A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason'

Kant · en
struggling with his deduction.[858] But the most interesting of all
Vaihinger’s conclusions has still to be mentioned. He points out that at
the time when this fragment was composed Kant had not yet developed the
doctrine characteristic of the fourth stage, namely, of a threefold
transcendental synthesis. Moreover, as he observes, the statement which
it explicitly contains, that reproductive imagination is always
empirical, is inconsistent with any such doctrine. The teaching of the
fourth stage must consequently be ascribed to an even later date.[859]

(4) The _Lose Blätter_ (Heft II.), though almost exclusively devoted to
moral and legal questions, contain in E 67[860] a relevant passage which
Reicke regards as belonging to the ‘eighties, but which Adickes and
Vaihinger agree in dating “shortly before 1781.” On Vaihinger’s view it
is a preliminary study for the passages of the fourth stage of the
deduction. But such exact dating is not essential to Vaihinger’s
argument. It is undoubtedly quite late, and contains the following
sentence:

     “All representations, whatever their origin, are yet ultimately as
     representations modifications of inner sense, and their unity must
     be viewed from this point of view. A spontaneity of synthesis
     corresponds to their receptivity: either of apprehension as
     sensations or of reproduction as images (_Einbildungen_) or of
     recognition as concepts.”

This is the doctrine from which the deduction of the first edition
_starts_; it was, it would seem, _the last to be developed_.[861] That
we find no trace of it in the _Prolegomena_, and that it is not only
eliminated from the second edition, but is expressly disavowed,[862]
would seem to indicate that it had been hastily adopted on the very eve
of publication, and that upon reflection Kant had felt constrained
definitively to discard it. The threefold synthesis can be verified on
the empirical level, but there is no evidence that there exist
corresponding transcendental activities.


=IV. Connected Statement and Discussion of Kant’s Subjective and
Objective Deductions in the First Edition=