Kant's Deduction From Apperception

An Essay on the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories

Dennis Schulting

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783110582871
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

In focusing on the systematic deduction of the categories from a principle, Schulting takes up anew the controversial project of the eminent German Kant scholar Klaus Reich, whose monograph "The Completeness of Kant's Table of Judgments" made the case that the logical functions of judgement can all be derived from the objective unity of apperception and can be shown to link up with one another systematically.

Common opinion among Kantians today has it that Kant did not mean to derive the functions of judgement, and accordingly the categories, from the principle of apperception. Schulting challenges this standard view and aims to resuscitate the main motivation behind Reich's project. He argues, in agreement with Reich's main thesis about the derivability of the functions of judgement, that Kant indeed does mean to derive, in full a priori fashion, the categories from the principle of apperception.

Schulting also shows that, given the general assumptions of the Critical philosophy, Kant's derivation is successful and that absent an account of the derivation of the categories from apperception, the B-Deduction cannot really be understood.

New edition. First published 2012 as "Kant's Deduction and Apperception. Explaining the Categories" (Palgrave Macmillan)

1 Introduction: The Categories and Apperception

One of the most important pieces of philosophical argument is undoubtedly Kant’s ‘Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding’ (hereafter the Transcendental Deduction or the Deduction for short) in his Critique of Pure Reason. It offers arguably the best solution to a perennial topic in philosophy, namely the secure grounding for knowledge. At the same time, it is considered one of the most obscure texts in the whole of philosophy, condensed as it is into a mere 23 Akademie pages (in the B-version). There is no unanimity among scholars as regards the structure, meaning and validity of its argument. In this book, I make a claim about the Transcendental Deduction that, in at least one respect, goes wholly against received opinion. Contrary to existing interpretations of the Transcendental Deduction, I contend that we should take absolutely seriously Kant’s assertion—most explicitly articulated at B142 in the B-Deduction—that the categories (or, to be more precise, ‘principles of the objective determination’ as he calls them there) are deducible or derivable from a principle, namely the principle of apperception, or, the transcendental unity of apperception.17 As the title of this book indicates, I want to suggest that the deduction indeed proceeds from apperception. Until now, the majority of Kant scholars have been in ostensible agreement that such a claim, if indeed it is Kant’s claim, is presumptuous and cannot be defended.18 Paul Guyer (2001: 70) has claimed even that the deduction of the individual categories ultimately depends on the natural conditions of our existence, as much as our empirical experience is dependent on them. The Transcendental Deduction cannot, on that account, be considered an a priori affair in terms of a derivation from a principle. In contrast to Guyer, I firmly believe, first, that Kant does put forward such a derivation claim and, secondly, that given the assumptions of Kant’s Critical project it can indeed be upheld. The Transcendental Deduction does not depend on empirical conditions but rather proceeds completely a priori, that is, in abstraction from experience (cf. B89–90/A65).19

In this book, I provide a systematic defence of the derivation claim and explain how, in effect, each of the categories conceptually ‘develops out of’ the unity of apperception. This can be done by virtue of a ‘dissection [Zergliederung] of the faculty of the understanding itself’, thus ‘by looking for [concepts a priori] in the understanding alone, as their birthplace’ (A65–6/B90, trans. Kemp Smith). I also believe it is only thus that the thrust of Kant’s reasoning in the Transcendental Deduction can be fully grasped. A central claim of the book is that one of the thorny issues involved in recent debates concerning the Transcendental Deduction—namely whether Kant is licensed to argue from the unity of apperception to cognition of objects in §§ 16–17 of the B-Deduction and whether this, Kant’s ‘master argument’ is not tantamount to a ‘gross non sequitur’ (this is the so-called reciprocity claim)20—can be solved once the derivation question has been answered. Therefore, the question regarding the derivability of the categories bears directly on the question of the meaning of the main argument of the Transcendental Deduction. I contend that the Deduction cannot be really understood absent an account of the derivation of the categories.

One might argue that in the A-preface of the First Critique Kant suggests that it is not required to fully get to grips with the subjective deduction—that is, the question ‘How is the faculty of thinking itself possible?’ (Axvii)—in order to understand the chief aim of the Transcendental Deduction, namely showing the objective validity of the pure concepts of the understanding; and that, given this, it would seem superfluous, or at most of merely secondary interest, to attempt a reconstruction of the derivation of the categories from ‘the faculty of thinking itself’ (by showing how the latter is possible).21 However, Kant also says that considering the understanding ‘in a subjective relation’ is ‘of great importance in respect of my chief end’, but does not ‘essentially’ belong to it (Axvi–xvii). This is admittedly cryptic, but I believe Kant means this last observation as a gesture of writer’s generosity towards the reader who might find herself grappling with the intricacies of such an exposition while not getting to the main point of the Transcendental Deduction—which is to establish that the categories are required for the possible experience of objects. But this does not detract from the fact that an account of the subjective aspects of the understanding, of cognition—the question, namely, of how the categories are acquired—is an important element in achieving that goal.22

Commentators often complain that Kant does not give a specific account of the categories in the Transcendental Deduction, apart from mentioning, in a rather perfunctory manner, some of the categories in the so-called ‘second step’ of the B-Deduction (see B149, B162–3) or, briefly, the concept of ‘cause’ at A112.23 My claim is that Kant does in fact provide—albeit couched in a densely argued presentation that has to do, partly at least, with Kant’s peculiar method of proof—a very specific account of all of the twelve categories in §§ 15–19, on which this book focuses.

In attending to the self-explaining dynamic of the Transcendental Deduction, I am able to explicate how precisely the categories together necessarily apply to objective experience (that is, to the extent that the thought of an object in general is concerned) by demonstrating how each of them is conceptually deducible from transcendental apperception, or, the principle of discursive thought. My basic claim is that the story about the categories as the conditions of objective experience or cognition is exactly congruent with a story about the logical constraints of the capacity for discursive thought, namely the unity of apperception. Put simply, it is discursive thought itself, by virtue of the unity of apperception, which operates the categories by virtue of which it is primordially linked to the objective world. This also involves a reappraisal of the so-called ‘guiding thread’,which Kant specifies at A79/B104–5 in the Metaphysical Deduction. The Archimedean point in the dynamic of this two-tier story is transcendental apperception, as a principle governing not only objective experience (cognition) itself but also the theory of objective experience (cognition), or more precisely, the argument that establishes that the categories are the necessary (and formally sufficient) conditions of possible experience (cognition). It is against this backdrop that the thesis of derivability from a principle will become understandable.

In focusing on the systematic deduction of the categories from a principle, I take up anew the controversial project of the eminent German Kant scholar Klaus Reich, whose monograph The Completeness of Kant’s Table of Judgments24 made the case that the logical functions of judgement can all be derived from the objective unity of apperception and can be shown to link up with one another systematically (A67/B92),25 albeit that according to Reich Kant himself did not actually proceed to provide a clear account of such a derivation in the Critique itself.26 More recently, Michael Wolff (1995) has built on Reich’s pioneering work and has provided us with a detailed account of the derivation of the functions (or forms) of judgement that, in my view, decisively settles the question regarding the derivation and the completeness of the table of judgement. However, although Reich’s book is considered something of a minor classic in Kant scholarship, Reich has been roundly criticised for his views on the idea of a derivation from apperception.27 Common opinion among Kantians today has it that not only did Kant not mean to derive the functions of judgement, and accordingly the categories, from the principle of apperception, but also that such a derivation would a fortiori be patently speculative and unfounded, stemming from the preoccupations of the post-Kantian idealists28 rather than something to do with the Critical philosophy itself. I challenge this standard view and aim to resuscitate the main motivation behind Reich’s project. I shall argue, in agreement with Reich’s main thesis concerning the derivability of the functions of judgement, that Kant indeed does mean to derive, in full a priori fashion, the categories from the principle of apperception.29 I also believe that, given the general assumptions of the Critical philosophy, Kant’s derivation argument is successful.

Yet, unlike Reich, I approach the question from the perspective of the categories rather than the functions of judgement. I seek to give an account of the derivation of the categories—and not, as Reich does, the functions of judgement—from the unity of apperception. I shall also have next to nothing to add to Reich’s and Wolff’s thoroughgoing analyses of the first two ‘Clue’ sections.30 While I look, in Chapter 5, at the Third Section of the Metaphysical Deduction—in particular the passage where Kant effectively provides the so-called ‘guiding thread’ for finding the categories (A79/B104–5)—I concentrate on Kant’s own primary goal of providing a transcendental deduction of the categories in the chapter of the Critique that bears that name (B116–69 in its B-edition).31

I believe, contrary to Reich’s suggestion, that Kant did actually, in the Deduction itself, provide an account of the specific derivation of all of the categories from one source, albeit by way of a dense, though perhaps poorly presented, argument. Although Kant does not explicitly, discursively expound the derivation of each of the categories, I contend that the thrust of the argument in the Deduction is such that it accounts, in the typical mode of a prima philosophia, for each of the categories as one of the grounding functions of transcendental apperception as the source of objectively valid thought. I also depart from Reich in that I reconstruct the derivation from the ‘I think’-proposition, that is, the analytic unity of apperception, not the objective unity of apperception, which in my construal is only the conclusion of Kant’s deduction. The argument proceeds from the ‘I think’ to objective apperception, of which the definition of judgement is an immediate corollary.

Unlike most commentators32 I follow Reich, however, in regarding the argument in the Metaphysical Deduction as of a piece with the transcendental story from the very start of the chapter ‘the Analytic of Concepts’ (A65–6/B90 –1; in particular, cf. A67/B92). In the introductory section to ‘the Analytic of Concepts’, Kant writes:

I understand by an analytic of concepts not their analysis, or the usual procedure of philosophical investigations, that of analyzing the content of concepts that present themselves and bringing them to distinctness, but rather the much less frequently attempted analysis of the faculty of understanding itself, in order to research the possibility of a priori concepts by seeking them only in the understanding as their birthplace and analyzing its pure use in general; for this is the proper business of a transcendental philosophy; the rest is the logical treatment of concepts in philosophy in general. (A65–6/B90–1, emphasis added)

It is clear from the start of the Analytic that the story is transcendental through and through. In the second remark on the table of judgement, Kant is clear that we are discussing ‘transcendental logic’ (A71/B97, emphasis added), and the table is a ‘transcendental table of all moments of thinking in judgments’ (B98/A73, emphasis added), although in the Prolegomena he contrasts the ‘logical’ table of judgement with the ‘transcendental’ table of the categories (Prol § 21, AA 4: 302–3).33

This is not to say, as has often been the charge, that the argument of the Metaphysical Deduction is constrained by presupposing the argument of the Transcendental Deduction to the effect that the table of judgement is made to cohere with the required kinds and right amount of a priori concepts of knowledge, which makes the claims about the correspondence between the tables viciously circular. The background assumption of the claims advanced in this book is that from the very start of the Transcendental Analytic, if not the Critique of Pure Reason as such, the story concerns the legitimacy of objectively valid cognitions, that is, possible experience as a whole, and so also addresses judgement as the quintessential form of objectively valid cognition, that is, as the essential form of possible experience. This means that the common denominator of the Metaphysical as well as the Transcendental Deduction is our capacity to cognise objects, to have a capacity for understanding, to judge. One might object to this that holding that the perspective from the very start of the Metaphysical Deduction is transcendental does after all imply that the Metaphysical Deduction is geared to the objective of the Transcendental Deduction, viz. an explanation of cognition or experience, and so is made dependent on the latter, which effectively means that the derivation of the table of categories from the table of judgement amounts to a circulus in probando (cf. Allison 2004: 152–3). However, this objection assumes a certain conception of the Metaphysical Deduction—that is, of the meaning of the table of judgement and specifically its connection with the table of categories—which is misleading, to say the least, and in fact itself begs the central question.34

Notwithstanding my different approach, the overall result of my analysis of the Transcendental Deduction complements Reich’s (and Wolff’s) conclusions regarding the table of judgement, given the ‘parallelism’35 or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the New Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Key to Abbreviations of Cited Primary Works
• 1 Introduction: The Categories and Apperception
• 2 The ‘Herz’ Question
• 3 The Quid Juris
• 4 The Master Argument
• 5 The Unity of Thought: On the Guiding Thread
• 6 Apperception and the Categories of Modality
• 7 Apperception and the Categories of Relation
• 8 Apperception and the Categories of Quality
• 9 Apperception and the Categories of Quantity
• 10 From Apperception to Objectivity
• 11 On the ‘Second Step’ of the B-Deduction
• Bibliography of Secondary Literature
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects