ISSN 1393-614X Minerva - An Internet
Journal of Philosophy Vol. 8 2004.
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A MOST AFFECTING VIEW:
TRANSCENDENTAL AFFECTION AS CAUSATION DE-SCHEMATIZED Chad Mohler |
Abstract
Kant claims that
things-in-themselves produce in us sensible representations. Unfortunately,
this “transcendental affection” appears to be inconsistent with Kant’s
prohibition against applying the category of causality to things-in-themselves.
This paper gives
an account of transcendental affection that does not require it to be seen as a
type of causation. Transcendental affection, properly understood, is the
logical relation of the ground of things-in-themselves to the consequent of an
affected subject. This relation is what one gets when one de-schematizes
causation, revealing the underlying hypothetical form of judgment.
So conceived, transcendental affection no longer poses
a potentially debilitating problem for the interpreter of Kant who contends
that things-in-themselves enjoy an independent objective existence. The paper, then, is a partial defense of such
an interpreter against the Kantian interpreter who contends that the
thing-in-itself is merely a limiting concept useful for the regulation of thought.
I. Introduction: Two Opposed Views
There
are two common interpretations of Kant’s doctrine of the thing-in-itself in his
Critique of Pure Reason. One of these, which I shall call the
phenomenalist reading, holds that Kant took the thing-in-itself to be not an
existing object, but the mere limiting concept of an object considered
in abstraction from all conditions of sensible perception. 1 The thing-in-itself, on this view, is such a
limiting concept in two distinct ways. First, the thing-in-itself, being the
concept of something unperceivable and hence by Kant’s lights unknowable,
places constraints on what we can know. Kant makes the thing-in-itself a limit
of our epistemological capacity by first restricting our knowledge to that of
things considered as they appear to us and by then construing the
thing-in-itself as the concept of a thing considered apart from the manner in
which it so appears.
The
thing-in-itself is also a limiting concept in a second sense, in that it is the
concept of an ultimate logical ground for all judgments about an object of
experience. The thing-in-itself is the conceptual unity under which all these
judgments fall and by which they are all conditioned — that is, the
thing-in-itself as conceptual ground is the condition for the assertion of the
judgments. For the phenomenalist, of course, this conditioning is merely
conceptual. On the phenomenalist view, we make a judgment about an empirical
object as if it were grounded by an actually existent thing-in-itself,
all the while bearing in mind that the thing-in-itself is in actuality only a
concept, not an object.
Because
all judgments about the experienced object are so conditioned by the
thing-in-itself and not vice versa, the thing-in-itself is, with respect to the
experienced object, unconditioned — that is, there is nothing that could be
said about the object that could serve as the condition for asserting something
about the corresponding conceptual thing-in-itself. The thing-in-itself, taken
in this sense as the ground for all judgments about an empirical object, is the
logically most fundamental concept of the object, and as such, it constitutes
the most general concept that could be invoked in any line of reasoning
concerning and limited to that object. It is thus the logical limit
of concepts involved in any series of judgments exclusively about the object.
In light of this construal of the thing-in-itself, we can understand in a
phenomenalist way one of Kant’s remarks in the B Edition Preface to the Critique,
where he says, “For what necessarily forces us to transcend the limits of
experience and of all appearances is the unconditioned, which reason, by
necessity and by right, demands in things in themselves, as required to complete the
series of conditions” (Bxx). 2 The thing-in-itself is the
unexperienced, unconditioned unity that we think (again, conceptually) as the
ground of all judgments which we make about an empirical object and that we
thus consider as completing any “series of conditions” which we might employ in
syllogistic reasoning limited to that object. 3 Just as reason seeks to extend itself to the Kantian
transcendental ideas of the thinking subject, the world, and God, the
phenomenalist holds that reason also strives in its consideration of a single
empirical object toward yet another totality, that of the thing-in-itself.
In
keeping with this phenomenalist interpretation, we must be careful not to
hypostatize the concept of a thing-in-itself as an actually existing object,
just as Kant in the Ideal of Pure Reason showed us we must not objectify as a
deistic God the unconditioned unity of the series of all objects of thought in
general. The lack of existent objects corresponding to the concept of
thing-in-itself is what makes this interpretation of Kant a phenomenalist one.
Our inability on this view to assert unqualifiedly that things-in-themselves
exist means that, at least as far as the First Critique is concerned, Kant can
only be justified in according the ontological status of existence to the
objects of one’s possible experience, that is, to possible appearances and
mental acts. 4 Roughly put, there is nothing that we can say
is lurking “behind the appearances.”
The
second interpretation of the Kantian thing-in-itself, by contrast, reads the
First Critique as asserting the existence of objects considered apart from the
sensible conditions under which we perceive objects — there are actual
things underlying appearances, on this account. This view, which I shall refer
to as the realist interpretation, holds that such objects can be considered in
one of two ways: either empirically, as given through their appearances to the
sensibility of the observer; or transcendentally, in abstraction from all
conditions of the sensibility. 5
In this latter
sense, the objects are thought as they are “in themselves.” Though the objects
can be thought in this way, we can know nothing about them as
they are in themselves, for knowledge can be had only of things for which there
are available intuitions, which for humans are exclusively sensible in nature.
The object thought about in the above non-sensible, abstract manner is only the
unknown “something=X” behind the appearances that that something generates in
us. A thing-in-itself on this view, then, is just an existent object considered
apart from any sensible means we have of perceiving it. 6 There is a grave threat, however, to any
interpretation of Kant which incorporates the above realist construal of the
thing-in-itself. The danger is that with things-in-themselves interpreted
realistically, Kant’s assertion of the existence of such entities is a dogmatic
claim with no justification; and if we have to give up the existence of
things-in-themselves, we have to give up the existence of objects “beneath the
appearances” altogether. The argument with which the phenomenalist so impugns
the realist goes roughly as follows:
(1) If a
thing produces sensible representations in me, it must affect me in some causal
way.
(2) But I can only
apply the category of causality to empirical objects, not to
things-in-themselves.
(3) Therefore,
I cannot say that it is things-in-themselves that produce sensible
representations in me.
(4) Kant
gives us no reason, other than things-in-themselves producing sensible
representations in us, to believe that things-in-themselves exist.
(5) So
Kant’s view does not provide us with any legitimate reason to think that
things-in-themselves exist; Kant’s view does not give us reason to believe that
there are objects considered apart from the conditions of sensibility.
Given
this argument, says the phenomenalist, any further insistence on the realist’s
part that existence can be attributed to objects considered apart from the
manner in which we perceive them is dogmatic and unjustified.
Unlike
the phenomenalist, the realist is committed to the doctrine of transcendental
affection: that is, to the assertion that objects considered transcendentally
as things-in-themselves do, in fact, affect us in such a way as to cause us to
have the sensible intuitions that we do. This is the problematic aspect of the
realist’s account, for as the phenomenalist's argument points out, it requires that the realist illegitimately apply the
category of causality to things-in-themselves. If, as Kant maintains, such an
application cannot be made, and if transcendental affection is, in fact, a
causal relation, the conclusion of the phenomenalist's argument
straightforwardly follows.
That
argument does not threaten the phenomenalist. For the phenomenalist who allows
that we can only justifiably say that appearances and mental acts exist, there
are no non-sensible objects that we can unequivocally assert as existing. This
being the case, on the phenomenalist view we cannot consider the objects of
empirical intuition — the only objects there are on this account —
transcendentally, for there is nothing to them outside of appearance (at least,
nothing that we could know). Thus, for the phenomenalist, there is no transcendental
affection that we need dogmatically to posit.
Of
course, rejecting transcendental affection creates for the phenomenalist
problems of her own. Among other difficulties, the
phenomenalist faces the challenge of giving some reasonable explanation of what
Kant actually means in the numerous instances in the First Critique where he
speaks of things-in-themselves affecting us. In this paper I want to focus not
on how the phenomenalist might do this, but, rather, on the phenomenalist’s
challenge to the realist interpreter of the First Critique. I will say how,
despite the attractiveness of the phenomenalist’s argument, the realist can
nonetheless evade the phenomenalist’s indictment of his transcendental
affection.
II. The Phenomenalist’s Argument in Detail
In
numerous passages in his Critical writings, Kant affirms that
things-in-themselves appear to us because they affect us in some causal way.
The following are examples of such references to this “transcendental
affection”:
The faculty of sensible intuition is strictly only a receptivity, a
capacity of being affected in a certain manner with representations... The
non-sensible cause of these representations is completely unknown to us... We
may, however, entitle the purely intelligible cause of appearances in general
the transcendental object, in order to have something corresponding to
sensibility viewed as a receptivity (A494/B523).
How things may be in themselves, apart from the representations through
which they affect us, is entirely outside our sphere of knowledge (A191/B236).
