Kant, Immanuel 1855. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by John Miller Dow Meiklejohn. London: Henry G. Bohn. [Internet Archive]
He had never studied the art of expression. He wearies by frequent repetitions, and employs a great number of words to express, in the clumsiest way, what could have been enounced more clearly and distinctly in a few. The main statement in his sentences is often overlaid with a multitude of qualifying and explanatory clauses; and the reader is lost in a maze, from which he has great difficulty in extricating himself. There are some passages which have no main verb; others, in which the author loses sight of the subject with which he set out, and concludes with a predicate regarding something else mentioned in the course of his argument. All this can be easily accounted for. Kant, as he mentions in a letter to Lambert, took nearly twelve [|] years to excogitate his work, and only five months to write it. (Meiklejohn 1855: xi-xii)
This is not going to be a joyous experience, we are warned.
A previous translation of the Kritik exists, which, had it been satisfactory, would have dispensed with the present. But the translator had, evidently, no very extensive acquaintance with the German language, and still less with his subject. A translator ought to be an interpreting intellect between the author and the reader; but, in the present case, the only interpreting medium has been the dictionary. (Meiklejohn 1855: xii)
Well put.
But, as the legislative continued to show traces of the ancient barbaric rule, her empire gradually broke up, and intestine wars introduced the reign of anarchy; while the sceptics, like nomadic tribes, who hate a permanent habitation and settled mode of living, attacked from time to time those who had organised themselves into civil communities. (Kant 1855: xviii)
That's a neat metaphor: skeptics and critics as nomads; the rolling stone gathers no moss.
In recent times the hope dawned upon us of seeing those disputes settled, and the legitimacy of her claims established by a kind of physiology of the human understanding - that of the celebrated Locke. (Kant 1855: xviii)
Inimmõistmise füsioloogia.
In the absence of this security, indifference, doubt, and finally, severe criticism are rather signs of a profound habit of thought. Our age is the age of criticism, to which every thing must be subjected. (Kant 1855: 23; fn)
Mõtteharjumuse märgid.
While I say this, I think I see upon the countenance of the reader signs of dissatisfaction mingled with contempt, when he hears declarations which sound so boastful and extravagant; and yet they are beyond comparison more moderate than those advanced by the commonest author of the commonest phelosophical programme, in which the dogmatist professes to demonstrate the simple nature of the soul, or the necessity of a primal being. (Kant 1855: xx)
Rahulolematuse märgid lugeja palgel. "The philosophical author elevates that belief to conviction, for he proves upon indubitable grounds, that a thing is necessarily so" (Schiller 1845: 161).
As regards certitude, I have fully convinced myself that, in this sphere of thought, opinion is perfectly inadmissible, and that everything which bears the least semblance of an hypothesis must be excluded, as of no value in such discussions. For it is a necessary condition of every cognition that is to be established upon a priori grounds, that it shall be held to be absolutely necessary; much more is this the case with an attempt to determine all pure a priori cognition, and to furnish the standard - and consequently an example - of all apodeictic (philosophical) certitude. (Kant 1855: xxi)
Define:apodeictic - clearly established or beyond dispute.
The other considers the pure understanding itself, its possibility and its powers of cognition - that is, from a subjective point of view; and, although this exposition is of great importance, it does not belong essentially to the main purpose of the work, because the [|] grand question is, what and how much can reason and understanding, apart from experience, cognize, and not, how is the faculty of thought itself possible? (Kant 1855: xxi-xxii)
It's already starting to look like the common sense understanding of Kant as excluding the possibility of getting in touch with reality, or whatever, is due to his excluding experience from his investigation.
As regards clearness, the reader has a right to demand, in the first place, discursive or logical clearness, that is, on the basis of conceptions, and, secondly, intuitive or æsthetic clearness, by means of intuitions, that is, by examples or other modes of illustration in concreto. I have done what I could for the first kind of intelligibility. This was essential to my purpose; and it thus became the accidental cause of my inability to do complete justice to the second requirement. (Kant 1855: xxii)
How to make our ideas clear? By sacrificing eloquence.
Abbé Terrasson remarks with great justice, that if we estimate the size of a work, not from the number of its pages, but from the time which we require to make ourselves master of it, it may be said of many a book - that it would be much shorter, if it were not so short. (Kant 1855: xxii)
Known around these parts as "compactness" or "thickness".
The reader must naturally have a strong inducement to cooperate with the present author, if he has formed the intention of erecting a complete and solid edifice of metaphysical science, according to the plan now laid before him. Metaphysics, as here represented, is the only science which admits of completion - and with little labour, if it is united, in a short time; so that nothing will be left to future generations except the task of illustrating and applying it didactically. For this science is nothing more than the inventory of all that is given us by pure reason, systematically arranged. (Kant 1855: xxiii)
"I seem to myself to be the sole depositary at present of the completely developed system, which all hangs together and cannot receive any proper presentation in fragments." (CP 8.255; in Dilworth 2014: 39)
The early success of logic must be attributed exclusively to the narrowness of its field, in which abstraction may, or rather must, be made of all the objects of cognition with their characteristic distinctions, and in which the understanding has only to deal with itself and with its own forms. It is, obviously, a much more difficult task for reason to strike into the sure path of science, where it has to deal not simply with itself, but with objects external to itself. Hence, logic is properly only a proædeutic - forms, as it were, the vestibule of the sciences; and while it is necessary to enable us to form a correct judgment with regard to the various branches of knowledge, still the acquisition of real, substantive knowledge is to be sought only in the sciences properly so called, that is, in the objective sciences. (Kant 1855: xxv)
Define:propaedeutic - an introduction to a subject or area of study; (of an area of study) serving as a preliminary instruction or as an introduction to further study.
