A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' — Kant — John Shaqi
A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason'
Kant · en
This decides for Kant the character of the distinction to be drawn
between animal and human intelligence. As animals, in his view, cannot
be regarded as possessing a capacity of self-consciousness, they must
also be denied all awareness of meaning. However complicated the
associative organisation of their ideas may be, it never rises to the
higher level of logical judgment. For the same reason, though their
ideas may be schematic in outline, and in their bearing on behaviour may
therefore have the same efficiency as general concepts, they cannot
become universal in the logical sense. “Animals have apprehensions, but
not apperceptions, and cannot, therefore, make their representations
universal.”[39] In support of this position Kant might have pointed to
the significant fact that animals are so teachable up to a certain
point, and so unteachable beyond it. They can be carried as far as
associative suggestion will allow, but not a step further. To this day
it remains true--at least I venture the assertion--that no animal has
ever been conclusively shown to be capable of apprehending a sign as a
sign. Animals may seem to do so owing to the influence of associated
ideas, but are, as it would appear, debarred from crossing the boundary
line which so sharply distinguishes associative suggestion from
reflective knowledge.
But Kant is committed to a further assertion. If animals are devoid of
all awareness of meaning, they must also be denied anything analogous to
what we must signify by the term consciousness. Their experience must
fall apart into events, that may, perhaps, be described as mental, but
cannot be taken as equivalent to an act of awareness. “_Apprehensio
bruta_ without consciousness,”[40] such is Kant’s view of the animal
mind. Its mental states, like all other natural existences, are events
in time, explicable in the same naturalistic fashion as the bodily
processes by which they are conditioned; they can not be equated with
that human consciousness which enables us to reflect upon them, and to
determine the conditions of their temporal happening.
The distinction which Kant desires to draw is ultimately that between
events and consciousness of events. Even if events are psychical in
character, consisting of sensations and feelings, there will still
remain as fundamental the distinction between what is simply a member of
the causal series of natural events and the consciousness through which
the series is apprehended. Kant’s most explicit statements occur in a
letter to Herz.[41] He is referring to data of the senses which cannot
be self-consciously apprehended: