Kant's Account of Intuition

Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Kant's Account of IntuitionAuthor(s): Lorne FalkensteinSource: Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Jun., 1991), pp. 165-193Published by: Canadian Journal of PhilosophyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40231741 .

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CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 165 Volume 21, Number 2, June 1991, pp. 165-193

Kant's Account of Intuition LORNE FALKENSTEIN The University of Western Ontario London, ON Canada N6A 3K7

Kant supposed that we possess two distinct cognitive capacities, which he referred to as 'intuition' (Anschauung) and 'understanding' or 'intellect' (Verstand)? This 'two-faculty account of cognition' lies at the foun- dation of his theoretical philosophy, and almost everything he has to say in the Critique of Pure Reason presupposes it. But it is also problematic. At the outset of the Critique Kant simply assumes the validity of the distinction, without in any way attempting to justify it.2 And one looks in vain through the Kantian corpus for any explanation that might legitimate it. To make matters worse, Kant does not always draw the distinction in the same way. Most notoriously, he presents two quite different accounts of intuition, defining it in some places as 'singular

1 In this paper I will use 'intellect' to translate 'Verstand' rather than the more common 'understanding/ I do this to preserve continuity between Kanfs Latin in his 'Inaugural Dissertation' and his German in the Critique of Pure Reason, as well as because 'intellect' permits convenient adjectival and adverbial constructions.

2 See A19=B33 and again at A50-2=B74-6, introductory passages where the distinctions are simply introduced without any attempt at justification. (References to Kanfs Critique of Pure Reason are to the pagination of the first and second original editions [Riga: Johann Friedrich Hartknoch 1781 and 1787], cited as 'A' and 'B'

respectively. References to Kant's other works are to the pagination of the Academy edition of his collected writings [Berlin: de Gruyter and predecessors 1900-], cited as 'Ak/ with volume in roman and page in arabic numerals, except in the cases where the section § or paragraph J numbers Kant himself supplied are more

specific. All translations from Kanfs German are my own. Those from his Latin follow G.B. Kerferd in Kant: Selected Pre-Critical Writings, G.B. Kerferd and D;E. Walford, trans. [Manchester: Manchester University Press 1968].)



166 Lome Falkenstein

representation' (A713=B741; Logic §6), in others as 'immediate cognition' (A19=B33).3

I believe that these problems arise from Kant's continued use of the vocabulary of scholastic faculty psychology in contexts where the meanings traditionally assigned to the terms can no longer apply.4 Kant used this vocabulary because it most accurately captured what he took to be the important features of human cognition,5 but the momentum of his argument forced different meanings onto the terms, though he himself was not always aware of it. As a result, he is sometimes deceived by his own language, and he applies traditional and revisionist meanings to the same term, often without realizing it, and often with confusing results.

My purpose in this paper is to clear up some of this confusion by giving an historical and strategic account of Kant's use of 'intuition' and 'intellect.' The account will be historical in the sense that it will pay careful attention to the traditional cognitive theory Kant adopted and to how his distinction between the faculties can be explicated and justified in the light of this tradition. It will be strategic because the forces which led Kant to unconsciously modify his meaning are internal to his thought, arising from the strategy he had to employ in order to achieve

3 There has been an extensive discussion of whether these two views are identical and, if not, which ought to be taken as primary. See, most notably, Jaakko Hintikka, 'On Kanf s Notion of Intuition (Anschauung)/ in T. Penelhum and J. Macintosh, eds., The First Critique: Reflections on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth 1969) 38-53; Charles Parsons, 'Kant's Philosophy of Arithmetic/ in S.

Morgenbesser, P. Suppes, and M. White, eds., Philosophy, Science, and Method (New York: St. Martin's 1969) 568-94; Manley Thompson, 'Singular Terms and Intuition in Kant/ Review of Metaphysics 26 (1972) 314-43; Kirk Dallas Wilson, 'Kant on Intuition/ Philosophical Quarterly 25 (1975) 247-65.

4 The point that Kanf s representation terminology has scholastic roots has been made before. See Giorgio Tonelli, 'Das Wiederaufleben der deutsch-aristotelischen

Terminologie bei Kant wahrend der Entstehung der "Kritik der reinen Vernunft/" Archiv fur Begriffsgeschichte 9 (1964) 233-42, and Norbert Hinske, 'Kants neue Ter-

minologie und ihre alten Quellen/ in Akten des 4 International Kant Congresses, pt. I (Kant-Studien 65 supp. [1974] 68-85, esp. 68-72.) Tonelli meant, and Hinske means, to date a deliberate but critical adoption by Kant of the traditional senses of Greek and Latin terms. The goal of this paper is to examine the degree to which the

meanings carried by this traditional terminology generated unnoticed tensions and inconsistencies in Kanf s thought, and the degree to which these tensions and inconsistencies led him to unconsciously modify those meanings.

5 Hinske, 70-2



Kant's Account of Intuition 167

certain goals - most notably that of proving that space and time have the peculiar status of 'forms of intuition/

My argument will be that Kant started out by understanding intuition in the same way that his scholastic predecessors had understood the 'lower' cognitive faculty: as a type of cognition dependent upon the exercise of the sense organs for its realization and delivering representations of particulars. But Kantian intuitions, in their mature instan- tiation, are to be understood differently: as arrays of raw data, immediately presented to the cognitive system for processing. His references to intuitions as singular representations will be shown to be throw-backs which were never fully excised from his mature philosophy and which are in fact inconsistent with some of its most fundamental tenets.

In what follows I will first summarize Kant's account of cognition as it was originally presented in his 'Inaugural Dissertation' of 1770 (here- after cited as 'ID'). I will show that his conception of intuitions as singular representations, which is quite evident in this pre-Critical work, has its roots in scholastic psychology. I will then show that certain features of Kant's argument, already incipient in ID, led him to abandon this traditional conception of the lower cognitive faculty in favour of a conception of intuitions as immediately given, unprocessed data. The direction of change in Kanf s thought, I will argue, is away from a conception of cognition rooted in a speculative physiology of the human sensory organs, towards what may be more appropriately described as an information theoretic account of the cognitive process.6

6 Those familiar with the companion piece to this paper (Kant's Account of Sensa-

tion/ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 20 [1990] 63-88) may find this a surprising claim in the light of the conclusion defended there, so I will add a word of explanation. The papers have appeared in the reverse order to the direction of Kanfs argument. 'Kanf s Account of Sensation' examined the consequences attendant upon his

postulating that space is a form of intuition. This paper will consider, among other

things, what justifies that postulate. Kanfs line of argument, that is, is from an information theoretic account of intuition which makes no physiological presup- positions to the claim that space is a form of intuition and from there to the conclusions of 'Kanfs Account of Sensation' - which do involve physiological claims.




I Kant's Theoretical Inheritance

In 1770, eleven years before the appearance of the Critique, Kant presented the dissertation, 'On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible Worlds/ in which he claimed that a careful separation of what is cognized through sense (sensus) from what is cognized by intellect (intellectus) could resolve a number of long-standing metaphysical problems. In making this recommendation Kant was going against the grain. At least since Descartes, who had argued that the soul is simple and without parts and has but a single faculty,7 the spirit of the time had been to unite, not separate, sense and intellect. In the generations after Descartes theorists in both the rationalist and empiricist camps advocated 'one faculty' theories of cognition - albeit in diametrically opposed fashions. Thus, Leibniz, Wolff, and Baumgarten treated all representation as the more or less clear or obscure, distinct or confused, apprehension of the specific differences (notae, Merkmale) distinguishing species from genera and individuals within species.8 Sensory representations were taken to differ from intellectual ones only in the greater degree of confusion (Verworrenheit) with which the collected differentiae were apprehended.9 Hume, Condillac, and Helvetius, on the other hand, treated all representations as more or less vivacious 'traces' left behind by past experience, or more or less complete replications of the content of such experience.10 The effect of the latter approach was to treat what

7 Rules for the Direction of the Mind XII (AT X 415-16); Meditations on First Philosophy VI (AT VII 85-6); Passions of the Soul 1 47 (AT XI 364-5); correspondence with Mersenne, 16 October 1639 (AT II 598). (References to Descartes are to Oeuvres de Descartes, Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, eds., 12 vols. [Paris: Cerf 1897-1913; revised ed. Paris: Vrin/CNRS 1964-76] cited as 'AT with volume in roman and page in arabic numerals.)

8 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 'Meditationes de Cognitione, Veritate, et Ideis' (Acta Eruditorium Leipzig, November 1684), in C.I. Gerhardt, ed., Die Philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, vol. 4 (reprint ed. Hildesheim: Olms 1960) 422-6; Christian Wolff, Philosophia Rationalis sive Logicae, 3rd ed. (Frankfurt: 1740), §§77-89 of the main text (facsimile in Christian Wolff, Gesammelte Werke, 2nd series, vol. 1 .2 [Hildesheim: Olms 1983]); Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Metaphysica, 3rd ed. (Halle: Carol, Herman, Hemmerde 1757), §§504-33; reprinted in Ak XV 5-13 and in Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Texte zur Grundlegung der Aesthetik, Hans Rudolf Schweizer, ed. and trans. (Hamburg: Meiner 1983) 2-17.

9 Baumgarten, §§521-2

10 David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (originally published in 1748 under the title Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding), section 2; Etienne Bonnot, Abbe de Condillac, Essai sur Vorigine des connaissances humaines




had previously been defined as intellectual representations as (vaguer, fainter) sensory phenomena, just as the effect of the former was to analyse sensory phenomena in a way which had been previously taken to characterize just intellectual representations; thus Kanf s famous remark in the Amphibolies (A271=B237), that Leibniz had intellectual- ized all appearances whereas the empiricists (in the name of Locke) had sensualized them.

In ID Kant rejected both approaches (the former explicitly11), and advocated what at the time can only have seemed an outmoded and regressive two-faculty theory. The motive for Kant's move is not difficult to discern from the text of ID: he was bothered by the paradoxes of the continuum. The paradoxes appeared to demonstrate a fundamental incoherence in the concepts of continuity and infinity - concepts on which both Leibnizian metaphysics and Newtonian mathematical natural science (via the calculus) were based. But Kant thought he had found a solution. Paradoxes such as Zeno's emerge when the composite in space and time is subjected to an infinite analysis. But Kant noted that it is really only reason (which Kant conflates in ID §3 with intellect) which demands that what is thought as composite be subjected to a thorough-going analysis. It is not a demand of sense that what is observed to be extended in space or time be divisible into easily distin- guishable parts, or that what appears simple and indivisible from a distance should continue to appear so upon closer inspection. Were it the case that the sensible is distinct from the intelligible - so distinct, in fact, that by the two faculties of sense and intellect we really cognize two radically distinct worlds - then the solution to the paradoxes would be simple. We need only prove that space and time and everything in them are components of the sensible world, and as such cannot legitimately be subjected to the sort of infinite analysis an intellectual cognition posits when it considers a continuum as a composite of parts. Kant trumpets this proposed solution twice in the opening sections of ID (§§1 and 2(111) - Ak II 388-9, 391-2), and the way he does so makes it clear that the whole purpose of the ensuing dissertation, with its talk of worlds and sensible forms and intelligible principles, is primarily to explain and demonstrate it.

(Amsterdam: P. Mortier 1746), part 1, section 2, esp. H74; C.A. Helvetius, De I'esprit (Paris: Durand 1758), essay 1, chapter 1.

11 See ID §7. Kant was always more vociferous in his opposition to the Leibnizian direction than to the empiricist. See, for instance, A43-5=B60-2, A264=B320, and Ak VIII 218.




But while the motive for Kant's advocacy of a two-faculty theory of cognition is clear from the text of ID, neither the nature of the distinction nor the grounds for it are. Kant spoke of the sense /intellect distinction with the sort of confident neglect of detail and definition that can only be assumed by someone who takes it that his audience is already thoroughly versed in the terms he is using. He had every right to do this, because the distinction between sense and intellect was not his invention. It had been articulated by Aristotle, in his discussion of the cognitive functions of cuo9r|ai<; and vofiq (De Anima 427b7- 15), and since then it had figured prominently in scholastic accounts of cognition.12

Because Kant himself does not do so, it is worthwhile pausing to outline briefly the tenets of this traditional theory. It postulated that the lower cognitive function, aio©r|oig or sense, is a physiological capacity exercised by certain organs within the body of the perceiver. These organs were supposed to be such that their matter could be imprinted with the forms of external objects, in much the same way that wax is imprinted by a seal (though the imprint on the senses conveys more than just spatial form). The product of this imprinting, called the 'phantasm' or 'image' (((xxviocaioc) was a replica of the external object. In fact, it was the external object, or, more precisely, it was the form of the external object, taken to exist simultaneously both in external matter and in the matter of the sense organ.

But the process of perception, thus described, only accounts for the acquisition of the forms of contingent, material particulars by the perceiver, and our knowledge extends to other things: to essences, to universals, and even (for the medievals) to necessary beings. To account for our ability to know about such things, a cognitive capacity capable of extracting the universal from the particulars delivered by sense had to be postulated. Such a function, Aristotle and the scholastics supposed, could not be achieved by a physiological mechanism, which could at most divide or combine material phantasms to produce other material phantasms. Accordingly, the second, 'higher' cognitive function was

12 Z. Kuksewicz, 'The Potential and the Agent Intellect/ and Edward P. Mahoney, 'Sense, Intellect, and Imagination in Albert, Thomas, and Siger/ in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1982) 595-601 and 602-22. Given his immediate philosophical environment, Kant would have been especially disposed to employ unexplained terminology from antiquity and the middle ages. Konigsberg had always been a stronghold of Aristotelianism (Max Wundt, Die deutsche Schulphilosophie im Zeitalter der Aufklarung [Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1945; reprint ed. Hildesheim: Olms 1964], 117-20.




taken to be a function of mind or intellect, not exercised through physical organs. For Aristotle and the scholastics, then, sense was a physiological cognitive function, and intellect a psychical one. Sense operated by receiving phantasms, and intellect by abstracting the universal from the material particulars delivered by sense; the objects of sense were contingent, material particulars, whereas those of intellect were universals and essences.13

Kant's adherence to at least the general outlines of this traditional view of the cognitive functions is evident from §1 of ID onwards, where he claims that the concept of a composite has a two-fold origin in the mind (namely in sense and in intellect), and where he describes the products of intellect as 'abstract/ 'general,' and 'universal,' in contrast to those of sense, which are 'concrete/ It is also evident in §3, where the distinction between sensitivity and intellect is drawn with reference to the subject's senses, intellect being a power to represent things 'which cannot by their own quality come before the senses of that subject.'

But Kant's agreement with the traditional attribution of a power of extracting universals to intellect is perhaps nowhere as clear as in his doctrine of the discursivity of intellect. Here, too, Kant adopts a distinction made by his predecessors (that between intuition and discursion) without a word of explanation. 'Discursion' comes from 'discourse/ and according to scholastic theory a discursive cognition is one which requires (mental) discourse, that is, the drawing of a conclusion, not immediately evident to the mind, by a process of reasoning. Discourse, therefore, has stages and it takes time.14 Intuitive knowledge is the opposite - it occurs immediately. Whereas all God's knowledge was supposed to be intuitive, human beings were supposed to be too limited to grasp the wealth of information involved in most knowledge claims. Thus, human intellectual knowledge was taken to be largely discursive.

Kant adhered to the doctrine of the discursivity of the human intellect more stringently than his predecessors - for him, the human intellect is exclusively discursive; in principle, it is incapable of an intuitive cognition. This doctrine was a constant of his philosophy, figuring in ID (§10), in the Critique (A230=B283), in Prolegomena §46 (Ak IV 333), and given its fullest exposition in §§1-16 of his lectures on logic (Ak IX 91-100), published only a few years before his death. According to Kant's

13 These points are made repeatedly by both Kuksewicz and Mahoney.

14 John F. Boler, 'Intuitive and Abstractive Cognition/ The Cambridge History, 460-78;

John Marenbon, Later Medieval Philosophy 1150-1350 (London: Routledge 1987), 118-21




version of the discursivity doctrine, intellect is essentially a classif icatory function. Rather than represent objects as such, it reflects on representations obtained from elsewhere and from these it infers or extracts (this is where the 'discursion' comes in) specific differentiae (notae, Merkmale). Concepts (Begriffe), Kant's name for the representations intellect delivers, are just more or less adequately presented collections of differentiae. Whatever these differentiae may be, Kant's references to them make clear that a number of separate sensory experiences may all exhibit the same specific difference, so that the difference serves as the definition of a species, collecting a whole class of representations of objects which share this difference, under it. The more differentiae there are thought in a concept, the narrower the extension of that concept. But Kant maintains that it is impossible for intellect to enumerate all the differentiae to be found in any concrete particular (there are just too many). There can be, as he puts it, no lowest species' (Logic §11) - no collection of differentiae complete enough to define a concrete particular. It may turn out that a certain collection of differentiae is in fact satisfied by only one object, but it is always at least in principle possible that there could be a whole collection of objects satisfying these differentiae but differing from one another with respect to their satisfaction of other differentiae not yet enumerated. Thus, though intellectual representations may be used to pick out single objects, they always have inherent generality (Logic §1). Only sense, therefore, can truly represent the particular; intellect, at least the human intellect, is constitutionally incapable of representing the infinite number of differentiae necessary to denote a truly singular representation. Thus, for the Kant of ID even more so than for the scholastics, intellect is to be defined as the capacity to represent universals; sense as the capacity to represent particulars.

II A Subversive Element

Though Kant views the sense/intellect distinction in the traditional way in ID, there is one aspect of his position which is potentially subversive. In ID §3 he separates the faculties from one another by denominating the one 'receptive/ and the other 'facilitative':

[Sensitivity] is the receptivity of a subject by which it is possible for the subject's own representative state to be affected in a definite way by the presence of some object. Intelligence (rationality) is the faculty of a subject by which it has the power to

represent things which cannot by their own quality come before the senses of that

subject.




Though there are hints of this distinction in the Thomistic separation of agent and patient intellects, the receptivity /spontaneity distinction is destined to become the locus of a radical break with tradition in Kant's later thought. For while the tradition did indeed take sense (notably the five 'outer' senses) to be acquisitive, receiving impressions from external-world objects, it also took sense (notably certain 'inner' senses) to be facilitative or productive. For the tradition, phantasms are not given, but created by a particular function of inner sense, the common sense, which has to first combine the particular impressions delivered by the outer senses before a phantasm can emerge. Furthermore, both Aristotle and the scholastics postulated a certain power to alter phantasms and even to produce new phantasms out of the bits and pieces of others which had been given. This power, imagination, was represented not as a function of intellect, but as a special function of inner sense, exercised by physiological mechanisms. Otherwise put, the peculiar function of human intellect was, on the traditional view, limited to extraction; the functions of combination and recombination were assigned to sense.

However, while the subversive receptivity/spontaneity distinction is stated by Kant in §3 of ID, it serves as no more than a signpost of impending changes. In ID nothing is made of the distinction, and it is in fact flatly contradicted almost immediately. According to ID §§3-4, appearances arise from two sensory processes. The first is the receptive process. Objects in the outside world act on the subject, and because certain parts of the subject (its sense organs) are 'receptive' to this activity, they have an effect on the subject's representative state.

But receptivity as so far described only yields sensory data. And Kant maintains that in addition to the data, or what he calls the matter of sense, sensitivity delivers awareness of a form or manner of arrangement in which the data are presented. This form, however, is no product of the objects themselves. '[O]bjects/ says Kant in ID, 'do not strike the senses in virtue of their form or specificity' (§4). Sensory data are instead 'co-ordinated by a certain natural law of the mind' (ID §4). As Kant describes it, this is an act performed by the mind, not a datum received by it.

In ID, therefore, despite the lip-service Kant pays to it, there is no distinction to be drawn between sense and intellect in terms of receptivity and spontaneity. In ID sense is facilitative as well as receptive and, as on the traditional account, combination of the matters delivered by sense (via the act of co-ordination) is still seen as a sensory and not an intellectual process.




III The Argument of ID

So far, I have argued that Kant's position on the nature of the cognitive faculties in ID is broadly in accord with the scholastic tradition and that he fails to follow through on the one point of deviation from this tradition. I will now consider how the account of the faculties figures in his argument, and I will show that it is only insofar as Kant adheres to the tradition that he is able to sustain his position. This conclusion will be a philosophical rather than an historical one: that the traditional conception of the faculties is in fact required to sustain Kant's position in ID, not that Kant realized this requirement. As will be seen, Kant commits a serious blunder in ID precisely because he fails, at a crucial juncture, to carry through with the traditional account.

I remarked above that Kant's major thesis in ID was that all the problems of philosophy and metaphysics could be solved by carefully distinguishing what we know of the sensible world from what we know of the intelligible, and by not subjecting knowledge of the one world to the forms or principles of the other. Chief among the problems Kant claimed to be able to solve was that of the paradoxes of the continuum, a conundrum which he eliminated by claiming that space, time, and all the things in them are forms only of the sensible world, not of the intelligible.

However, to sustain this solution Kant had to argue that space and time do indeed pertain only to the sensible world. This was not an obvious or trivial point. Kant had to contend with a Cartesian tradition which took mathematics and geometry to be paradigms of intellectual knowledge (insofar as Descartes was willing to distinguish intellect from sense at all).15 He had to contend with a contingent of Newtonian natural scientists, such as Leonhard Euler, who took space to be a real thing and no mere appearance of sense.16 And he had to contend even with a Leibnizian tradition which, though it took space and time to be sensory phenomena, also supposed that these phenomena were not independent forms of the sensible world, but were in fact determined by the internal properties of the monads, of which they were merely

15 Meditations VI (AT VII 72-3).

16 Leonhard Euler, 'Reflexions sur l'espace et le temps/ Memoires de I'academie des sciences de Berlin, 4 (1750) 324-33 (reprinted in Leonhardi Euleri, Opera Omnia, 3rd series, vol. 2 [Berlin: B.G. Teubner 1942] 376-83). Kant specifically mentions this treatise in his 1768 paper on the differentiation of regions in space (Ak II 378).



Kant's Account of Intuition 1 75

confused perceptions.17 Kant may have been able to rely on tradition for an explanation of the nature of the faculties, but given this sort of opposition, his identification of space and time as forms only of the sensible world could not pass without argument.

What makes this argument all the more crucial is that Kant failed to justify his adoption of the traditional, two-faculty account of cognition. (Unless we take the resulting solution to the paradoxes of the continuum as a justification.) Insofar as the two-faculty account has any basis in Kant's work, therefore, it is only via the thesis that space and time are forms only of a sensory, as opposed to an intellectual, cognition. Thus it was not merely Cartesian epistemology of mathematics, Newtonian natural science, or Leibnizian metaphysics which stood in opposition to Kant's claims in ID, but the one-faculty cognitive theories of Leibniz, Wolff, and Baumgarten on the one hand, and of Hume, Condillac, and Helvetius on the other. The answer to all these opponents was the same: a demonstration that space and time are forms only of the sensible world. This demonstration forms the centerpiece of ID.

The demonstration occurs in what is in fact the middle of the dissertation: Part III. There Kant proposed to show that there are two 'formal principles of the phenomenal universe, absolutely primary, catholic and moreover as it were schemata and conditions of anything sensitive in human cognition ... namely space and time' (ID §13).

Part III consists of three sections: §13 which is introductory; §14 on time; and §15 on space. Each of the latter sections is divided into subsections which, for some very mysterious reason, are assigned numbers in §14 but letters in §15. Though there are seven numbers in §14 and five letters in §15, they do not all contribute to the demonstration. The conclusion that time is a 'pure intuition'18 is drawn at the outset of §14

17 This is how Kant understood the Leibniz- Wolf fian position - witness ID §7 and A43-5=B60-2.

18 Why a 'pure intuition' rather than a form of the sensible world? As I go on to show in the next paragraph, it is really the latter which follows. That space and time should be 'intuitions' in the sense of intuitive - as opposed to discursive -

cognitions does not follow, at least not from the bare fact that they are singular; for there is no prima facie reason why singular objects could not be discursively cognized. What we have here are the beginnings of a slippage in terminology, which is to become ever more severe as time goes on. Because Kant is already convinced that an intuitive intellection is impossible for human beings, he comes to equate 'intuition' with 'sense/ Thus, in his later work, the two faculties are not named sense and intellect, but intuition and intellect - an opposition which, from the traditional point of view, is as skewed as would be opposing the analytic with the a posteriori, or the bright with the wet. Use of 'intuition' rather than 'sense' does




13, as a conclusion from HI and 2, and 1C for space similarly states the conclusion as a consequence of HA and B. The remaining paragraphs contain the elucidation of subsidiary principles (continuity for time, geometry for space), remarks on the errors of Kanfs predecessors, and notes on implications and advantages of the theory. Thus, the basic argument is given in the first two paragraphs of each section.

Kanfs method in each of these pairs of paragraphs is quite systematic. In the first paragraph of each pair he argues that we do not have sensations of time and space, but that all our sensations presuppose time and space (in the sense that they are originally presented to us one after another in time and displayed alongside one another in space). In the second paragraph of each set he argues that time and space are not known by intellect. From these points, the conclusion that space and time must be forms of the sensible world follows immediately. Since all our sensations are in fact arrayed in space and time, it follows that space and time must be orders of sensations, and since these orders are not infused by intellect they must be products of sense itself. But since these products of sense are not due to sensation, the matter of sense, it only remains that they pertain to a further, special element of sense, a form distinct both from sensed matter (sensation) and from all form invented by intellect.

The adequacy of the arguments Kant offers for these separate points need not concern us here. But the underlying strategy, particularly the strategy of the second argument in each pair, where Kant tries to prove that space and time are not intellectual representations, must be of concern. To make his point, Kant needs to show that there is something about space and time which renders them in principle incapable of intellectual representation. It is here that Kant's understanding of the nature of the distinction between sense and intellect comes to be of vital importance. For some conception of what intellect is, how it works, and how it differs from sense must be invoked in the argument.

The claims Kant makes about time and space in §14 12 and §15 IB appeal to the scholastic distinction between the faculties: intellect is represented as a faculty restricted to the abstraction of universals, and sense represented as a faculty delivering cognition of particulars or, as Kant puts it here, singular objects. Thus, all the little points made in §14 12 go to prove singularity: (1) Time is singular because all different times are parts of one underlying time which connects them all. (2) Time is singular because one time cannot be distinguished from

have one major advantage, though: it allows Kant to talk about 'a priori' intuitions without giving the immediate appearance of uttering a contradiction in terms.




another by means of any identifiable specific difference (per notas aliquas intellectui conceptibiles), that is, by any universal abstractable by intellect, but only by 'a singular intuition' (per intuitum singularem). Finally, (3) were time a universal it would be a specific difference which a number of things could have in common (like being red or loud or sharp). It would define a species or a genus and the various earlier and later or longer and shorter times would pick out subspecies. But time intervals are not related to one another taxonomically, but mereologically. They are not under time, as a more specific concept is under a more generic, but in it, as a part is in a picture. And because all the various times are in time, they make up one time, not a scattered collection of times with no more than a principle of resemblance to connect them. Similar points hold for space.

However, even assuming that these claims are defensible, they give only an historical, not a philosophical answer to the question. Granting that Kant accepted a tradition which encouraged the equation of sensory experience with singular representation, we may still wonder what justifies this equation. Why should we suppose that intellect is incapable of forming singular representations or, as Kant would put it, of descending to the lowest species?

The answer Kant ought to have given to this question is the one his tradition supplied for him: that sense, being a physiological function of the human body delivering only material particulars, is inadequate to account for our cognition of universals and that for this purpose a second cognitive faculty must be postulated. This faculty, intellect, being by definition the faculty for abstracting universals from the concrete phantasms delivered by the physical sensory apparatus, has products which are abstract and general by their very nature, and it can approach a cognition of the particular only by thinking an increas- ingly large set of differentiae. Given that any particular contains an infinitely rich variety of abstractable differentiae, only an infinite spirit, not finite minds such as ourselves, could form intellectual representations adequate to particulars.

However, this is not the answer Kant in fact gives. He attempts to explain why intellect cannot represent concrete singular objects in §10 of ID - a few pages before he argues that space and time are the forms of the sensible world. The answer is nothing less than an acute embarrassment:




There is not given (to [human beings]) an intuition of things intellectual, but only a

symbolic cognition,19 and intellection is only allowable for us through universal

concepts in the abstract and not through a singular concept in the concrete. For all our intuition is bound to a certain principle of form under which form alone can

something be discerned by the mind immediately or as singular, and not merely conceived discursively through general concepts. But this formal principle of our intuition (namely space and time) is the condition under which something can be the object of our senses, and so, as the condition of sensitive cognition, it is not a means to intellectual intuition.

We are not capable of having intellectual intuitions or of intellectually conceptualizing singular objects, Kant tells us, because our cognition of singular objects is bound to the conditions of space and time, which apply only to sensory experience. But the point that the conditions of space and time apply only to sensory and not to intellectual experience is precisely what is in question three pages later in §14 12, where Kant blithely 'proves' that time is not a form of the intelligible world by appealing to the claim that intellect cannot represent singular objects. Thus, the argument ends up moving in a circle.

It is not clear why Kant makes this blunder. He may have been relying on the traditional conception throughout, expecting that his readers would take that conception to justify the exclusive universality of intellectual representations in §§14 and 15 and that §§14 and 15 would in turn justify the claims about the non-spatiotemporality of intellectual representations in §10. This would be the most charitable reading. But, alternatively, he might have had some reason for wanting to retreat from the explicit physiologizing of sense that the traditional conception in- vokes to justify intellect's role. He might have felt, for instance, that ID,

19 Kant here opposes intuitive cognition to symbolic, rather than discursive, cognition. This distinction originated with Leibniz, 423, and it later found its way into the entry under 'Anschauung' in Johann Christoph Adelung's Grammatisch-Kritisches Woter- buch der Hochdeutschen Mundart (Leipzig: J.G.I. Breitkopf 1793-1801; facsimile edition Hildesheim: Olms 1970), where it played a crucial role in the definition. Because Adelung's definition has been frequently cited as evidence for Kant's

understanding of intuition, it is important to note that, as a matter of fact, Kant

explicitly rejected the intuitive/symbolic distinction: 'It is a contrary and incorrect use of the word symbolic to contrast symbolic with intuitive modes of representation (as the new logicians have done). For the symbolic is properly a species of the intuitive' (Ak V 351 - I am indebted to Brigitte Sassen for drawing this passage to

my attention). This remark is made only in the Critique of Judgement (1790), and it

may be that Kant had not yet accepted it at the time of writing ID. But it is also

possible that in ID he is merely trying to get his point across in the terms is audience would have been most familiar with.




since it was ostensibly a propadeutic to the science of metaphysics (ID §8), ought not to rest on premises garnered from empirical observation of the human body and its workings.