For accidental observations, made according to no preconceived plan, cannot be united under a necessary law. But it is this that reason seeks for and requires. It is only the principles of reason which can give to concordant phenomena the validity of laws, and it is only whene xperiment is directed by these rational principles, that it can have any real utility. Reason must approach nature with the view, indeed, of receiving information from it, not, however, in the character of a pupil, who listens to all that his master chooses to tell him, but in that of a judge, who compels the witnesses to reply to those questions which he himself thinks fit to propose. (Kant 1855: xxvii)
Hence the view of Reason as "internal legislation" (Schiller 1845: 14).
For we come to the conclusion that our faculty of cognition is unable to transcend the limits of possible experience; and yet this is precisely the most essential object of this science. The estimate of our rational cognition a priori at which we arrive is that it has only to do with phænomena, and that things in themselves, while possessing a real existence, lie beyond its sphere. Here we are enabled to put the justice of this estimate to the test. For that which of necessity impels us to transcend the limits of experience and of all phænomena, is the unconditioned, which reason absolutely requires in things as they are in themselves, in order to complete the series of conditions. (Kant 1855: xxx)
Iconic.
Dogmatism is thus the dogmatic procedure of pure reason without previous criticism of its own powers, and in opposing this procedure, we must not be supposed to lend any countenance to that loquacious shallowness which arrogates to itself the name of popularity, nor yet to scepticism, which makes short work with the whole science of metaphysics. (Kant 1855: xxxviii)
A description that could very well suit phatic communion.
Those who reject at once the method of Wolf, and of the Critique of Pure Reason, can have no other aim but to shake off the fetters of science, to change labour into sport, certainty into opinion, and philosophy into philodoxy. (Kant 1855: xxxix)
Define:philodox - A person with an excessive interest in his/her own opinions (plural philodoxes); One who loves his own opinion; an argumentative or dogmatic person.
But few possess the ability, and still fewer the inclination, to take a comprehensive view of a new system. By confining the view to particular passages, taking these out of their connection and comparing them with one another, it is easy to pick out apparent contradictions, especially in a work written with any freedom of style. These contradictions place the work in an unfavourable light in the eyes of those who rely on the judgment of others, but are easily reconciled by those who have mastered the idea of the whole. (Kant 1855: xlii)
Another philological truism.
That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of themselves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare, to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience? In respect of time, therefore, no knowledge of ours is antecedent to experience, but begins with it. (Kant 1855: 1)
"All knowledge must, therefore, ultimately rest on revelation; the general knowledge of the race on a general revelation, and the special knowledge that may be adapted to newly arising needs of human liberty, on a special revelation" (Chase 1863: 464). Personally, I remain unconvinced by both. Revelation is bull. Most knowledge is gained from the experience of reading a book. I wonder if comparing, connecting and separating are laws of association in disguise.
If we cast our eyes upon the commonest operations of the understanding, the proposition, "every change must have a cause," will amply serve our purpose. In the latter case, indeed, the conception of a cause so plainly involves the conception of a necessity of connexion with an effect, and of a strict universality of the law, that the very notion of a cause would entirely disappear, were we to derive it, like Hume, from a frequent association of what happens with that which precedes, and the habit thence originating of connecting representations - the necessity inherent in the judgment being therefore merely subjective. (Kant 1855: 3)
Habit-formation is subjective and negates universal laws: things happen because they've always happened.
Of far more importance than all that has been above said, is the consideration that certain of our cognitions rise completely above the sphere of all possible experience, and by means of conceptions, to which there exists in the whole extent of experience no corresponding object, seem to extend the range of our judgments beyond its bounds. And just in this transcendental or supersensible sphere, where experience affords us neither instruction nor guidance, lie the investigations of Reason, which, on account of their importance, we consider far preferable to, and as having a far more elevated aim than, all that the understanding can achieve within the sphere of sensuous phænomena. (Kant 1855: 4)
Transcendental, meaning above the sphere of all possible experience. The dictionary (Merriam-Webster) even has a special section for the meaning of transcendental in Kantian philosophy: (a) of or relating to experience as determined by the mind's makeup; (b) transcending experience but not human knowledge.
"A straight line between two points is the shortest," is a synthetical proposition. For my conception of straight, contains no notion of quantity, but is merely qualitative. The conception of the shortest is therefore wholly an addition, and by no analysis can it be extracted from our conception of a straight line. (Kant 1855: 10)
An answer to the question, "How straight are you?"
Yet, in a certain sense, this kind of knowledge must unquestionably be looked upon as given; in other words, metaphysics must be considered as really existing, if not as a science, nevertheless as a natural disposition of the human mind (metaphysica naturalis). For human reason, without any instigations imputable to the mere vanity of great knowledge, unceasingly progresses, urged on by its own feeling of need, towards such questions as cannot be answered by any empirical application of reason, or principles derived therefrom; and so there has ever really existed in every man some system of metaphysics. (Kant 1855: 13)
"This kind of vantage-ground may be occupied by a man of no original capacity or deep learning, if accident has made him intimate with some exciting or absorbing subject of the day." (Mahaffy 1888: 23)
I apply the term transcendental to all knowledge which is not so much occupied with objects as with the mode of our cognition of these objects, so far as this mode of cognition is possible à priori. A system of such conceptions would be called Transcendental Philosophy. But this, again, is still beyond the bounds of our present essay. (Kant 1855: 16)
Transcendental philosophy is metacognitive?