In the process of warning [the sensibility] that it must not presume to
claim applicability to things-in-themselves but only to appearances, [the
understanding] does indeed think for itself an object in itself, but only as
transcendental object, which is the cause of appearance and therefore not
itself appearance, and which can be thought neither as quantity nor as reality
nor as substance, etc. (because these concepts always require sensible forms in
which they determine an object) (A288/B344).
And we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances,
confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not
this thing as it is in itself but only know its appearances, viz., the way in
which our senses are affected by this unknown something. The understanding
therefore, by assuming appearances, grants also the existence of things in
themselves, and thus far we may say that the representation of such things as
are the basis of appearances, consequently of mere beings of the understanding,
is not only admissible but unavoidable (Prolegomena, §32).
There
are a number of interesting points to observe about these passages. First,
while in some of them Kant refers to transcendental objects as the causes of
the appearances we have, in others he explicitly posits things-in-themselves in
that affective role. It is clear, however, that in these particular passages,
insofar as he is referring in all of them to some non-sensible entity which is
the underlying, unknown origin of the mental representations that a subject
has, he uses ‘transcendental object’ and ‘thing-in-itself’ synonymously. In the
third passage, Kant even equates the two terms.
Furthermore,
the passages make it clear that the things-in-themselves affecting the subject
are themselves not objects of knowledge, for there corresponds to them no
sensible intuition. As the Prolegomena passage suggests, the
things-in-themselves doing the affecting are objects considered in abstraction
from those very sensible conditions under which they appear to us. Considered
in this way, we can know nothing about them because without sensible intuitions
of them, we cannot determine their properties by subsuming the concept of the
object under other concepts. As Kant says in the B Transcendental Deduction,
“Our conclusion is therefore this: the categories, as yielding knowledge of things,
have no kind of application, save only in regard to things which may be objects
of possible experience” (B148). Things-in-themselves, as objects considered
apart from the sensible conditions of possible experience, are not the sorts of
objects to which the categories can be applied to yield any determinate
knowledge.
The
very non-applicability of the categories to things-in-themselves is the origin
of the problems for the realist that the phenomenalist’s argument brings to the
fore. As the above passages indicate, Kant appears to construe the manner in
which things-in-themselves affect the subject in a causal way, which would
imply that the realist is committed to affirming the truth of the first premise
of the phenomenalist’s argument, that things-in-themselves’ production of
sensible representations in a subject requires some sort of causal affection of
the subject by those things-in-themselves. But, by the above admission that
categories are not applicable to things-in-themselves, the realist must accept
the second premise as well. The first two premises imply the preliminary
conclusion in (3): we cannot say that things-in-themselves cause the
sensible representations that we have, since such a judgment requires that the
category of causality be definitely applicable to things-in-themselves.
Now
the realist interpreter of Kant is in trouble, for the only reason Kant gives
for allowing us to assert the existence of things-in-themselves as
subject-independent objects is that, on the realist view, subject-independent
objects considered as things-in-themselves are what produce sensible
representations in us. 7 If the realist really is committed to the
argument the phenomenalist describes, he cannot justifiably posit
subject-independent objects considered as things-in-themselves as the causes of
the appearances he has, so that he has no justifiable reason on the basis of
Kant’s view for saying that things-in-themselves exist at all.
It
appears, then, that unless the realist is willing to assert dogmatically that
things-in-themselves exist, she must admit that we really have no reason for
saying there are objects “beneath the appearances.” Her realism under such a
concession would dissolve away into a mere phenomenalism that asserts the
“empirical reality” of objects without the transcendental substrate of
existent, non-sensible things-in-themselves underlying those real empirical
entities. Considered apart from their relation to us, subject-independent
objects on this view could not be justifiably said to be anything at all.
III. The Realist Vindicated: Affection De-Schematized
Fortunately
for the realist, she is not forced to subscribe to this phenomenalist vision of
the world. Despite Kant’s characterization of affection in the above passages
as a causal relation between the subject and things-in-themselves, we can
construct a Kantian view of transcendental affection that is non-causal in
nature and thus does not rely on a misapplication of the categories to
subject-independent objects considered apart from the conditions of their
sensible perception.
First,
it is important to note that, Kant’s above causal descriptions of affection
notwithstanding, it follows from many positions of Kant in the Critique
that transcendental affection is definitely not a causal relation. We
have already mentioned, of course, that Kant does not allow the categories,
including that of causality, to be applied to things-in-themselves. We can
better understand why we are prevented from considering things-in-themselves in
any causal connection with the subject by examining a few other sections of the
Critique. As Kant notes in his discussion of the Second Analogy, any
causal relation between two objects requires that those objects be determined
in time (A190/B234). Kant’s transcendental idealism commits him to the view
that subject-independent objects do not have temporal properties apart from our
perception of those objects. In particular, things-in-themselves, then, are not
determined in time, so that we cannot properly postulate a causal relation
involving them.
In his
solution to the Third Antinomy, Kant makes a similar point with respect to the
acting subject. Considered according to its intelligible character, “which does
not itself stand under any conditions of sensibility,” “this acting subject
would not ... stand under any conditions of time; time is only a condition of
appearances, not of things in themselves” (A540/B568). Just as
things-in-themselves cannot be determined in time, the acting subject, merely
intelligibly considered, is also not temporally conditioned, so that what it does
cannot have “a place in the series of those empirical conditions through which
the event [of its action] is rendered necessary in the world of sense”
(A540/B568). The actions of the intelligible subject, in other words, cannot be
a part of any series of empirical causes and effects.
Kant’s
talk of intelligible agents in his solution of the Third Antinomy and the
non-applicability of the category of causality to atemporal
things-in-themselves allows us to see that transcendental affection cannot be a
causal relation of the empirical type. But what type of relation is it,
then? It is important to note, first, that Kant allows us to describe affection
in an empirical manner. For instance, he describes color
as “modifications of the sense of sight, which is affected in a certain manner
by light” (A29). We as empirically considered objects are affected by another
empirical entity, light, in such a way that we perceive certain hues. Later on,
in the Third Analogy, Kant says, “Each substance... must therefore contain in
itself the causality of certain determinations in the other substance, and at
the same time the effects of the causality of that other” (A213/B260). Each
empirical object, according to this claim, stands in mutual causal interaction
with other empirical objects; and it is this “dynamical community,” Kant goes
on to say, that allows our minds, empirically considered, to be affected by
empirical objects in such a way that we perceive them as coexisting: “The
light, which plays between our eye and the celestial bodies, produces a mediate
community between us and them, and thereby shows us that they coexist”
(A214/B260). As further evidence that Kant allows us to consider affection in
empirical terms, Kemp Smith cites at least 26 passages in Kant’s Opus
Postumum referring to empirical causes of sensations. 8
Now, in my initial description of the realist’s
interpreter’s position, I distinguished two ways of viewing objects on Kant’s
view. On the one hand, we can concern ourselves exclusively with the way that
we experience objects as empirically appearing to us; on the other hand, we can
consider objects in abstraction from the conditions of sensibility, as
things-in-themselves, and inquire as to how they transcendentally appear to us.
Likewise, we can consider affection in two different ways. I have already
mentioned above the empirical sense in which we can consider affection, as a
physical causality between empirical objects and the empirically considered self.
But we can also take affection in a transcendental sense by considering the
causal relation of empirical affection in abstraction from all sensible
conditions.
A determination of what is left to the causation of
empirical affection after we abstract from it all conditions of sensibility
requires that we first briefly review a few passages from the Transcendental
Analytic where Kant describes the functions of judgment and their connection to
the schematized categories. For Kant, judgments basically consist of the
relation of one concept to another concept, where the latter concept, in turn,
is itself related to an object of appearance (cf. A69/B93: “In every judgment
there is a concept which holds of many representations, and among them of a
given representation that is immediately related to an object”). In this way,
judgments serve as round-about ways of representing the objects of appearance —
they ascribe to a concept associated with such an object a concept-predicate
that presents that object as having a certain property. The indirectness of the
concept-predicate’s relation to the object, through the object’s associated
concept and not directly to the object itself, is what prompts Kant to call a
judgment “mediate knowledge of an object” (A69/B93). Other judgments can
represent the object of experience as having additional properties; and insofar
as these other concepts are related to the same object-concept, the
representations are unified under the concept of one object. This explains why
Kant refers to judgments as “functions of unity among our representations;
instead of an immediate representation, a higher representation, which
comprises the immediate representation and various others, is used in knowing
the object, and thereby much possible knowledge is collected into one”
(A69/B94).
After describing the general character of judgments,
Kant goes on to introduce four tripartite divisions presenting the various
forms that a judgment can take. These “forms of judgment” are a catalog of the various logical features that a judgment in
its representation-unifying function can exhibit. Of particular interest to us,
under the heading of “Relation,” is the hypothetical form of judgment. Kant
exemplifies this form with the judgment, ‘If there is a perfect justice, the
obstinately wicked are punished’ (A74/B99). A judgment of this type, Kant
notes, is composed of two propositions whose truth value is undetermined. What
is important to the hypothetical type of judgment is not the truth but the
relation of the two propositions. As Kant says, “It is only
the logical sequence which is thought by this judgment” (A74/B99), and he
earlier characterizes this logical sequence as the relation “of ground to its
consequence” (A73/B98). Thus, what a hypothetical judgment affirms is
that the existence of the state of affairs described in the first proposition
of the judgment entails that the state of affairs described in the second
proposition also obtains. The judgment, in other words, unifies the two states
of affairs in the relation of ground to consequent; the state of affairs of the
first proposition is the ground of the state of affairs of the second.
The hypothetical form of judgment is particularly
important for our purposes, for, as it turns out, it is the form which, in its
application to the manifold of pure intuition, is the category of cause and
effect (A79-80/B105-106). Properly schematized, this pure concept of the
understanding can be applied to the objects of possible experience, supplying
us with the concept of causality under which the empirical objects involved in
empirical affection can be appropriately thought. The schematization of the
pure concept produces a “temporalized” category: that is, a pure concept of the
understanding translated into temporal terms that allow that category to be
applied to empirical objects. For causality, the condition of this
temporalization, the schema, is “the succession of the manifold, in so far as
that succession is subject to a rule” (A144/B184). How does this schema relate
pure concept to empirical appearance? As mentioned above, the pure concept of
causality, as a form of judgment applied to the manifold of pure intuition,
gives a logical relation between ground and consequent. The schema, then,
associates this ground and consequent with two events “of the manifold” of
empirical intuition occurring successively in time in accordance with the law
of cause and effect developed in the Second Analogy. This schematic association
between the rule-governed succession of empirical events and the
ground-consequent relation of the pure concept is what enables us to apply the
category of causality to empirical objects in general, and to the empirical
objects involved in empirical affection in particular.
In my attempt at developing an account of affection
transcendentally considered, I have thus far given a rudimentary view of the
relationship between judgments, categories, and schematized categories in the
Analytic. In the context of that explanation, I have shown that underlying the
schematized/temporalized category of causality that applies to objects involved
in empirical affection is the hypothetical form of judgment. Now, it is this
logical relation of ground to consequent that I want to argue we can count as
affection considered in the transcendental sense. Just as we considered objects
transcendentally by characterizing them in abstraction from the conditions of
sensibility through which they become empirically manifest to us, we can do the
same with affection. As Kant says at the beginning of the Analytic, “If we
abstract from all content of a judgment,” we obtain the forms of judgment
(A70/B95). Thus, considered in abstraction from the spatiotemporal conditions
that characterize it, a judgment involving the subsumption of objects involved
in empirical affection under the category of causality becomes simply the
assertion of a logical relation between ground and consequent. This is the
relation of affection considered transcendentally.
Let us consider this relation and its connection to
empirical affection in more detail. The objects involved in empirical affection
are the empirical object that affects a subject’s sensibility and the
(empirically considered) subject so affected. The empirical object and the
subject stand in a causal relation to each other that can be captured in a
hypothetical judgment — for instance, “If light strikes my eyes, I will see
some color.” The light’s striking my eyes causes
me to perceive a particular color. If we abstract
this causal judgment in hypothetical form from all conditions of sensibility,
we are left with the bare assertion of a logical relation of ground to
consequent. In the selected example, this assertion is that some relation
(we-know-not-what) between myself and the light
empirically affecting me — both considered apart from the conditions under
which I and it are empirically perceived — is the ground for my affected mental
state, considered apart from the way that state is perceived by me through
inner sense. Alternately, insofar as we are able to characterize in a physical
way the object’s affecting me, we can equate the effect of that affection with
a physical state of my body. In this case, then, what is grounded in the
logical judgment is this physical state of my body, considered apart from the
manner in which we empirically perceive it.
Affection transcendentally considered, then, is simply
a logical relation of ground to consequent, where an unknown relation between
an empirically affecting object and an affected subject, considered as
things-in-themselves, is taken to be the ground for the existence of a certain
affected mental/physical state in that subject, considered apart from the
manner in which we perceive that state and that subject. The logical relation
of transcendental affection entails that if the unknown relation between the
empirically affecting object and affected subject obtains, the mental/physical
state of the subject will obtain as well (where here, again, the object,
subject, and subject’s state are taken as objects considered apart from the
conditions under which we perceive them).