If this was indeed Kant's concern, then it must have been redoubled for him when he came to write the Critique. The Critique is supposed to provide a justification of the very possibility of empirical knowledge and a theory of the possibility of empirical knowledge cannot rest on an empirical theory of the functions of the sense organs. But insofar as Kant's argument in ID has any cogency, it is only insofar as it relies on the traditional physiological account of human sensory experience. If this account is rejected, then how avoid the circularity in proving that space and time cannot be represented by intellect?

This, however, is only one of the problems to emerge with Kant's argument when it is transferred to the Critique.

IV Strategic Difficulties

Kant's 'Inaugural Dissertation' and his Critique of Pure Reason are two very contrary works. The former draws such a sharp distinction between sense and intellect that it splits the cognized world in two. In denying that the forms and principles of the sensible world have any application with reference to the products of the intellect, it sets out to save the pretences of pure intellect to deliver knowledge of things as they are in themselves and refute the sceptical attacks drawn from the paradoxes of the continuum. But the Critique affirms the opposite of this two- worlds theory: that 'neither concepts without intuitions in some way corresponding to them nor intuitions without concepts can provide a cognition' of an object (A50=B74). And far from securing the field for pure intellect by denying the admission of sensible principles, it affirms that intellectual categories and functions may be legitimately employed only with reference to sense. The dogmatic pretences of intellect must be systematically critiqued and exploded, and all hopes to gain knowledge of a second, intelligible world must be abandoned.

Nonetheless, in the first part of the Critique, the Transcendental Aes- thetic, Kant still maintains that sense and intellect are two distinct sources of knowledge and he is still concerned to prove that space and time are forms of sense. But his revised position on the relation of sense (which the Critique now calls 'sensitivity' [Sinnlichkeit], 'sense intuition,' or just 'intuition') and intellect makes the strategy used to prove this point in ID unusable. Recall that this strategy was to exhibit some feature in our representations of space and time which intellect is supposed to be incapable of presenting. We may wonder about how successfully Kant was able to give this exhibition, but in ID it was at least possible to




propose such a project, for in ID sensitivity was taken to be able to deliver a cognition of objects on its own, independently of any recourse to intellect. Thus, in ID, the only problem was to uncover the special characteristic distinguishing a sensible from an intellectual cognition and then to demonstrate that space and time possess this characteristic.

But the Critique cannot allow this. Though in the Critique Kant still believes that the faculties are separate, he no longer believes that either is able to deliver a knowledge of objects when employed on its own. Just as there can be no knowledge gained by employing pure intellectual concepts outside of the field of experience, so there can be no raw intuitive knowledge, obtained prior to all application of the concepts.

The main reason for this is that in the Critique Kant takes combination, and not just abstraction, to be a function exercised by the intellectual faculty (B129-30, A77-8=B103). He was led to this view by his efforts to provide a transcendental deduction of the categories, but in formulating it he makes a radical departure from the traditional conception of the faculties. He elevates the combination (or, as he more frequently terms it, 'synthesis') traditionally carried out by the inner sense organs of common sense and imagination into a function of intellect, carried out in accord with the categories.20 Imagination (Einbildungskraft) still figures in Kant's account, but in the Critique it is the name of a function of intellect, not a function of inner sense (B129-30, B150-52).

Thus for Kant the cognition of particulars, no less than that of abstract or general representations, requires intellect. Apart from intellectual

processing, appearances may indeed be given to us in intuition (A90=B122), but such appearances are 'for us as good as nothing' (Alll)

20 To forestall difficulties, a remark on what combination or figurative synthesis entails may be in order. One can conceive of the act of assembling the pieces of a

jigsaw puzzle as a type of combination, and this is likely the example which comes most readily to mind. But there is another, more subtle sense of combination. Consider the example of a child's game book, where drawings are presented in which objects are cleverly camouflaged: a knife, for example, outlined in the bark of a tree; or a train in its leaves. The act of discovering the concealed object in the more readily apparent objects is itself a kind of combination - only here the combination involved is not a co-ordination of parts in space, but simply a recog- nition that the parts, which are already co-ordinated in space, may be 'combined' in the representation of the hidden object. It is this sense of synthesis or combination, the combination of a variety already arrayed in space and time into the representation of a single object, which is the primary sense of 'combination' for the Transcendental Deduction. Nothing that is said either here or in what follows should therefore be taken as implying that spatial or temporal order is originally created by intellect, through co-ordinative acts.




- it is only when the manifold presented in the intuition has been run through and connected in accord with concepts that any representation - even a singular representation - is cognized (All 6, Bl 37-38).

This destabilizes Kant's argument about space and time. If intuition cannot provide a cognition of objects prior to being synthesized in an intellectual representation (let us call this the blindness thesis) then how can we say anything about what intuitions may be like prior to all conceptualization? How, indeed, can we even be sure that intuitions exist?

Given these difficulties, it might seem that Kant would be better off without blindness, but it is not a thesis which he could easily abandon. One has only to consider the notion, central to the Transcendental Deduction, that cognition requires bringing whatever is distinct or discrete or various in experience to a unity of apperception. Combining this with the thesis that intuition presents a collection of distinct matters arrayed in space and time (a 'manifold') at once yields a proof of the necessity of synthesis under the categories (which just are the functions whereby a variety is brought to a unity of apperception) before whatever is intuited can be cognized. But a corollary of the main premise is that without synthesis in accord with the categories, that is, without bringing intellectual concepts to intuitions, there is no unity of apperception, and hence no cognition. Thus blindness cannot be abandoned without un- dermining the proof-structure of the Transcendental Deduction.

It is suspicious that the blindness thesis is stated only at the outset of the Transcendental Analytic, after Kant has proven that space and time are forms of intuition in the Transcendental Aesthetic. The thesis crops up just when it is needed for the Transcendental Deduction, but not earlier, where it would have posed serious questions about the adequacy of Kanf s arguments for identifying space and time as forms of intuition. It is almost as if Kant wrote the Transcendental Aesthetic without realizing that he was committed to the blindness thesis. Thus, at the outset of the Aesthetic, he blithely describes his methodology for the coming pages as follows:

In the Transcendental Aesthetic, then, sensitivity will first be isolated in order to set aside everything which intellect, in passing, thinks through its concepts, so that

nothing but empirical intuition will remain. Secondly, everything in empirical intuition which belongs to sensation will also be removed in order that nothing but

pure intuition and the mere form of appearances will remain - this is the only thing that sensitivity can deliver a priori. This investigation will reveal that there are two

pure forms of sense intuition [serving] as principles of a priori cognition, namely, space and time. [A22=B36]

This project is hopeless. Even if Kant could succeed in removing everything intellect thinks through its concepts from experience, he




would be left with something which, according to blindness, would not be an object of knowledge.

This blindness to the blindness thesis at least appears to infect Kant's subsequent arguments as well. In the immediately following pages of the Transcendental Aesthetic, in what he calls the Metaphysical Exposi- tions of the concepts of space and time, Kant sets out to prove that space and time are forms of intuition, and his arguments on this score at first seem to be no more than a repeat of §§14 and 15 of ID. The same arguments occur in much the same order, and they seem to be directed to proving the same point: that we have some sort of intuition of space and time prior to all conceptualization, and that we can know this because space and time have some special feature which intellect cannot represent. How we can know that space and time even have this feature, if intellect cannot represent it and intuitions without concepts are blind, is not explained; neither is what entitles us to suppose that the feature cannot be intellectually represented.

Consider the following examples: at A31-2=B47 Kant claims that time must be an intuition because different times are only parts of one and the same time and because intuition is that representation which can only be given through a singular object. The argument apparently is that, because there is really only one time, it cannot be represented intellectually. But this argument comes to nothing, given the blindness thesis. If blindness is correct, there can be no cognition of singular objects independently of intellectual synthesis. So if time, or the different parts of time, are not intellectually represented, we cannot say anything about them; in particular, we cannot say anything about their singularity. But if they are intellectually represented, if we do have concepts of time or times, then these very concepts falsify Kant's claim that all our intellectual representations must, in principle, be general - either that, or Kant must admit that time is not singular.

At A32=B48 Kant tells us that with intuitions, the whole precedes the parts; whereas with concepts, the parts precede the whole (according to A), or perhaps there just are parts (according to B). Because the parts of time are only created through drawing boundaries within the whole, and therefore the whole of time must be given first, it is supposed to follow that time is an intuition and not a concept. But even granting that with time the whole precedes the parts (which is granting a great deal), either the whole of time that precedes the parts is intellectually represented - in which case it is false that with all our intellectual representations the parts precede or fail to give the whole - or the whole of time is not intellectually represented - in which case, according to blindness, we cannot know anything about it, including that it is a whole within which we may define boundaries.




Finally, at A25 Kant tells us that concepts of relations can only represent infinity by referring to an unboundedness in the progress of intuition. At B40 he tells us that even if concepts can represent infinity independently of reference to the progress of intuition, they do so only by containing an infinite number of possible representations under them (presumably, he is thinking here of differentiae contained under a genus), whereas intuitions contain an infinity in them, as parts. Since infinity is supposed to pertain to space (A), or pertain to it in the appropriate way (B), we are apparently supposed to draw the conclusion that the original representation of space is an intuition, and not an intellectual representation. But again the dilemma posed by blindness arises: if all that we do is intuit the space, then because intuitions are blind we cannot know anything about it, including whether it has any parts at all. But if we do succeed in bringing infinite space to consciousness, then our representation is intellectual, and it exhibits precisely that feature which Kant seems to be denying to intellectual representations.21

In all of these cases Kant comes to grief because, apparently, he has not revised the proof-strategy employed in ID in any way that could meet the challenge of blindness. Nor is it simply Kant who comes to grief here. Many of Kanfs commentators have proposed one or other of these features as defining the distinction between intuitive and intellectual representations. Thus, Hintikka has proposed that for Kant the singularity criterion is what really marks off the two classes of representation, and Kirk Wilson has clearly and cleverly worked up Kanfs remarks on part-whole priority into a distinction drawn in terms of mereological and set-theoretical relations of membership.22 There are serious strategic difficulties with such moves. First, they are inconsistent with the devel-

21 Karen Gloy's recent attempt to defend Kanfs position ('Die Kantische Differenz von Begriff und Anschauung und ihre Begriindung/ Kant-Studien 75 [1984] 1-37) is vulnerable to the same criticisms. According to her, Kanfs separation of intuition from intellect is really justified by the case of incongruent counterparts, which is

supposed to prove that space cannot be intellectually represented. Aside from being historically implausible (Kanfs references to incongruent counterparts appear as an appendix or an after-thought when they appear - which they do not do at all in the Critique) and in principle inadequate (incongruent counterparts only prove the case for space, not time), Gloy's defence simply begs the question. Why should we suppose that the distinction between right and left cannot be represented by any concept? At the very least, what is called for here is (1) an account of what it means to cognize conceptually, and (2) an explanation of why this account should be

supposed to be correct. Gloy supplies neither.

22 Hintikka, 42-3; Wilson, 252-6




opment of Kant's views on the blindness of intuition and the necessity of intellectual synthesis for cognition. These views entail that even the perception of singular objects or mereological wholes must already involve synthesis under the categories and so cannot be non-intellectual. Second, such criteria are disastrous for Kant's project in the Transcen- dental Aesthetic. Kant wants to prove that space and time are forms of intuition. Giving this proof entails explaining why certain features of space and time, such as their singularity or their mereological structure, could not be rendered by intellect. Simply defining intuitions as representations which exhibit these features, and intellections as representations which do not, trivializes the whole project. Kant might in fact have good reason for separating intuitive from intellectual representations in this way. But given blindness, much would have to be said to justify such criteria. They could not, therefore, be simply defined as the original or fundamental grounds of distinction between the representations delivered by the faculties.

In ID Kant's argument was open merely to the charge of a possible circularity. But if he intended to use the same argument in the Critique, then it is not just circular; it is incoherent.

V The Distinction between the Faculties in the Critique

There is a popular view that the Transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique is merely a slightly revised version of Parts II and III of ID, incongruously tagged onto the rest of the work.23 In light of what has been said in the previous section, this assessment may not appear at all illegitimate. Nonetheless, I have been careful in the preceding section to qualify the description of Kant's argument with words like 'seems' and 'appears.' I have done this because I think some question can be raised whether Kant in fact intended his argument in the Critique to be understood along the same lines he had presented earlier in ID. There are differences between ID and the Critique which extend beyond his account of intellect, to his account of sense. In what follows I will draw from these differences an alternative reading of Kanf s arguments for identifying space and time as forms of intuition.

23 For a specimen of this view see Ralph C.S. Walker, Kant (London: Routledge 1978), 12.




Kant's blindness thesis, which sets such barriers in the way of identifying any particular representation as intuitive rather than intellectual, also forces a distinction between the functions that deliver these representations. Note that in accord with the blindness thesis, intuition isolated from intellection is not nothing. Kant supposes that we still have some (confused) experience in intuition (A89-91=B122-3, B145); it is just that this experience is unintelligible (Alll, A116, B145).24 This means that intuition is conceived as a primitive function which delivers data, but delivers them in such a way that they are not directly usable in knowledge claims. And intellect, in turn, is conceived as a higher function which renders the data usable. This functional distinction between the faculties is captured in the first sentence of the Introduction to the Transcendental Logic, where Kant writes:

Our cognition springs out of two fundamental sources of the mind. The first of these is that by which representations are sensed ... the second the capacity to cognize an

object by means of these representations ... through the first an object is given to us;

through the second this object is thought. [A50=B74]

It is also at play throughout the Transcendental Deduction, where Kant distinguishes intuition, as the capacity through which data are given, from intellection, and notably from the intellectual function of figurative synthesis, as the capacity whereby the given data are connected (B129-30, B136, B150-2). It is even briefly mentioned in the Logic, where Kant writes that sensitivity 'gives the mere material to thinking7 whereas intellect 'disposes of this material and brings it under rules or concepts' (Ak IX 36).

It is with passages such as these that the unsubstantiated remarks on receptivity and faculty in §3 of ID are finally taken seriously. In the Critique intuition is truly receptive; its function is simply to present raw data to us for processing. Intellect, in contrast, is facilitative in the sense that it does all the processing required to bring these data to a cognition - including combination of various items in a singular representation,

24 Our blindness to intuitions is not, therefore, so total that it allows us to doubt that there might even be intuitions, as some of Kant's commentators have worried. (See, for instance, Daniel C. Kolb, Thought and Intuition in Kanfs Critical System/ Journal of the History of Philosophy 24 [1986] 223-41.) Though intuitions are 'nothing to us' without concepts, they are not nothing. Their existence follows because intellect itself can only supply the form of unity, not any of the content of representations. The fact that we think objects rather than bare forms of unity is therefore

already sufficient proof of the existence of intuitions.




as well as abstraction of specific differences in a concept. To thought belong all the processes, and all the products of processes, which can be conceived to be performed upon raw data. To intuition belongs the mere act of receiving raw data.

All intuitions, as sensory, are grounded on affection, concepts on functions. By 'function' I understand the unity of the act of ordering different representations under a common one. Concepts, therefore, are grounded on the spontaneity of

thought, as sensory intuitions are on the receptivity to impressions. [A67-8=B92-3]

Nor is this account merely a later invention, to be found only in the subsequent parts of the Critique and not in the 'older' Transcendental Aesthetic. It occurs in the very first sentence of the Aesthetic, where Kant gives what must be taken (if only because of its privileged position) as the authoritative pronouncement on the nature of the distinction.

