A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason'Smith, Norman Kemp
Philosophy
A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason'
Smith, Norman Kemp
Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804. Kritik der reinen Vernunft
(1) =Psychological possibility.=--What are the _subjective_ conditions of
_a priori_ synthetic judgments? _Through what mental faculties_ are they
rendered possible? Kant replies by developing what may be called a
transcendental psychology. They depend upon space and time as forms of
sensibility, upon the _a priori_ concepts of understanding, and upon the
synthetic activities by which the imagination schematises these concepts
and reduces the given manifold to the unity of apperception. This
transcendental psychology is the necessary complement of the more purely
epistemological analysis.[186] But on this point Kant’s utterances are
extremely misleading. His Critical enquiry has, he declares, nothing in
common with psychology. In the _Preface_ to the first edition we find
the following passage: “This enquiry ... [into] the pure understanding
itself, its possibility and the cognitive faculties upon which it rests
..., although of great importance for my chief purpose, does not form an
essential part of it.”[187] The question, he adds, “how is the faculty
of thought itself possible?... is as it were a search for the cause of a
given effect, and therefore is of the nature of an hypothesis [or ‘mere
opinion’], though, as I shall show elsewhere, this is not really so.”
The concluding words of this passage very fairly express Kant’s
hesitating and inconsistent procedure. Though he has so explicitly
eliminated from the central enquiry of the _Critique_ all psychological
determination of the mental powers, statements as to their constitution
are none the less implied, and are involved in his epistemological
justification alike of _a priori_ knowledge and of ordinary experience.
If we bear in mind that Kant is here attempting to outline the possible
causes of given effects, and that his conclusions are therefore
necessarily of a more hypothetical character than those obtained by
logical analysis, we shall be prepared to allow him considerable liberty
in their formulation. But in certain respects his statements are precise
and definite--the view, for instance, of sensations as non-spatial, of
time as a form of inner sense, of the productive imagination as
pre-conditioning our consciousness, of spontaneity as radically distinct
from receptivity, of the pure forms of thought as not acquired through
sense, etc. No interpretation which ignores or under-estimates this
psychological or subjective aspect of his teaching can be admitted as
adequate.[188]
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