I have mentioned a bit about what transcendental
affection is; now I will describe what it is not. To begin with,
affection considered in abstraction from the conditions of sensibility is not a
relation of determinate objects to determinate objects. The subject, object,
and subject’s state involved in the logical relation of affection are, like all
objects considered as things-in-themselves, merely indeterminate “somethings=x,y,z” about which we can know nothing at all. We cannot even
know that the “x”, “y”, and “z” somethings are distinct. There may be no
one-to-one mapping at all between the empirical objects involved in an
affection relation and those objects considered as things-in-themselves. All
the realist can say about objects considered transcendentally, and still remain
in agreement with the limits Kant establishes concerning the unknowability of
things-in-themselves, is that there is some transcendental substrate
underlying the appearances of empirical objects to us.
In characterizing the transcendental object, Kant
makes exactly this point. He asks, “What, then, is to be understood when we
speak of an object corresponding to, and consequently also distinct from, our knowledge?”
He responds, “It is easily seen that this object must be thought only as
something in general=x, since outside our knowledge we have nothing which we
could set over against this knowledge as corresponding to it” (A104). The
passage from which this quote comes is the A edition Transcendental Deduction,
in which Kant is probably more interested in using the term ‘transcendental
object’ to signify the conceptual unity that keeps our judgments “from being
haphazard and arbitrary” (A104) than he is in using that term to refer to
things-in-themselves. Nevertheless, in light of the fact that
things-in-themselves are, like the transcendental objects described here,
objects as they are considered “distinct from our knowledge,” this passage
lends weight to the claim that Kant took things-in-themselves to be merely
indeterminate somethings. This claim is further reinforced in a similar passage
in the “Phenomena and Noumena” section of the Critique, where Kant
equates things-in-themselves with noumena and refers explicitly to their
indeterminate character. He says there that the understanding “limits
sensibility by applying the term noumena to things in themselves (things not
regarded as appearances). But in so doing it at the same time sets limits to
itself, recognising that it cannot know these noumena through any of the
categories, and that it must therefore think them only under the title of an
unknown something” (A256/B312; underlining added).
The prohibition against determinate objects in the
logical relation of transcendental affection keeps our characterization of
affection in line with what Kant claims about the limited use the pure concepts
of the understanding do have apart from their schematized application to
sensible intuitions. For instance, at the end of the section on schematism,
Kant claims,
Now there certainly does
remain in the pure concepts of understanding, even after elimination of every
sensible condition, a meaning; but it is purely logical, signifying only the
bare unity of representations. The pure concepts can find no object, and so can
acquire no meaning which might yield a concept of some object. (A147/B186)
The concepts, divorced from sensible intuitions, do
have a function, but it is only a logical one that yields no knowledge of
objects. That is exactly the functional role that the concept of cause, in its
bare hypothetical judgment relation of ground to consequent, can be thought to
play in transcendental affection. Kant makes similar remarks about the limited
role of the pure concepts of the understanding at another point where he talks
specifically about what the category of cause would amount to apart from its
schematization:
If I omit from the
concept of cause the time in which something follows upon something else in conformity
with a rule, I should find in the pure category nothing further than that there
is something from which we can conclude to the existence of something else...
the concept would yield no indication how it applies to any object.”
(A244/B302)
Again, this grounding of the existence of something in
the existence of something else, without specifying those somethings as objects
and without even specifying that the former “something” is distinct from the
latter “something else”, is exactly what the logical relation of transcendental
affection does.
Admittedly, this relation does not tell us much about
anything at all, and we might feel disappointed that we could not within the
limits of Kant’s Critical philosophy come up with anything more substantial to
posit as the relation of transcendental affection than this. Still, keeping in
mind that transcendental affection and empirical affection are the same
relation considered in two different ways, we have succeeded in characterizing
transcendental affection in a way that allows the realist to say that
things-in-themselves affect the subject: a thing-in-itself, in some unknown
relation to the subject-in-itself, is the ground for the subject's affected
state, insofar as the subject and that state are considered apart from the
conditions through which they are known. It is the dual aspect description of
affection that allows us to characterize affection in one sense (the empirical
sense) as a causal relation without at the same time making an illegitimate
application of the categories to things-in-themselves when we characterize that
relation transcendentally, as a bare logical, non-causal relation. In this way,
we can restore to a respectable place in Kant’s view the transcendental
substrate “behind the appearances,” the ground that momentarily threatened to
give way beneath the realist’s feet.
Construing transcendental affection as the logical
relation of the ground of things-in-themselves to the consequent of an affected
subject certainly seems to be consistent with the numerous passages in the
Dialectic in which Kant specifically characterizes things-in-themselves as the
ground of appearances. For instance, in the section on the Paralogisms, Kant
says,
... all
that can be done is to indicate [how in a thinking subject outer intuition is
possible] through the ascription of outer appearances to that transcendental
object which is the cause of this species of representations, but of which we
can have no knowledge whatsoever and of which we shall never acquire any
concept. In all problems which may arise in the field of experience we treat
these appearances as objects in themselves, without troubling ourselves about
the primary ground of their possibility (as appearances). But to advance
beyond these limits the concept of a transcendental object would be
indispensably required (A393; emphasis added).
It is clear that the “primary ground of the
possibility” of the appearances here is taken to be the transcendental object,
as a thing-in-itself, that is responsible for those representations in the
subject. Here are two more passages in which Kant characterizes
things-in-themselves as the ground of appearances in a subject:
Neither the transcendental
object which underlies outer appearances nor that which underlies inner
intuition, is in itself either matter or a thinking being, but a ground (to us
unknown) of the appearances... (A380).
If, on the other hand,
appearances are not taken for more than they actually are; if they are viewed
not as things in themselves, but merely as representations..., they must
themselves have grounds which are not appearances. While the effects are to be
found in the series of empirical conditions, the intelligible cause, together
with its causality, is outside the series (A537/B565).
IV. The Parallel Between Transcendental Affection and Free Action
This last passage, found in Kant’s discussion of the
Third Antinomy, serves as an important link between the Critique’s
doctrine of transcendental affection and Kant’s compatibilist stance toward
determinism and free will. Considering the passage in conjunction with our
account of transcendental affection suggests an original way in which we can
coherently view the actions of an agent as both transcendentally free and at
the same time empirically determined. This can be done because the effects of
an agent’s actions can be compared favorably with the
affection of subjects by objects.
Just as empirical objects can affect the senses of a
subject in such a way that she ends up having particular mental representations
of those objects, so an agent’s actions can be considered empirically in terms
of the causal relationship between the agent and certain effects of her action.
Considered in this way, the agent in acting as she does is situated somewhere
in the deterministic “empirical series of conditions” mentioned in the above
passage. Likewise, just as the empirically affecting objects, considered as
things-in-themselves in a certain unknown relation to a subject-in-itself, are
the logical ground for the affected mental state of the subject, considered
apart from the conditions under which it is perceived, we can analogously
consider an agent’s actions transcendentally. The agent, considered as a
thing-in-itself and in some unknown relation to other things-in-themselves, is
the ground for a certain state of objects that results from that person’s
actions, where here that state is considered apart from the conditions under
which it is perceived. As we can see, actions transcendentally considered yield
us as little substantial information about the actions themselves as affection
transcendentally considered yields us about the affection itself. Like
transcendental affection, there may not be any one-to-one mapping from the
empirically considered actors and acted-upon subjects to those various objects
considered as things-in-themselves. Nevertheless, actions viewed in this way
allow us to consider them as actions that are freely performed. An action
considered apart from empirical conditions does not presuppose “something upon
which it follows according to a rule,” as the Second Analogy dictates for
empirical objects (A190), so we can think of an action in the transcendental
sense as at least not empirically determined.
There is a certain parallel in the Critique,
then, between actions and affection. Each can be characterized in terms of a
causal relation between empirical objects/agents, but each can also be
construed transcendentally as a logical relation of ground to consequent
between things-in-themselves, about which we only determinately know that they
are objects of experience considered apart from the conditions under which we
sensibly perceive them. These objects so conceived are mere, indeterminate,
possibly indistinct somethings underlying the appearances. We can say with Kant
in the above quote from the Third Antinomy discussion that with respect to both
actions of an agent and affection of a subject, “the intelligible cause,
together with its causality,” considered transcendentally as the logical
relation of ground to consequent, “is outside the series” of empirical
relations, even though “the effects,” considered empirically, “are to be found
in the series of empirical conditions” which includes the agent or affecting
body empirically considered.
