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

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СКАЧАТЬ Kant's remarks are few and little satisfactory. He very commonly employs the term affection of the faculty of sense as expressing the mode of origin, but offers no further explanation of a term which has significance only when interpreted after a somewhat mechanical fashion. Unquestionably certain of his remarks indicate the view that the origin is to be sought in things-in-themselves, but against hasty misinterpretations of such remarks there are certain cautions to be borne in mind. The relation between phenomena and noumena in the Kantian system does not in the least resemble that which plays so important a part in modern psychology — between the subjective results of sense affection and the character of the objective conditions of such affection. Kant has pointedly declared that it would be a gross absurdity to suppose that in his view separate, distinct things-in-themselves existed corresponding to the several objects of perception. And, finally, it is not at all difficult to understand why Kant should say that the affection of sense originated in the action of things-in-themselves, when we consider what was the thing-in-itself to which he was referring. The thing-in-itself to which the empirical order and relations of sense-experience are referred is the divine order, which is not matter of knowledge, but involved in oitf practical or moral beliefs. Critics who limit their view to the Kritik of Pure Reason, and there, in all probability, to the first or constructive portion of the work, must necessarily fail to interpret the doctrines of the Kantian system, which do not become clear or definite till the system has been developed. Reason was, for Kant, an organic whole; the speculative and moral aspects are never severed; and the solution of problems which appear at first sight to belong solely to the region of speculative thought may be found ultimately to depend upon certain characteristics of our nature as practical.

      Data of sense-affection do not contain in themselves synthetic combination. The first conditions of such combination are found by Kant in the universal forms under which alone sense-phenomena manifest themselves in experience. These universal forms of perception, space and time, are necessary, a priori, and in characteristic features resembling intuitions, not notions. They occupy, therefore, a peculiar position, and one section of the Kritik, the Aesthetik, is entirely devoted to the consideration of them. It is important to observe that it is only through the a priori character of these perceptive forms that rational science of nature is at all possible. Kant is here able to resume, with fresh insight, his previous discussions regarding the synthetic character of mathematical propositions. In his early essays he had rightly drawn the distinction between mathematical demonstration and philosophic proof, referring the certainty of the first to the fact that the constructions were synthetic in character and entirely determined by the action of constructive imagination. It had not then occurred to him to ask, With what right do we assume that the conclusions arrived at from arbitrary constructions in mathematical matter have applicability to objects of experience? Might not mathematics be a purely imaginary science? To this question he is now enabled to return an answer. Space and time, the two essential conditions of sense-perception, are not data given by things, but universal forms of intellect into which all data of sense must be received. Hence, whatever is true of space and time regarded by imagination as objects, i.e. quantitative constructions, must be true of the objects making up our sense-experience. The same forms and the same constructive activity of imagination are involved in mathematical synthesis and in the constitution of objects of sense-experience. The foundation for pure or rational mathematics, there being included under this the pure science of movement, is thus laid in the critical doctrine of space and time.

      The Aesthetik isolates sense-perception, and considers its forms as though it were an independent, complete faculty. A certain confusion, arising from this, is noticeable in the Analytik when the necessity for justifying the position of the categories is under discussion, but the real difficulty in which Kant was involved by his doctrine of space and time has its roots even deeper than the erroneous isolation of sensibility. He has not in any way “deduced ” space and time, but, proceeding from the ordinary current view of sense-experience, has found these remaining as residuum after analysis. The relation in which they stand to the categories or pure notions is ambiguous; and, when Kant has to consider the fashion in which category and data of sense are to be brought together, he merely places side by side as a priori elements the pure connective notions and the pure forms of perception, and finds it, apparently, only a matter of contingent convenience that they should harmonize with one another and so render cognition possible. To this point also Fichte was the first to call attention.

      Affection of sense, even when received into the pure forms of perception, is not matter of knowledge. For cognition there is requisite synthetic combination, and the intellectual function through which such combination takes place. The forms of intellectual function Kant proceeds to enumerate with the aid of the commonly received logical doctrines. For this reference to logic he has been severely blamed, but the precise nature of the debt due to the commonly accepted logical classification is very generally misconceived. Synthetic combination, Kant points out, is formally expressed in a judgment, which is the act of uniting representations. At the foundation of the judgments which express the types of synthetic combination, through which knowledge is possible, lie the pure general notions, the abstract aspect of the conditions under which objects are cognizable in experience. General logic has also to deal with the union of representations, though its unity is analytic merely, not synthetic. But the same intellectual function which serves to give unity in the analytic judgments of formal logic serves to give unity to the synthetic combinations of real perception. It appeared evident, then, to Kant that in the forms of judgment, as they are stated in the common logic, there must be found the analogues of the types of judgment which are involved in transcendental logic, or in the theory of real cognition. His view of the ordinary logic was wide and comprehensive, though in his restriction of the science to pure form one can trace the influence of his earlier training, and it is no small part of the value of the critical philosophy that it has revived the study of logic and prepared the way for a more thorough consideration of logical doctrines. The position assigned to logic by Kant is not, in all probability, one which can be defended; indeed, it is hard to see how Kant himself, in consistency with the critical doctrine of knowledge, could have retained many of the older logical theorems, but the precision with which the position was stated, and the sharpness with which logic was marked off from cognate philosophic disciplines, prepared the way for the more thoughtful treatment of the whole question.

      Formal logic thus yields to Kant the list of the general notions, pure intellectual predicates, or categories, through which alone experience is possible for a conscious subject. It has already been noted how serious was the error involved in the description of these as notions, without further attempt to clear up their precise significance. Kant, indeed, was mainly influenced by his strong opposition to the Leibnitzian rationalism, and therefore assigns the categories to understanding, the logical faculty, without consideration of the question, — which might have been suggested by the previous statements of the Dissertation, — what relation these categories held to the empirical notions formed by comparison, abstraction and generalization when directed upon representations of objects. But when the categories are described as notions, i.e. formed products of thought, there rises of necessity the problem which had presented itself to Kant at every stage of his pre-critical thinking, — with what right can we assume that these notions apply to objects of experience? The answer which he proceeds to give altogether explodes the definition of the categories as formed products of thought, and enables us to see more clearly the nature of the new conception of experience which lies in the background of all the critical work.

      The unity of the ego, which has been already noted as an element entering into the synthesis of cognition, is a unity of a quite distinct and peculiar kind. That the ego to which different parts of experience are presented must be the same ego, if there is to be cognition at all, is analytically evident; but the peculiarity is that the ego must be conscious of its own unity and identity, and this unity of self-consciousness is only possible in relation to difference not contained in the ego but given to it. The unity of apperception, then, as Kant calls it, is only possible in relation to synthetic unity of experience itself, and the forms of this synthetic unity, the cate- gories, are, therefore, on the one hand, necessary as forms in which self-consciousness is realized, and, on the other hand, restricted in their application and validity СКАЧАТЬ