IMMANUEL KANT: Philosophical Books, Critiques & Essays. Immanuel Kant

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СКАЧАТЬ compressed, would be beyond the limits of the present article, it is proposed here to select only the more salient doctrines, and to point out in connexion with them what advance had been effected by Kant, and what remained for subsequent efforts at complete solution of the problems raised by him. Much that is of interest and value must necessarily be omitted in any sketch of so elaborate a system, and for all points of special interpretation reference must needs be made to the many elaborate dissertations on or about the Kantian philosophy.

      The doctrine from which Kant starts in his critical or transcendental investigation of knowledge is that to which the slow development of his thought had led him. The essence of cognition or knowledge was a synthetic act, an act of combining in thought the detached elements of experience. Now synthesis was explicable neither by reference to pure thought, the logical or elaborative faculty, which in Kant's view remained analytic in function, nor by reference to the effects of external real things upon our faculties of cognition. For, on the one hand, analysis or logical treatment applied only to objects of knowledge as already given in synthetic forms, and, on the other hand, real things could yield only isolated effects and not the combination of these effects in the forms of cognitive experience. If experience is to be matter of knowledge for the conscious subject, it must be regarded as the conjoint product of given material and synthetic combination. Form and matter may indeed be regarded separably and dealt with in isolation for purposes of critical inquiry, but in experience they are necessarily and inseparably united. The problem of the Kritik thus becomes for Kant the complete statement of the elements necessarily involved in synthesis, and of the subjective processes by which these elements are realized in our individual consciousness. He is not asking, with Locke, whence the details of experience arise; he is not attempting a natural history of the growth of experience in the individual mind; but he is endeavouring to state exhaustively what conditions are necessarily involved in any fact of knowledge, i.e. in any synthetic combination of parts of experience by the conscious subject.

      So far as the elements necessarily involved in conscious experience are concerned, these may be enumerated briefly thus: — given data of sense, inner or outer; the forms of perception, i.e. space and time; the forms of thought, i.e. the categories; the ultimate condition of knowledge, the identity of the pure ego or self. The ego or self is the central unity in reference to which alone is any part of experience cognizable. But the consciousness of self is the foundation of knowledge only when related to given material. The ego has not in itself the element of difference, and the essence of knowledge is the consciousness of unity in difference. For knowledge, therefore, it is necessary that difference should be given to the ego. The modes under which it is possible for such given difference to become portion of the conscious experience of the ego, the modes under which the isolated data can be synthetically combined so as to form a cognizable whole, make up the form of cognition, and upon this form rests the possibility of any a priori or rational knowledge.

      The notion of the ego as a purely logical unity, containing in itself no element of difference, and having only analytical identity, is fundamental in the critical system, and lies at the root of all its difficulties and perplexities. To say that the ego as an individual does not produce the world of experience is by no means the same as to say that the ego is pure unity without element of difference. In the one case we are treating the ego as one of the objects of experience and denying of it productive efficacy; in the second case we are dealing with the unity of the ego as a condition of knowledge, of any experience whatsoever. In this second sense, it is wholly wrong to assert that the ego is pure identity, pure unity. The unity and identity of the ego, so regarded, are taken in abstraction, i.e. as dissevered from the more complex whole of which they are necessary elements. When the ego is taken as a condition of knowledge, its unity is not more important than the difference necessarily correlated with it. That the ego as a thing should not produce difference is quite beside the mark. The consequences of the abstract separation which Kant so draws between the ego and the world of experience are apparent throughout his whole system. Assuming at the outset an opposition between the two, self and matter of knowledge, he is driven by the exigencies of the problem of reconciliation to insert term after term as means of bringing them together, but never succeeds in attaining a junction which is more than mechanical. To the end, the ego remains, partly the pure logical ego, partly the concrete individual spirit, and no explanation is afforded of the relation between them. It is for this reason that the system of forms of perception and categories appears so contingent and haphazard. No attempt is made to show how or why the difference supplied for the pure logical ego should present, itself necessarily under these forms. They are regarded rather as portions of the subjective mechanism of the individual consciousness. The mind or self appears as though it were endowed with a complex machinery by which alone it could act upon the material supplied to it. Such a crude conception is far, indeed, from doing justice to Kant's view, but it undoubtedly represents the underlying assumption of many of his cardinal doctrines. The philosophy of Fichte is historically interesting as that in which the deficiencies of Kant's fundamental position were first discerned and the attempt made to remedy them.

      Unfortunately for the consistency of the Kritik, Kant does not attempt to work out systematically the elements involved in knowledge before considering the subjective processes by which knowledge is realized in consciousness. He mixes up the two inquiries, and in the general division of his work depends rather upon the results of previous psychology than upon the lines prescribed by his own new conception of experience. He treats the elements of cognition separately in connexion with the several subjective processes involved in knowledge, viz. sense and understanding. Great ambiguity is the natural result of this procedure. For it was not possible for Kant to avoid the misleading connotation of the terms employed by him. In strictness, sense, understanding, imagination and reason ought to have had their, functions defined in close relation to the elements of knowledge with which they are severally connected, and as these elements have no existence as separate facts, but only as factors in the complex organic whole, it might have been possible to avoid the error of supposing that each subjective process furnished a distinct, separately cognizable portion of a mechanical whole. But the use of separate terms, such as sense and understanding, almost unavoidably led to phraseology only interpretable as signifying that each furnished a specific kind of knowledge, and all Kant's previous training contributed to strengthen this erroneous view. Especially noteworthy is this in the case of the categories. Kant insists upon treating these as Begriffe, notions, and assigns to them certain characteristics of notions. But it is readily seen, and in the Logik Kant shows himself fully aware of the fact, that these pure connective links of experience, general aspects of objects of intelligible experience, do not resemble concepts formed by the so-called logical or elaborative processes from representations of completed objects. Nothing but harm can follow from any attempt to identify two products which differ so entirely. So, again, the Aesthetik is rendered extremely obscure and difficult by the prevalence of the view, already noted as obtaining in the Dissertation, that sense is a faculty receiving representations of objects. Kant was anxious to avoid the error of Leibnitz, who had taken sense and understanding to differ in degree only, not in kind; but in avoiding the one error he fell into another of no less importance.

      The consideration of the several elements which in combination make up the fact of cognition, or perception, as it may be called, contains little or nothing bearing on the origin and nature of the given data of sense, inner or outer. The manifold of sense, which plays so important a part in the critical theory of knowledge, is left in an obscure and perplexed position. So much is clear, however, that according to Kant sense is not to be regarded as receptive of representations of objects. The data of sense are mere stimuli, not partial or confused representations. The sense-manifold is not to be conceived as having, per se, any of the qualities of objects as actually cognized; its parts are not cognizable per se, nor can it with propriety be said to be received successively or simultaneously. When we apply predicates to the sense-manifold regarded in isolation, we make that which is only a factor in the experience of objects into a separate, independent object, and use our predicates transcendently. Kant is not always in his language faithful to his view of the sense-manifold, but the theory as a whole, together with his own express definitions, is unmistakable. On the origin of the data СКАЧАТЬ