Of course, to be sure, Kant would not want to say that
anything other than God or a rational human agent could act freely in the
transcendental sense, contrary to what our account appears to allow with
respect to non-human empirically affecting objects. Considered
transcendentally, their affection of the subject would seem to be an act freely
performed by those objects. However, we might be able to avoid ascribing
freedom to non-human, empirically affecting objects as they are
transcendentally considered if we take the transcendental ground for all
non-human cases of empirical affection (that is, all cases of empirical
affection where the affecting empirical object is not a rational human agent)
to be God, who certainly can act freely. 9 Non-human empirical objects and
their causal relationships on this account would interestingly enough be, as
that transcendental ground empirically considered, various empirical
manifestations of God. While a full development of this view, requiring an
examination of Kant’s positive conception of God, would take us significantly
beyond the First Critique and, as such, shall not be pursued in this paper,
exploring such an approach is one promising and potentially fruitful way we
might attempt to maintain and elaborate further the analogy between actions and
affection.
V. Conclusion
Admittedly,
my account of transcendental affection brings us no closer to offering a conclusive
justification of the existence of things-in-themselves than we were before
we started. Transcendental affection’s logical relation of ground to consequent
does not entail the existence of the ground itself any more than the claim that
“If x exists, then y exists” implies the existence of x. Nevertheless, it is
reasonable to expect that the phenomenalist will have equal difficulty
defending his claim that things-in-themselves definitively do not exist;
and insofar as I have given an account of transcendental affection that does
not require an illegitimate application of the categories to
things-in-themselves, I have removed one of the substantial obstacles in the
way of the realist’s offering a coherent and epistemically respectable story
about the existence of things-in-themselves. The realist can now more easily
argue that a view of things-in-themselves and empirical objects as two aspects
of subject-independent objects appearing to us offers us the best explanation
of our sensory appearances. That dual aspect view would be considerably less
attractive if we were forced to jettison altogether the notion of
transcendental affection for being inconsistent with the rest of the Critical
philosophy. The pitfall of the problematic character of transcendental
affection thus overcome, the way is clear for the realist to offer a
justification for believing things-in-themselves to exist, and thus to
indemnify herself against the phenomenalist’s charge of dogmatism concerning
that belief.
The
phenomenalist, on the other hand, while perhaps holding a coherent ontology of
his own, is at a substantial disadvantage when it comes to explaining Kant’s
continual reference to things-in-themselves and the affection through which
they are related to the subject and her appearances. Thus, as far as
interpretations of Kant are concerned, it appears that the realist offers the
more comprehensive of the two construals of the Critique of Pure Reason;
and given that, as I have shown, the doctrine of transcendental affection, an
important part of the realist view, can be accommodated in Kant’s Critical
philosophy without contradiction, the realist interpretation of the First
Critique comes off as the more promising of the two interpretations. 10
REFERENCES
Allison, H. E. 1983. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kant, I. 1977. Prolegomena to Any
Future Metaphysics. Trans. Paul Carus, rev. James
W. Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Kant, I. 1929. Critique of Pure
Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. New York:
St. Martin’s Press.
Shaper, E. 1966. “The Kantian Thing-in-Itself as a Philosophical Fiction,” Philosophical
Quarterly 16: 233-43.
Smith, N. K. 1992. A Commentary
to Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason. 2nd ed. Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities Press International.
NOTES
1. This view is advocated by Shaper (1966, 235-241).
2. All references to the Critique of Pure
Reason shall be to the Norman Kemp Smith 1929 translation.
3. An example of such reasoning is the following two-syllogism concluding
segment in a syllogistic series whose completion is thought of as being
ultimately given by some tree T considered conceptually as an unconditioned
thing-in-itself:
<earlier parts of the syllogistic series>
...
4. Here, a “possible”
appearance or mental act is either an actual appearance or mental act or
an appearance or mental act satisfying the condition that if a person were in a
particular place at a particular time, she could perceive that
appearance or perform that act.
5. This interpretation is
defended by H. E. Allison in his 1983. The interpretation’s view of
things-in-themselves is considered in most detail in Chap. 11 of that book
(esp. pp. 240-241).
6. This
construal of what constitutes a thing-in-itself can be found, for instance, at
A251-52, B306, and B308 in the First Critique.
7. Kant does indeed at
least give this reason for asserting the existence of things-in-themselves: cf.
the passage quoted at the beginning of this section from the Prolegomena,
and also B72: “Our mode of intuition is dependent upon the existence of the
object, and is therefore possible only if the subject’s faculty of
representation is affected by that object.”
8. N. K. Smith, 1992 , p. 275, n. 1.
9. This idea was suggested
to me by Béatrice Longuenesse.
10. Special thanks to
Béatrice Longuenesse for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
Copyright
© 2004 Minerva
All rights are reserved, but fair and good faith use with full attribution may
be made of this work for educational or scholarly purposes.
Chad Mohler is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at
Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri, U.S.A.
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