BEISER'S IDEALISM (10): KANT, A Summary So Far

Beiser's summary of the purport of Kant’s analysis of the object of representation in the first edition version of the transcendental deduction comes to this. The object is not something already there, confronting the mind, which the mind then passively pictures or mirrors; it is rather the rule according to which a manifold is combined, the unity of a synthesis that makes the manifold count as one and the same something. Objects are rules. To say that a representation has an object is therefore to say that it stands under a rule of synthesis that fixes what further representations must be like if they are to count as representations of the same thing. There is no question of comparing a finished mental item with an independently given thing in order to see whether the two are similar, nor of the representation having determinate content in advance of its role in such a rule governed synthesis. This is why Kant is complicated because who would ever have thought of saying chairs and people are products of rules! Wow. 

Once this point is grasped the traditional picture behind the way of ideas begins to disintegrate. If there are no primitive ideas with intrinsic content which can simply be inspected and compared, then there is no sense in the notion that truth consists in the agreement of such ideas with their objects. What we call agreement is already a function of rules which tell us how to pass from one representation to another. It is not that we first possess isolated representations and then investigate whether they correspond to something beyond themselves, but that the very possibility of having a representation with cognitive purport presupposes that it stands in lawful connections with other representations, connections that are determined by the categories and the forms of intuition. The idea of a representation that would be fully formed and yet not already embedded in such a network is, for Kant, an empty abstraction.

In this way Beiser shows thow Kant undermines, at one stroke, the three central assumptions of the theory of ideas. He denies, first, that ideas are simply given, since behind every given there lies a prior synthesis of imagination and understanding which is not itself given but performed. He denies, second, that ideas have a self contained meaning, since the content of a representation is fixed only through its place in an ordered whole of possible judgments. And he denies, third, that the relation between representation and object is one of resemblance, since representation is nothing other than the holding of a rule, and the object nothing other than the unity of the rule’s possible applications. From this it follows that the familiar image of a veil of ideas separating us from things is itself a product of misunderstanding. The veil presupposes that there are, on the one side, mental items whose nature is independent of their role in cognition, and, on the other side, things whose nature is likewise independent, so that the problem arises how the former can resemble the latter. For Kant there is no such duality. However much he speaks, in the inherited jargon, of Vorstellungen, he does not regard them as ready made intermediaries standing between a subject and a world. Rather, the subject’s world is nothing over and above the totality of his possible experiences as determined by the forms of sensibility and the categories, and the notion of a representation with cognitive status is only intelligible within that world. Once we abstract from the rules of synthesis that constitute experience we are left, not with a residuum of bare ideas, but with nothing that could count even as a representation, let alone as an object of knowledge.

This is why Kant can at once accept and subvert the slogan that the objects of our awareness are nothing but representations. If this phrase is taken in the sense of the way of ideas it indeed leads straight to subjectivism, for it then means that what we are directly acquainted with are mental items whose reality and content can be grasped independently of any contribution of rules and forms, and to which an external world must somehow be added by hypothesis or inference. But if it is taken in Kant’s sense it has a very different force. It then means only that whatever counts as an object for us must be given in sensibility and thought through the understanding, that is, must be the result of a synthesis of representations in accordance with a priori conditions. There is nothing behind or beyond such conditions that could be compared with them; and therefore there is no room for the sceptical question whether they agree with an independent realm of things in themselves.

Nevertheless, as we saw, Kant often continues to use expressions which seem to belong to the older picture. He still speaks of appearances as a “species of representations” and he still defines inner experience as consciousness of “my representations” in time. In these formulations he appears to be taking over, without qualification, the Cartesian and Lockean conception of mental contents. It is not surprising, then, that readers schooled in the way of ideas should project their own assumptions into Kant’s vocabulary and interpret his transcendental idealism as a refined replay of Berkeley’s immaterialism. What they overlook is the extent to which the critical philosophy has transformed the underlying framework of these terms. The word remains, but the conceptual role has been altered so radically that it no longer supports the inferences that once attached to it.

Beiser says the same holds for Kant’s occasional talk of the “givenness” of intuitions. From Locke’s point of view an idea is present to the mind as something simple and immediate, whose nature is fully grasped in a single act of attention. Kant, by contrast, insists that even the simplest sensible content is possible for us only because the manifold of intuition has been successively taken up, reproduced and recognised under a concept. What appears as an immediate presence is, when analysed, the endpoint of a series of syntheses none of which are themselves objects of consciousness, although they are conditions of its possibility. In this sense the given is always already the product of an activity, even if that activity is not itself experienced. Beiser says that if we ask how far this transformation carries Kant beyond the subjectivist tradition, the answer must be that it does so more deeply than he himself sometimes realised. For the decisive move of the way of ideas lay, not simply in the claim that we are conscious of ideas, but in the claim that ideas can be described and individuated without reference to the rules according to which they function in thought. Once this claim is abandoned, the entire edifice built upon it crumbles. There is no longer a privileged standpoint of inner inspection from which we could first take stock of our mental furnishings and then ask whether they correspond to an outer reality; for the very distinction between inner and outer content presupposes the conceptual forms through which both are articulated. The possibility of scepticism concerning the external world depended upon our being able to make sense of a contrast between the way things are “in my ideas” and the way they are “in themselves”. But for Kant that contrast already involves an illicit application of the categories beyond the bounds of possible experience.

The upshot is that Kant’s relation to the way of ideas is one of partial loyalty and radical apostasy. He still describes cognition in terms of representations, and he still grants that for us everything that is an object must be present in consciousness under some form or other. In this respect his position can seem merely a refined variant of the old theory. Yet he simultaneously deprives that theory of its most essential presuppositions by showing that representation as such cannot be understood as a primitive relation between a mental item and a thing, but only as a function of synthesis according to a priori rules. The mind is not a repository of ideas but a power of combining, and it is from this power, not from any stock of materials antecedently in its possession, that both the content of experience and the very notion of an object derive. This double attitude explains why Kant can at times sound so close to Berkeley and at other times so distant from him. When he speaks in the language of the theory of ideas and emphasises that matter and bodies are “nothing but” appearances, that is, species of representations, he seems to echo the bishop’s maxim that being consists in being perceived. Yet when he develops his account of objective validity in the deduction and the analogies, he breaks decisively with the whole framework within which that maxim had its sense. For Berkeley the fundamental contrast was between ideas and spirits, passive contents and active perceivers; objects were simply complex ideas held together by relations of association. For Kant the fundamental contrast is between a mere succession of subjective states and an experience in which that succession is ordered in accordance with universal and necessary rules. The question whether there are things over and above ideas collapses into the question whether there can be a unity of experience, and this is answered not by metaphysical speculation but by an analysis of the conditions under which judgment is possible at all.It is in this shift of question and method that Kant’s break with subjectivism truly lies. Instead of beginning, as Descartes had recommended, with the certainty of inner awareness and then attempting to justify our belief in external things, Kant begins with the fact that we judge, that we take our representations to be objectively valid, and asks what must be presupposed if such judging is to be possible. Inner awareness itself, as the reputation of idealism shows, is then revealed to be no more immediate or self standing than outer awareness; both are equally dependent on the same synthetic forms. The subject can no longer be conceived as a self enclosed spectator peering at its own ideas. It must be understood as that which, through its original unity of apperception, grounds a single, intersubjectively sharable experience of objects in space and time.

If, despite all this, the vocabulary of the way of ideas persists throughout the critical writings, this is due not merely to historical inertia but also to the fact that Kant lacked a more adequate idiom. To describe cognition without speaking of representations would have required a conceptual revolution greater than even the critical philosophy could readily accomplish. Kant therefore contents himself with bending inherited terms to new purposes, trusting that their altered systematic role will prevent the old errors from reappearing. The history of his reception, beginning with the Göttingen review and continuing through many of his twentieth century interpreters, shows how optimistic this hope was. For those who read him through the spectacles of the way of ideas, the appearances that he declares to be “nothing but representations” can only be understood as Lockean ideas, and the transcendental conditions of experience as epistemic filters that stand between us and things in themselves. From such a standpoint it is almost inevitable to take transcendental idealism as a sophisticated form of subjectivism. Beiser says the remedy, however, does not lie in abandoning Kant’s talk of representations in favour of some allegedly more realistic idiom, but in following through the consequences of his own analysis of representation. Once we see that to represent is to stand under a rule, and that rules are possible only through the unity of apperception, we are compelled to abandon the image of an inner realm of objects, mental or otherwise, whose nature is fixed independently of their role in judgment. The subject is no longer a container of ideas but the source of the forms according to which anything can count as an object for it; and the world is not something lying behind a veil but the totality of what can be determined within those forms. In that sense Kant’s apparent adherence to the way of ideas is superficial, and his real allegiance belongs to a very different, and far less subjectivist, conception of mind and world.