Transcendental philosophy is the idea of a science, for which the Critique of Pure Reason must sketch the whole plan architectonically, that is, from principles, with a full guarantee for the validity and stability of all the parts which enter into the building. It is the system of all the principles of pure reason. (Kant 1855: 17)
Noted for Peirce's use of this term.
Transcendental philosophy is conseuently a philosophy of the pure and merely speculative reason. For all that is practical, so far as it contains motives, relates to feelings, and these belong to empirical sources of cognition. (Kant 1855: 18)
Looks like the triad: feelings, motives (reasons for doing something), and (pure) reason.
Only so much seems necessary, by way of introduction of premonition, that there are two sources of human knowledge (which probably spring from a common, but to us unknown root), namely, sense and understanding. By the former, objects are given to us; by the latter, thought. (Kant 1855: 18)
Wait a minute now! You said "all our knowledge begins with experience"! Now we can not only sense objects but also think them up? What's next? We can gain knowledge from books and discourse? Don't be ridiculous! All knowledge comes from Revelation.
In whatsoever mode, or by whatsoever means, our knowledge may relate to objects, it is at least quite clear, that the only manner in which it immediately relates to them, is by means of an intuition. To this as the indispensable groundwork, all thought points. But an intuition can take place only in so far as the object is given to us. This, again, is only possible, to man at least, on condition that the object affect the mind in a certain manner. The capacity for receiving representations (receptivity) through the mode in which we are affected by objects, is called sensibility. By means of sensibility, therefore, objects are given to us, and it alone furnishes us with intuitions; by the understanding they are thought, and from it arise conceptions. But all thought must directly, or indirectly, by means of certain signs, relate ultimately to intuitions; consequently, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us. (Kant 1855: 21)
I'm assuming that inuition is here given in the simple sense of "without the need for conscious reasoning". The question here is a classical one: if I see a piece of cheese in front of me on the table, am I having an intuition of cheese (a cheesy intuition, lets say). Or, furthermore, when I come to think of what type of cheese it is, what kinds of "signs" are relating to cheesy intuitions?
The effect of an object upon the faculty of representation, so far as we are affected by the said object, is sensation. That sort of intuition which relates to an object by means of sensation, is called an empirical intuition. The undetermined object of an empirical intuition, is called phænomenon. That which in the phænomenon corresponds to the sensation, I term its matter; but that which effects that the content of the phænomenon can be arranged under certain relations, I call its form. But that in which our sensations are merely arranged, and by which they are susceptible of assuming a certain form, cannot be itself sensation. It is then, the matter of all phænomena that is given to us à posteriori; the form must lie ready à priori for them in the mind, and consequently can be regarded separately from all sensation. (Kant 1855: 21)
Relevant for Schiller's use of these terms in his letters (i.e. Stofftrieb and Formtrieb). Their definitions come across as counterintuitive: form is content, matter is sensation. Like, the material is what you perceive, the shape is what it's made of.
By means of the external sense (a property of the mind), we represent to ourselves objects as without us, and these all in space. Therein alone are their shape, dimensions, and relations to each other determined or determinable. The internal sense, by means of which the mind contemplates itself or its internal state, gives, indeed, no intuition of the soul as an object; yet there is nevertheless a determinate form, under which alone the contemplation of our internal state is possible, so that all which relates to the inward determinations of the mind is represented in relations of time. Of time we cannot have any external intuition, any more than we can have an internal intuition of space. (Kant 1855: 23)
Messages in interpersonal communication traverse space, messages in intrapersonal communication traverse time.
Space then is a necessary representation à priori, which serves for the foundation of all external intuitions. We never can imagine or make a representation to ourselves of the non-existence of space, though we may easily enough think that no objects are found in it. (Kant 1855: 24)
"Infinity and the First Cause are held by Sir William Hamilton to be things inconceivable, things unthinkable, and, nevertheless, things about which the mind is somehow conversant" (Clay 1882: 3).
Space is essentially one, and multiplicity in it, consequently the general notion of spaces, of this or that space, depends solely upon limitations. (Kant 1855: 23)
This rings true.
For, in such a case, that which is originally a mere phænomenon, a rose, for example, is taken by the empirical understanding for a thing in itself, though to every different eye, in respect of its colour, it may appear different. On the contrary, the [|] transcendental conception of phænemena in space is a critical adminition, that, in general, nothing which is intuited in space is a thing in itself, and that space is not a form which belongs as a property to things; but that objects are quite unknown to us in themselves, and what we call outward objects, are nothing else but mere representations of our sensibility, whose form is space, but whose real correlate, the thing in itself, is not known by means of these representations, nor even can be, but respecting which, in experience, no inquiry is ever made. (Kant 1855: 27-28)
It kinda sounds like we may never know cheese in itself because some men are short-sighted or colour-blind, or have damaged taste-buds (ageusia). Nothing drives one towards common-sense realism as effectively as acquaintance with transcendental idealism.
