience. The merely logical clarifications of possibility, actuality, and necessity, provided by rational metaphysics are rejected; in short, being is no longer determined on the basis of mere thought. On what basis then? The recurring formula “whatever agrees with,” “whatever is connected with” is conspicuous in the postulates. [243] Possibility, actuality, and necessity are understood on the basis of the relation of our cognitive power—as a thoughtfully determined intuiting—to the conditions of the possibility of objects, conditions lying within the cognitive power itself.
The Modalities—possibility, actuality, necessity—add no material content to the object, and yet they are a synthesis. They posit the object in each case in a relation to the conditions of its standing-against. But these conditions are, at the same time, conditions of the letting-stand-against [of the object], conditions of experiencing and hence of the activities of the subject. The postulates, too, are synthetic principles, not objectively but only subjectively synthetic. This is to say: they do not compose the whatness [Sachheit] of the object,19 but they posit the entire essence of the object (as determined by the first three groups of principles) in its relation to the subject and its modes of intuiting-thinking representing. The Modalities add to the concept of the object its relation to our cognitive power (A234/B286). Hence, the three modes of being are also coordinated with the first three groups of principles. What is asserted in these presupposes the Modalities. In this respect, the fourth group of synthetic principles of pure understanding is superior in rank to the first three. Conversely, the Modalities are determined only in relation to what is posited in the preceding principles.
δ) The Circularity of the Proofs and Elucidations
It is now clear that the elucidations of the postulates, just like the proofs of the previous principles, also move in a circle. Why is there this circularity, and what does it mean?
The principles are supposed to be demonstrated as those propositions that ground the possibility of an experience of objects. How are these propositions demonstrated? Only by showing [244] that the propositions are themselves possible only on the basis of the unity and unification of pure concepts of the understanding with the forms of intuition, with space and time. The unity of thinking and intuiting is itself the essence of experience. The proof consists in showing that the principles of pure understanding are possible through that which they themselves make possible, through the essence of experience. That is an obvious circle, and indeed a necessary one. The principles are demonstrated by recourse to that the emergence of which they make possible, because these propositions are supposed to bring nothing other than this circularity itself to light, for this constitutes the essence of experience.
In the concluding part of his work, Kant says of the principle of pure understanding that “it has the special property that it first makes possible its ground of proof, namely experience, and must always be presupposed in this [experience]” (A737/B765). The principles are such propositions that ground their ground of proof and transfer their grounding to the ground of proof. Expressed differently: the ground that lay, the essence of experience, is no merely present thing, to which we return and upon which we simply stand. Experience is in itself a circular happening, by virtue of which what lies within the circle is opened. But this opening is nothing other than the Between—between us and thing.
h) The Supreme Principle of All Synthetic Judgments: the Between
What Kant hits upon and sought to apprehend ever freshly as the basic occur-rence is this: we human beings are able to know beings that we ourselves are not, although we have not made these beings ourselves. To be a being within an open over-against of beings is something that is continually disconcerting. In Kant’s formulation, this means that objects [245] have standing-over-against as they themselves [are], although the letting-encounter [of the object] occurs through us. How is such a thing possible? Only in such a way that the conditions of the possibility of experiencing (space and time as pure intuitions and the categories are pure concepts of the understanding) are at the same time conditions of the standing-against of the objects of experience.
What is expressed in this way Kant posited as the supreme principle of all synthetic judgments. What the circularity in the proof of the principles signifies is now clear—nothing but this: at bottom, the principles always express only the supreme principle, but in such a way that in their belonging-together they properly name all that belongs to the full content of the essence of experience and the essence of an object.
The principal difficulty in understanding this basic part of the Critique of Pure Reason and the entire work lies in the fact that we approach Kant’s work from everyday or scientific modes of thought and read the work in those very attitudes. We are either directed toward what is said of the object itself or directed toward what is exposed about the way we experience it. But what is decisive is to attend neither to the one nor to the other alone, nor to both together, but to cognize and to know
1.that we must move in the Between, between human being and thing,
2.that this Between is only while we move around in it, and
3.that this Between is not like a rope stretching from human being to thing, but that this Between, as anticipation, reaches beyond the thing and likewise back behind us. Grasping-ahead [Vor-griff] is casting-back.
When, therefore, we read the Critique of Pure Reason from the very first sentence in this attitude, everything moves from the beginning in another light. [246]
1 Jacob Sigismund Beck (1761–1840) was one of Kant’s most valued interlocutors and an influential interpreter of Kant’s works in the early reception of Critical Philosophy.
2 Correspondence, translated and edited by Arnulf Zweig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 398.
3 Ak. 11:315, Correspondence, 400.
4 Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, 318.
5 Ibid., 330.
6 Our emphasis.
7 By “Logistik” Heidegger follows Meinong and his student Mally to mean “symbolic logic,” as opposed to the traditional logic of subsumption. But “symbolic logic” still seems a bit too broad. So we have decided on “logicism.” The term appears in Mally’s 1912 Gegenstandstheoretische Grundlagen der Logik und Logistik and in Heidegger’s own “ Neuere Forschungen über Logik” of the same year. See, for instance, GA 1, 29, 41, and 42. At GA 1, 41 Heidegger speaks of the “idea of ‘logistics’ or ‘symbolic logic.’ ” He takes Logistik to be anchored historically in Leibniz’s mathesis universalis and developed most fully in the work of Russell and Whitehead.
8 Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, 363.
9 Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, 331.
10 Heidegger does not provide the reference.
11 This is the first of several instances of “ Dasein” that will be translated as “existence,” in keeping with Kant’s use of the term.
12 Heidegger does not supply the reference.
13 The wavelength of red is actually measured in nanometers (nm), not micrometers (μm), and ranges between 620 and 750. The frequency of the same is 400–484 terahertz (THz).
14 All three terms translate die Sache.
15 Notes and Fragments, translated by Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rauscher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 380.
16 We have not been able to locate the precise reference (Heidegger may be misremembering), but the claim is consistent with Kant’s discussion of the threefold “Predisposition to Good in Human Nature” in Part One of Religion (Ak. 6:26–28). Kant comes close to saying something of this sort in a section on the consciousness of oneself in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Ak. 7:127).
17 The parenthetical qualification is Heidegger’s.
18 Translation slightly modified.
19 Heidegger uses both Objekt and Gegenstand for “object.”