In whatever way and by whatever means a cognition may be related to an object, that way through which it is in immediate relation to its object, and to which all

thought is directed as a means, is intuition. [A19=B33]

With this pronouncement, Kant turns away from the traditional physiological conception of the faculties towards an information theoretic account. The Critique grounds the distinction between the faculties on the two basic functions which any information processing system must perform: reception of data and processing of data. Intuitions just are received data. Nothing is said about how they are received: whether they are given through corporeal sense organs; whether they are given through the impression of sensible forms, the motions of animal spirits, or the Vibrations' of nerve fibres;25 or even whether the data are effects of external objects. All that is claimed is that the data which are first given to us, prior to any processing on our part, are intuitions. It is only subsequently that Kant points out that, as a matter of fact, all our (human) intuitions are given through the sensitivity or af fectivity of our sense organs.

25 Compare Johann Nicolas Tetens, Philosophische Versuche u'ber die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwicklung, vol. 1 (Leipzig: M.G. Wiedmann 1777), Preface, III-XXVIII

(reprinted under the same title and bound with u'ber die allgemeine speculativische Philosophie, Wilhelm Uebele, ed. [Berlin: Reuther & Reichard 1913], III-XXVIII), who is also at pains to separate his account of cognition from the physiological theories of Priestley, Bonnet, and Hartley.




VI The Circularity Problem

So far, I have argued that Kant's mature (Critical) distinction between the faculties is drawn in information-theoretic terms, as a distinction between a capacity for receiving information and a capacity for unifying or connecting received information in images and in knowledge claims. In Kant's terms, it is a distinction between what is immediately presented and what is discursively represented. This is a distinction which does not run afoul of the blindness thesis (unlike the singularity or mereological criteria), because it does not say anything about the nature of the representations delivered by the two faculties. But it does resur- rect the problem which plagued Kant in ID, and it resurrects it in an even more vitriolic form: how, given that the representations of intuition are, though not nothing, certainly 'nothing to us' prior to intellectual synthesis, could we possibly prove that space and time are forms of intuition?

If the strategy for such a demonstration is the strategy of ID - the same strategy that Kant proposes to follow at the outset of the Critique in the passage from A22=B36 cited in Section IV above - then the project is hopeless. But this is not the only way to go about the job. Though we cannot inspect our raw intuitions in order to demonstrate that they exhibit spatiotemporal form, we do have intellectual representations of space and time - what Kant refers to as 'concepts' of space and time - and blindness does not forbid us from inspecting them. Perhaps, by doing so, we could find some evidence which would allow us to infer that the raw data for these concepts must already be spatiotemporal.

Despite the disappointing evidence of passages such as A22=B36, there is considerable evidence in the Transcendental Aesthetic, especially in B, that it is this more consistent strategy which Kant in fact follows. Throughout the sections of the Transcendental Aesthetic where Kant offers his major arguments - the Metaphysical and Transcenden- tal Expositions - he persists in referring to our experiences of space and time using the term 'concept' (his preferred name for an intellectual representation). These references occur in the titles of the sections ('Of Space: Metaphysical Exposition of this Concept' [B37]; 'Transcendental Exposition of the Concept of Time' [B48]; 'Conclusions from the above Concepts' [A26=B42, A32=B49]) and they occur, perhaps most tellingly, in the definition of the activity of exposition which Kant gives in B. At A23 Kant had asked, What, then, are space and time?' and he had continued with the sentence, 'In order to become clear about this, let us first consider space.' But in B he struck out the words 'consider space' and substituted in their stead 'exposit the concept of space' - deliber- ately inserting the word 'concept' where it had not before been present. What is more, he continued the passage, adding the words: 'I understand by "exposition" (expositio) the clear (though not complete) pres-




entation of that which belongs to a concept/ indicating that he saw his project not as the presentation of an intuition, but as the analysis of a concept. The Expositions are therefore really inquiries into the conditions which make our concepts of space and time possible; this, no doubt, is why at A87=B119 Kant refers to the Expositions as transcendental deductions of the concepts of space and time.

Consider now how Kant carries out this new strategy of conceptual exposition. According to Kant, all our intellectual representations spring from two sources: an original reception of material in intuition, and whatever results from bringing this material to a unity of apperception. To prove that space and time are intuited, therefore, entails showing that they could not come into existence only at the second stage, as a result of the process of unifying materials which are themselves in no way spatial or temporal. Kant needs to show, that is, that our concepts of space and time could only arise if spatiotemporal order were already present in its own right among the information originally presented in intuition, and that it could not be subsequently constructed from purely qualitative data in the way Berkeley, and successors to the Berkeleian program such as Lotze, Bain, and Wundt, have supposed. This may be a difficult task, but it is at least a coherent one. Executing it does not obviously entail violating blindness, but merely considering what, in our intellectual representations, could possibly be produced by synthesis and what not.

Seen in the light of this strategy, Kant's appeals in the later paragraphs of the Metaphysical Expositions to the singularity, whole-part priority, and unboundedness of space and time take on an entirely different meaning. Rather than serve as criteria for separating intuitive from intellectual representations, they are features which, purportedly at least, raise problems for the constructivist program. Kanf s charge is that Berkeley, or anyone else who takes a constructivist tack, could not account for why space is, for instance, singular (or, as he puts it at A25=B39, 'essentially united'); for why it exhibits mereological relations of parts; or for why it is unbounded. The point is not that our concept of space does not exhibit these differentiae, but rather that the constructivist cannot account for how these differentiae could be true of the concept of space. Were space constructed by intellect out of sensations it would not be essentially united; it would be united only to the degree that the spaces defined by various groups of sensations are in fact synthesized, so that there could well be discrete spaces. And even if all of space were in fact united, the whole of space would not be given prior to the parts. On the contrary, successively given groups of sensations would define successively given parts of space and the whole would only subsequently arise from these parts. Nor could the whole be infinite or unbounded. Were sensations assembled into spaces by mental processes, the resulting construct would, up to any given moment in time,




contain only a finite number of sensations and would always have a definite outer rim. To attain infinity or unboundedness in the construct would require an infinite time or infinitely swift synthetic abilities.

I noted above that it has been charged that the Transcendental Aes- thetic of the Critique is merely a repeat of Parts II and III of ID. In particular, the Metaphysical Expositions of space and time are thought to have been more or less directly lifted out of §§14 and 15 of ID. But though the appeals Kant makes in the later arguments to essential unity and whole-part priority are the same ones he made in ID §§14 T[2 and 15 IB, the different role these appeals play in the later arguments is made clear by a significant alteration: throughout the Metaphysical Exposi- tion, Kant inserts a vocabulary of ground and consequent which had no precedent in ID. Whereas in ID the point is simply that space and time have singularity and whole- part priority and therefore are intuitions, in the Critique the point is that because the consequent, our concepts of space and time, exhibits the differentiae of essential unity, whole-part priority, and unboundedness, this consequent must be grounded on a space and time originally given in intuition.

From this it follows that in respect of space an a priori intuition (one not empirical) must lie as a ground of all concepts. [ A25=B39]

Were there no limitlessness in the progression of intuition, no concept of relations could convey a principle of unboundedness. [A25]

Space is thought as containing an infinite number of representations in itself (since all the parts of space to infinity are simultaneous). Therefore the original representation of space must be an a priori intuition and not a concept. [B40, my italics]

Wherever the parts themselves and every magnitude of an object can only be

represented as determined through delimitation, there the complete representation cannot be given through concepts, but an immediate intuition must lie as a ground of such concepts. [A32=B48, my italics]

The pattern of argument, therefore, is that of inference from what is given in the intellectual representation back to what must have been present in the data originally given to intellect prior to processing.

Much more would have to be said about Kant's arguments in the Metaphysical Expositions before they could hope to convert a dedicated constructivist. But I hope I have shown that the strategy Kant employs in the Metaphysical Expositions is different from that of ID, does not violate blindness, and is noncircular. This is already more than can be said for the strategy of ID, or for those interpretations which rest Kant's distinction between intuitions and concepts on the singularity or the mereological criteria.




VII Regressive Terminology

The main conclusion to be drawn from this survey of the historical and strategic factors in Kant's account of intuition is that what in the literature is called the immediacy criterion must be taken as the fundamental criterion by which Kant distinguishes intuition from thought. This is the only way to read Kant consistent with blindness, and it is the only way his major conclusions about space and time in the Transcen- dental Aesthetic can have even a hope of standing as coherent, non- trivial, or non-question-begging. All the same, this reading of Kant does conflict with a number of passages (notably 14 of the Metaphysical Exposition for time, A320=B377, A713=B741, and Logic I<][1-16) where he appears to use singularity as a defining criterion of intuitions and generality of intellectual representations. I will conclude by explaining why this regressive terminology is still to be found in Kant's mature works.

Nothing which has been said so far militates against the possibility that intuitions might turn out to be mereologically structured wholes, each given by only a single object. I have only argued that they cannot be defined that way at the outset without trivializing Kant's position on space and time. It is important to separate what is fundamental from what is derivative, what Kant starts out with from what he tries to prove. Kant starts out, I have argued, with the thesis that intuition is immediate reception of information, and thought the processing of information into knowledge claims. But one of the things he sets out to prove is that the data originally received in intuition are disposed in space and presented successively in time - that these are the forms in which the information is received. If we assume that he is successful in making this case, then it follows that intuitions must be spatiotemporally determined and spatiotemporally structured. From this it is a trivial consequence that intuitions express mereological rather than taxonomic relations of membership, and given that location in space and time is a sufficient condition for singularity, it is equally trivial that intuitions are singular objects and not universals.

But these are consequences of the supposition that intuitions, as the most immediate, primitive, and original elements in cognition, consist of an array of matters in space and time. They are not definitions assumed at the outset and they are not distinguishing features of intuition as opposed to intellectual experience. For, if intellectual representations include whatever is given through a process of combination or figurative synthesis of the immediately given spatiotemporal array, then at least some intellectual representations (namely, images) will be singular and will exhibit mereological relations of




parts. Indeed, insofar as intellectual processing is necessary for the perception of an object, singularity and mereological structure can only be seen in the representations of intellect. Of intuitions, they must be inferred (given blindness).

It may be objected that this is too much at variance with what Kant has to say about intuitions and concepts. Why would Kant persist in offering the singularity criterion as a distinguishing feature of intuitions (as, for instance, in Logic §1)? Why does he so frequently claim that the products of intellectual activity are merely discursive or general representations through which we do not think singular objects, but only specific differentiae which a number of objects may have in common (Logic §1, B39-40, B136n, A320=B377)? And why does he so frequently speak as if intuition by itself, apart from all reference to intellectual synthesis, might constitute the perception of a singular object? In his Logic, for instance, he remarks that 'when a savage sees a house in the distance, the use of which he does not know, he has the same object before him as another who knows it is a dwelling furnished for people/ But, Kant continues, the savage's cognition of the house is 'mere intuition/ whereas for the civilized person it is 'intuition and concept at the same time' (Ak IX 33). The passage hints that it is possible to perceive something without synthesizing the array under concepts (we could hardly suppose that there would be a

house-shaped hole in the savage's visual field because intuitions without concepts are blind). This implication is seconded by Kant's claim at B422n that an indeterminate empirical intuition is perception, and further reinforced by the classification passage (A320=B377) where he claims that intuition is a perception (Perzeption) which not only relates

immediately to an object, but is single. But if any of these claims were in fact true - if the savage's

perception of what we recognize as a house were 'mere intuition' -

then synthesis under the categories would not be necessary to effect a

unity of apperception and thereby become conscious of anything manifold. Thus, a crucial premise of the Transcendental Deduction - the claim that all connection is an act of intellect (Bl 29-30) and that a collection of matters can never be brought to consciousness insofar as it is merely presented through the senses, but only insofar as the matters are connected in a single thought (B132-3) - would fail. For the argument of the Transcendental Deduction to be correct, the

savage must be supposed either to see nothing at all (which is

implausible) or to synthesize the variety presented in intuition under some other concept (in which case perception is not 'mere intuition' but intuition rendered intelligible through intellectual processing).




Assuming that the claims of the Transcendental Deduction are correct, we are left having to admit that Kant's claims about the singularity of intuitions and the generality of intellectual representations are throwbacks to the earlier position of ID, and that this earlier position was never fully worked out of his later thought. This confusion of senses is generated, above all, by Kant's unfortunate tendency to refer to intellectual representations as 'concepts' - a term which he then defines in the traditional way as a discursive representation with a certain inherent universality. Taken in this sense, concepts are not all that intellect produces; it produces images as well as concepts. But Kant uses 'concept' to refer to all intellectual representations, images included. Then he slips into thinking of all intellectual representations as general representations, ignoring that by his own principles images of singular objects require intellectual processing no less than the abstraction of universals. At the same time, he persists in equating 'discursive' with 'intellectual' and in using 'intuitive' to contrast with 'discursive,' and this leads him to refer to non-discursive representations as 'singular intuitions,' thus generating the appearance that singular representation somehow falls outside of the power of intellect. Thus, the traditional, scholastic scheme comes back to vex and confuse his account.

But once this confusion has been uncovered, it can be easily resolved with a verbal choice: either we can call all products of intellectual synthesis 'concepts,' whether singular or general, or we can legislate that the term 'concept' shall be reserved for thoughts of universals. If we take the latter route, however, we have to recognize that concepts, considered as universals, are no more than a subset of the representations delivered by intellect. If 'concept' means 'universal/ then it does not refer to the product of any intellectual process, but only to the products of a particular process: abstraction. In this sense, indeed, concepts cannot be singular or have mereological structure. But in this sense concepts are only one among the products of intellectual synthesis; there are also perceptions and images.

Paralleling this second choice, we might also take 'intuition' to mean 'singular representation,' or 'image,' or 'phantasm.' But if we define 'intuition' in this way, then we must recognize that 'intuitions' are not distinct from intellectual representations, but are a subset of intellectual representations: namely, products of the intellectual process of combination or figurative synthesis. However, we cannot simply take Kantian intuitions to be singular intellectual representations. To do so would be to lose sight of other vital Kantian tenets: that pure intellect cannot deliver a cognition on its own, so that intellectual repre-




sentations are empty without some content supplied by 'intuition/ and that space and time are forms of 'intuition/ and hence constitute a prior set of structures determining the form of possible intellectual syntheses. Preserving these claims requires recognizing intuition as a distinct cognitive capacity from intellect.

Kant, unfortunately, did not use his terms in any consistent way. Sometimes, by 'intuition' he means intuition in what may be called the metaphysical sense: that of raw data for the cognitive process supplied by a distinct cognitive faculty. But sometimes, as in the passage about the savage, he means it in what may be called the logical sense - which does not appeal to a distinct faculty at all, but merely to the (necessarily intellectual) experience of singular objects. Likewise, 'concept' sometimes means the product of intellectual processing - which is the metaphysical sense - but sometimes means just a universal cognized through abstracting specific differences, which is the logical sense. Kant recognized this distinction between logical and metaphysical senses in the Introduction to his Logic (Ak IX 36); but the body of that work, for obvious reasons, only deals with the former sense, and aside from this one instance Kant seems not to recognize the importance of distinguishing the senses, and frequently slides between them.

The mereological and the singularity criteria for distinguishing representations are not misguided, nor have Kant's commentators been wrong to raise them. But the distinctions they effect are really distinctions between different products of intellect. They are misplaced when taken as distinctions drawn between intuitions in the metaphysical sense and the products of intellect. The legacy of these misplaced distinctions has been the utter confusion of Kant's purpose and method in the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Deduction. The way to a successful reading of the first parts of the Critique begins with taking intuitions to be just immediately given data for the cognitive process.26

Received: September, 1989 Revised: August, 1990

26 The research project of which this paper is a part was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada post-doctoral fellowships program, grant #457-88-0038. I am indebted to Thomas M. Lennon and Brigitte Sassen for comments and criticisms and to Robert Binkeley for invaluable bibliographical suggestions.



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Kant's Account of Intuition