Time is nothing else than the form of the internal sense, that is, of the intuitions of self and of our internal state. For time cannot be any determination of outward phænomena. It has to do neither with shape nor position; on the contrary, it determines the relation of representations in our internal state. (Kant 1855: 30)
This must have preceded the invention of clocks and calendars and the day and night cycle. Facetiousness to pardon incomprehension.
On the other hand, those who maintain the absolute reality of time and space, whether as essentially subsisting, or only inhering, as modifications, in things, must find themselves at utter variance with the principles of experience itself. For, if they decide for the first view, and make space and time into substances, this being the side taken by mathebmatical natural philosophers, they must admit two self-subsisting nonentities, infinite and eternal, which exist (yet without there being any thing real) for the purpose of containing in themselves every thing that is real. If they adopt the second view of inherence, which is preferred by some metaphysical natural philosophers, and regard space and time as relations (contiguity in space or succession in time), abstracted from experience, though represented confusedly in this state of separation, they find themselves in that case necessitated to deny the validity of mathematical doctrines à priori in reference to real things (for example, in space), - at all events their apodeictic certainty. (Kant 1855: 34)
I wish I were conversant with logical fallacies and could identify the type.
The difficulty here lies wholly in the question - How the subject can have an internal intuition of itself? - but this difficulty is common to every theory. The consciousness of self (apperception) is the simple representation of the "Ego;" and if by means of that representation alone, all the manifold representations in the subject were spontaneously given, then our internal intuition would be intellectual. This consciousness in man requires an internal perception of the manifold representations which are previously given in the subject; and the manner in which these representations are given in the mind without spontaneity, must, on account of this difference (the want of spontaneity), be called sensibility. If the faculty of self-consciousness is to apprehend what lies in the mind, it must affect that, and can in this way alone produce an intuition of self. But the form of this intuition, which lies in the original constitution of the mind, determines, in the representation of time, the manner in which the manifold representations are to combine themselves in the mind; since the subject intuites itself, not as it would represent itself immediately and spontaneously, but according to the manner in which the mind is internally affected, consequently, as it appears, and not as it is. (Kant 1855: 41)
Makes little to no sense, as if it were one of those passages in which the translator found proper syntax missing. In Chase, self-consciousness is spontaneous, though he is laconic on how, and does not connect it with remembrance ("of the manifold representations which are previously given in the subject" - is he paraphrasing memory?).
Our knowledge springs from two main sources in the mind, the first of which is the faculty or power of receiving representations (receptivity for impressions); the second is the power of cognizing by means of these representations (spontaneity in the production of conceptions). Through the first an object is given to us; through the second, it is, in relation to the representation (which is a mere determination of the mind), thought. Intuition and conceptions constitute, therefore, the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither conceptions without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intiution without conceptions, can afford us a cognition. (Kant 1855: 45)
Above (1855: 18) it was intuition and understanding.
We apply the term sensibility to the receptivity of the mind for impressions, in so far as it is in some way affected; and, on the other hand, we call the faculty of spontaneously producing representations, or the spontaneity of cognition, understanding. (Kant 1855: 45)
This emphasis on spontaneity requires further elucidation. Is understanding, after all, a mid-point between sensuousness and reason?
Thoughts without content are void; intuitions without conceptions, blind. (Kant 1855: 46)
I'm constantly bothered by La Roux lyrics, "What are feelings without emotions?" - the answer is sensations.
See Sir William Hamilton's Edition of Reid's Works, passim. It is to Sir William Hamilton, one of the greatest logicians, perhaps the greatest, since Aristotle, and certainly one of the acutest thinkers of any time, that the Translator is indebted for the above view of the subject of logic. (Meiklejohn 1855: 47)
Okay then.
General logic is again either pure or applied. In the former, we abstract all the empirical conditions under which the understanding is exercised; for example, the influence of the senses, the play of the phantasy or imagination, the laws of the memory, the force of habit, of inclination, &c., consequently also, the source of prejudice, - in a word, we abstract all causes from which particular cognitions arise, because these causes regard the understanding under certain circumstances [|] of its application, and, to the knowledge of them experience is required. Pure general logic has to do, therefore, merely with pure à priori principles, and is a canon of understanding and reason, but only in respect of the formal part of their use, be the content what it may, empirical or transcendental. (Kant 1855: 47)
Sounds like this "applied logic" is just semiotics or psychology.
Thus applied logic treats of attention, its impediments and consequences, of the origin of error, of the state of doubt, hesitation, conviction, &c., and to it is related pure general logic in the same way that [|] pure morality, which contains only the necessary moral laws of a free will, is related to practical ethics, which considers these laws under all the impediments of feelings, inclinations, and passions to which men are more or less subjected, and which never can furnish us with a true and demonstrated science, because it, as well as applied logic, requires empirical and psychological principles. (Kant 1855: 48-49)
Again, sounds like something I'm more interested in than your à priori whatchamacallit. It's like he teasing the reader - hey, here's some exciting subjects I'm not going to talk about.
The old question with which people sought to push logicians into a corner, so that they must either have recourse to pitiful sophisms or confess their ignorance, and consequently the vanity of their whole art, is this, - "What is truth?" The definition of the word truth, to wit, "the accordance of the cognition with its object," is presupposed in the question; but we desire to be told, in the answer to it, what is the universal and secure criterion of the truth of every cognition. (Kant 1855: 50)
Good description. Though even a ideal definition of truth would not disprove the vanity and futility of logic.
For although a cognition may be perfectly accurate as to logical form, that is, not self-contradictory, it is notwithstanding quite possible that it may not stand in agreement with its object. Consequently, the merely logical criterion of truth, namely, the accordance of a cognition with the universal and formal laws of understanding and reason, is nothing more than the conditio sine quâ non, or negative condition of all truth. Farther than this logic cannot go, and the error which depends not on the form, but on the content of the cognition, it has no test to discover. (Kant 1855: 51)
Thence the futility of logic.
Now it may be taken as a safe and useful warning, that general logic, considered as an organon, [|] must always be a logic of illusion, that is, be dialectical, for, as it teaches us nothing whatever respecting the content of our cognitions, but merely the formal conditions of their accordance with the understanding, which do not relate to and are quite indifferent in respect of objects, any attempt to employ it as an instrument (organon) in order to extend and enlarge the range of our knowledge must end in mere prating; any one being able to maintain or oppose, with some appearance of truth, any single assertion whatever. (Kant 1855: 52-53)
Define:prate - talk foolishly or at tedious length about something; "I heard him prate on for at least an hour and a half". Looks like an archaic form of prattle - foolish or inconsequential talk.
But besides intuition there is no other mode of cognition, except through conceptions; consequently, the cognition of every, at least every human, understanding is a cognition through conceptions, - not intuitive, but discursive. All intuitions, as sensuous, depend on affections; conceptions, therefore, upon functions. By the word function, I understand the unity of the act of arranging diverse representations under one common representation. Conceptions, then, are based on the spontaneity of thought, as sensuous intuitions are on the receptivity of impressions. (Kant 1855: 57)
What, then, are affections? The definition of function here is not very productive: essentially, it organizes and unites representations. Without illustrations and something concrete, this is just word-play.
If we abstract all the content of a judgment, and consider only the intellectual form thereof, we find that the function of thought in a judgment can be brought under four heads, of which each contains three momenta. These may be conveniently represented in the following table: -As this division appears to differ in some, though not essential points, from the usual technic of logicians, the following observations, for the prevention of otherwise possible misunderstanding, will not be without their use. (Kant 1855: 58)
Bracketed with categories to for analogy - Quantity: Unity (Universal), Plurality (Particular), and Totality (Singular); Quality: Reality (Affirmative), Negation (Negative), Limitation (Infinite); Relation: Inherence and Subsistance (Categorical), Causality and Dependence (Hypothetical), Community (Disjunctive); Modality: Possibility (Problematical), Existence (Assertorical), Necessity (Apodeictical). The terms have almost no overlap (negation & negative being the single exception). How off is this translation?
Problematic judgments are those in which the affirmation or negation is accepted as merely possible (ad libitum). In the assertorical, we regard the proposition as real (true); in the apodeictical, we look on it as necessary. (Kant 1855: 61)
Yeah, Possibility, Reality and Necessity. I had no clue that Kant's famous categories were just his take on logic. The explanations surrounding the table (here, "sphere") make no god damn sense and I must hope that a later translation will be more intelligible.
The problematic proposition is, therefore, that which expresses only logical possibility (which is not objective); that is, it expresses a free choice to admit the validity of such a proposition, - a merely arbitrary reception of it into the understanding. The assertorical speaks of logical reality or truth; as, for example, in a hypothetical syllogism, the antecedens presents itself in a problematical form in the major, in an assertorical form in the minor, and it shows that the proposition is in harmony with the laws of the understanding. The apodeictical proposition cogitates the assertorical as determined by these very laws of the understanding, consequently as affirming à priori, and in this manner it expresses logical necessity. (Kant 1855: 61)
At least it now makes sense why Schiller sums up the "assertorical" as "when thought once declared - that is" (1845: 55-56).
In this manner, there arise exactly so many pure conceptions of the understanding, applying à priori to objects of intuition in general, as there are logical functions in all possible judgments. For there is no other function or faculty existting in the understanding besides those enumerated in that table. These conceptions we shall, with Aristotle, call categories, our purpose being originally identical with his, notwithstanding the great difference in the execution.This, then, is a catalogue of all the originally pure conceptions of the synthesis which the understanding contains à priori, and these conceptions alone entitle it to be called a pure understanding; inasmuch as only by them it can render the manifold of intuition conceivable, in other words, think an object of intuition. (Kant 1855: 64)
The "purity" of these conceptions will come into play with Chase and Peirce - as regards their universal generality.
"It is a serious error to imagine that, in his Categories, Aristotle proposed, like Kant, 'an analysis of the elements of human reason.' The ends proposed by the two philosophers were different, even opposed. In their several Categories, Aristotle attempted a synthesis of things in their multiplicity, - a classification of objects real, but in relation to thought; Kant, an analysis of mind in its unity, - a dissection of thought, pure, but in relation to its objects. The predicaments of Aristotle are thus objective, of things as understood; those of Kant subjective, of the mind as understanding. The former are results à posteriori - the creation of abstraction and generalisation; the latter, anticipations à priori - the conditions of those acts themselves." (Hamilton, Essays and Discussions; in Meiklejohn 1855: 65; footnote)
Hamilton actually makes sense.
I purposely omit the definitions of the categories in this treatise. I shall analyze these conceptions only so far as is necessary for the doctrine of method, which is to form a part of this critique. (Kant 1855: 66)
A right old prick-tease you are, mate. I'm only reading this shite because of the categories.
This table, which contains four classes of conceptions of the understanding, may, in the ficrst instance, be divided into two classes, the first of which relates to objects of intuition - pure as well as empirical; the second, to the existence of these objects, either in relation to one another, or to the understanding. The former of these classes of categories I would entitle the mathematical, and the latter the dynamical categories. The former, as we see, has no correlates; these are only to be found in the second class. This difference must have a ground in the nature of the human understanding. (Kant 1855: 67)
If I'm reading this correctly, categories of Quantity and Quality are mathematical, and the categories of Relation and Modality are dynamical.
It is to be added, that the third category in each triad always arises from the combination of the second with the first. (Kant 1855: 67)
Already a familiar song and dance via Peirce. E.g. "the unity of plurality gives totality, the negation of reality gives limitation and the permanence of community causality" (Topa 2018: 116).
Thus Totality is nothing else but Plurality contemplated as Unity; Limitation is merely Reality conjoined with Negation; Community is the Causality of a Substance, reciprocally determining, and determined by other substances; and [|] finally, Necessity is nothing but Existence, which is given through the Possibility itself. (Kant 1855: 67-68)
Topa's examples all "give", here the verbs are more varied. What's the significance of mathematical/dynamical though?
Now, in every cognition of an object, there is unity of conception, which may be called qualitative unity, so far as by this term we understand only the unity in our connection of the manifold; for example, unity of the theme in a play, an oration, or a story. Secondly, there is truth in respect of the deductions from it. The more true deductions we have from a given conception, the more criteria of its objective reality. This we might call the qualitative plurality of characteristic marks, which belong to a conception as to a common foundation, but are not cogitated as a quantity in it. Thirdly, there is perfection, - which consists in this, that the plurality falls back upon the unity of the conception, and accords completely with that conception, and with no other. This we may denominate qualitative completeness. Hence it is evident that these logical criteria of the possibility of cognition, are merely the three categories of Quantity modified and transformed to suit an unauthorized manner of applying them. That is to say, the three categories, in which the unity in the production of the quantum must be homogeneous throughout, are transformed solely with a view to the connexion of heterogeneous parts of cognition in one act of consciousness, by means of the quality of the cognition, which is the principle of that connexion. (Kant 1855: 70)
Who authorizes the manner of applying the categories?
The three categories are quantitative; these conceptions, qualitative. They are logical conditions employed as metaphysical conceptions, - one of the very commonest errors in the sphere of mental science. (Meiklejohn 1855: 71; fn)
Oh, I hate logic and don't know the meaning of metaphysics. Damn it feels good to be a gangsta.
Now there are only two conditions of the possibility of a cognition of objects; firstly, Intuition, by means of which the object, though only as phænomenon, is given; secondly, Conception, by means of which the object which corresponds to this intuition is thought. (Kant 1855: 77)
The translator forewarned that there are repetitions but holy shit this must be the fourth or fifth iteration of this distinction.
Apperception simply means consciousness. But it has been considered better to employ this term, not only because Kant saw fit to have another word besides Bewusstseyn, but because the term consciousness denotes a state, apperception an act of the ego; and from this alone the superiority of the latter is apparent. (Meiklejohn 1855: 81; fn)
Define:apperception - the mental process by which a person makes sense of an idea by assimilating it to the body of ideas he or she already possesses.
For the Ego, as a simple representation, presents us with no manifold content; only in intuition, which is quite different from the representation Ego, can it be given us, and by means of conjunction, it is cogitated in one self-consciousness. An understanding, in which all the manifold should be given by means of consciousness itself, would be intuitive; our understanding can only think, and must look for its intuition to sense. I am, therefore, conscious of my identical self, in relation to the variety of representations given to me in an intuition, because I call all of them my representations. In other [|] words, I am conscious myself of a necessary à priori synthesis of my representations, which is called the original synthetical unity of apperception, underwhich rank all the representations presented to me, but that only by means of a synthesis. (Kant 1855: 83)
If I called my representations something else, e.g. not mine, I wouldn't become conscious of my identical self, whatever that means?
The transcendental unity of apperception is alone objectively valid; the empirical which we do not consider in this essay, and which is merely a unity deduced from the former under given conditions in concreto, possesses only subjective validity. One person connects the notion conveyed in a word with one thing, another with another thing; and the unity of consciousness in that which is empirical, is, in relation to that which is given by experience, not necessarily and universally valid. (Kant 1855: 86)
That is why good writers refer to something concrete and make their meaning apparent. It also doesn't help if you use words like transcendental, apperception, and synthesis in a word-soup like the previous few pages. It comes across as verbal masturbation rather than philosophy.
To think an object and to cognize an object are by no means the same thing. In cognition there are two elements: firstly, the conception, whereby an object is cogitated (the category); and, secondly, the intuition, whereby the object is given. For supposing that to the conception a corresponding intuition could not be given, it would still be a thought as regards its form, but without any object, and no cognition of anything would be possible by means of it, inasmuch as, so far as I knew, there existed and could existed and could exist nothing to which my thought could be applied. (Kant 1855: 90)
Define:cognize - know or become aware of.
But the figurative synthesis, when it has relation only to the originally synthetical unity of apperception, that is to the transcendental unity cogitated in the catgories, must, to be distinguished from the purely intellectual conjunction, be entitled the transcendental synthesis of imagination. Imagination is the faculty of representing an object even without its presence in intuition. Now, as all our intuition is sensuous, imagination, by reason of the subjective condition under which alone it can give a corresponding intuition to the conceptions of the understanding, belongs to sensibility. But in so far as the synthesis of the imagination is an act of spontaneity, which is determinative, and not, like sense, merely determinable, and which is determinative, and not, like sense, merely determinable, and which is consequently able to determine sense à priori, according to its form, conformably to the unity of apperception, in so far is the imagination a faculty of determining sensibility à priori, and its synthesis of intuitions according to the categories, must be the transcendental synthesis of the imagination. (Kant 1855: 93)
One sentence per ten pages is intelligible. The rest seems to be following necessary conclusions leading to complete nonsense.
We cannot cogitate a geometrical line without drawing it in thought, nor a circle without describing it, nor represent the three dimensions of space without drawing three lines from the same point perpendicular to one another. We cannot even cogitate time, unless, in drawing a straight line (which is to [|] serve as the external figurative representation of time), we fix our attention on the act of the synthesis of the manifold, whereby we determine successively the internal sense, and thus attend also to the succession of this determination. (Kant 1855: 94-95)
Noted for possible significance for the specious present.
The understanding, therefore, does by no means find in the internal sense any such synthesis of the manifold, but produces it, in that it affects this sense. At the same time how [the] I who think is distinct from the I which intuites itself (other modes of intuition being cogitable as at least possible), and yet one and the same with this latter as the same subject; how, therefore, I am able to say: "I, as an intelligence and thinking subject, cognize myself as an object thought, so far as I am, moreover, given to myself in intuition, - only, like other phænomena, not as I am in myself, and as considered by the understanding, but merely as I appear," - is a question that has in it neither more nor less difficulty than the question, - "How can I be an object to myself," or this, - "How I can be an object of my own intuition and internal perceptions." But that such must be the fact, if we admit that space is merely a pure form of the phænomena of external sense, can be clearly proved by the consideration that we cannot represent time, which is not an object of external intuition, in any other way than under the image of a line, which we draw in thought, a mode of representation without which we could not cognize the unity of its dimension, and also that we are necessitated to take our determination of periods of time, or of points of time, for all our internal perceptions from the changes which we perceive in outward things. It follows that we must arrange the determinations of the internal sense, as phænomena in time, exactly in the same manner as we arrange those of the [|] external senses in space. And consequently, if we grant respecting this latter, that by means of them we know objects only in so far as we are affected externally, we must also confess, with regard to the internal sense, that by means of it we intuite ourselves only as we are internally affected by ourselves; in other words, as regards internal intuition, we cognize our own subject only as phænomenon, and not as it is in itself. (Kant 1855: 95)
Evidently being able to feel oneself and think of oneself simultaneously is problematic. The argument kinda seems to lead up to the looking glass self, though I'm not sure. The analogy with "determining periods of time [...] from changes which we perceive in outward things" would indicate that we would know ourselves likewise - through the reactions of others to ourselves. Though, if there were anything of which we had knowledge that was independent of the senses, it would be ourselves.
The I think expresses the act of determining my own existence. My existence is thus already given by the act of consciousness; but the mode in which I must determine my existence, that is, the mode in which I must place the manifold belonging to my existence, is not thereby given. For this purpose intuition of self is required, and this intuition possesses a form given à priori, namely, time, which is sensuous, and belongs to our receptivity of the determinable. Now, as I do not possess another intuition of self which gives the determining in me (of the spontaneity of which I am conscious), prior to the act of determination, in the same manner as time gives the determinable, it is clear that I am unable to determine my own existence as that of a spontaneous being, but I am only able to represent to myself the spontaneity of my thought, that is, of my determination, and my existence remains ever determinable in a purely sensuous manner, that is to say, like the existence of a phænomenon. But it is because of this spontaneity that I call myself an intelligence. (Kant 1855: 96; footnote)
And I thought Schiller's (1845: 98) play with "determinableness" and "determinateness" was whack.
We cannot think any object except by means of the categories; we cannot cognize any thought except by means of intuitions corresponding to these conceptions. Now all our intuitions are sensuous, and our cognition, in so far as the object of it is given, is empirical. But empirical cognition is experience; consequently no à priori cognition is possible for us, except of objects of possible experience. (Kant 1855: 101)
Insistence is not proof.
It is quite possible that some one may propose a species of præformation-system of pure reason - a middle way between the two - to wit, that the categories are neither innate and first à priori principles of cognition, nor derived from experience, but are merely subjective aptitudes for thought implanted in us contemporaneously with our existence, which were so ordered and disposed by our Creator, that their exercise perfectly harmonizes with the laws of nature which regulate experience. Now, not to mention that with such an hypothesis it is impossible to say at what point we must stop in the employment of predetermined aptitudes, the fact that the categories would in this case entirely lose that character of necessity which is essentially involved in the very conception of them, is a conclusive objection to it. (Kant 1855: 102)
"Substance possesses an attribute in virtue of which it is the equivalent of Mind, the attribute orderly concurrence of aptitudes." (Clay 1882: 105)
General logic is constructed upon a plan which coincides exactly with the division of the higher faculties of cognition. These are, Understanding, Judgment and Reason. This science, accordingly, treats in its analytic of Conceptions, Judgments, and Conclusions in exact correspondence with the functions and order of those mental powers which we include generally under the generic denomination of understanding. (Kant 1855: 103)
If Chase is correct in his general appraisal of Kant's work and his own triad (Motivity, Spontaneity, Rationality) accord with these (which they might not, as Kant calls these "higher faculties" of cognition), then Judgment(s) should be first, Understanding (and Conceptions) second, and Reason (and Conclusions) third. Note that in Kant, unlike Schiller, there is a conspicuous lack of triads.
Thus, it is evident, that the understanding is capable of being instructed by rules, but that the judgment is a peculiar talent, which does not, and cannot require tuition, but only exercise. This faculty is therefore the specific quality of the so-called mother-wit, the want of which no scholastic discipline can compensate. For although education may furnish, and, as it were, ingraft upon a limited understanding rules borrowed from other minds, yet the power of employing these rules correctly must belong to the pupil himself; and no rule which we can prescribe to him with this purpose, is, in the absence of deficiency of this gift of nature, secure from misuse. (Kant 1855: 105)
I feel personally attacked.
Deficiency in judgment is properly that which is called stupidity; and for such a failing we know no remedy. A dull or narrow-minded person, to whom nothing is wanting but a proper degree of understanding, may be improved by tuition, even so far as to deserve the epithet of learned. But as such persons frequently labour under a deficiency in the faculty of judgment, it is not uncommon to find men extremely learned, who in the application of their science betray to a lamentable degree this irremediable want. (Kant 1855: 105)
Yeah? Well, it's like... No, your dumb.
In truth, it is not images of objects, but schemata, which lie at the foundation of our pure sensuous conceptions. No image could ever be adequate to our conception of a triangle in general. For the generalness of the conception it never could attain to, as this includes under itself all triangles, whether right-angled, acute-angled, &c., whilst the image would always be limited to a single part of this sphere. The schema of the triangle can exist nowhere else than in thought, and it indicates a rule of the synthesis of the imagination in regard to pure figures in space. Still less is an object of experience, or an image of the object, ever adequate to the empirical conception. On the contrary, the conception always relates immediately to the schema of the imagination, as a rule for the determination of our intuition, in conformity with a certain general conception. The conception of a dog indicates a rule, according to which my imagination can delineate the figure of a four-footed animal in general, without being limited to any particular individual form which experience presents to me, or indeed to any possible image that I can represent to miself in concreto. This schematism of our understanding in regard to phænemena and their mere form, is an art, hidden in the depths of the human soul, whose true modes of action we shall only with difficulty discover and unveil. (Kant 1855: 109)
This aspect requires special attention. Peirce wrote to Chase regarding the subject of images and representations. Also, those very interesting introductions to philosophy in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy that have begun to make sense after some reading of Kant focus on images. This "schematism of our understanding" appears almost as a nod towards semiosis.
Without entering upon a dry and tedious analysis of the essential requisites of transcendental schemata of the pure conceptions of the understanding, we shall rather proceed at once to give an explanation of them according to the order of the categories, and in connection therewith. (Kant 1855: 110)
Accidental self-description.
Reality, in the pure conception of the understanding, is that which corresponds to a sensation in general; that, consequently, the conception of which indicates a being (in time). Negation is that the conception of which represents a not-being (in time). The opposition of these two consists therefore in the difference of one and the same time, as a time filled or a time empty. (Kant 1855: 110)
The third category is disguised? As in the previous paragraph, "number is nothing else than the unity of the synthesis of the manifold in a homogeneous intuition" - is homogeneous intuition synonymous with totality? Here, is limitation embodied in the filling and emptying of time?
The schema of community (reciprocity of action and reaction), or the reciprocal causality of substances in respect of their accidents, is the co-existence of the determinations of the one with those of the other, according to a general rule. (Kant 1855: 111)
I get the abstract logic of it - just like the unity of plurality gives totality, "causality of substance" gives "community (reciprocity between the agent and patient), but Kant is not considering that his reader might be a dummy who requires concrete examples.
The schema of possibility is the accordance of the synthesis of different representations with the conditions of time in general (as, for example, opposites cannot exist together at the same time in the same thing, but only after each other), and is therefore the determination of the representation of a thing at any time. (Kant 1855: 111)
This much is unproblematic: "All the impressions of mere Motivity are single and momentary" (Chase 1863: 548).
Thus, the schemata of the pure conceptions of the understanding are the true and only conditions whereby our understanding receives an application to objects, and consequently significance. (Kant 1855: 112)
Very likely "significance" is here meant in the sense of value, as in a previous iteration (not quoted above): "They are mere forms of thought, without objective reality, because we have no intuition to which the synthetical unity of apperception, which alone the categories contain, could be applied, for the purpose of determining an object. Our sensuous and empirical intuition can alone give them significance and meaning." (1855: 91)
If an cognition is to have objective reality, that is, to relate to an object, and possess sense and meaning in respect to it, it is necessary that the object be given in some way or another. Without this, our conceptions are empty, and we may indeed have thought by means of them, but by such thinking, we have not, in fact, cognized anything, we have merely played with representation. To give an object, if this expression be understood in the sense of to present the object, not mediately but immediately in intuition, means nothing else than to apply the representation of it to experience, be that experience real or only possible. (Kant 1855: 118)
How many times have I complained here of the lack of illustrations? "Playing with representations" I phrased as "verbal masturbation".
In the application of the pure conceptions of the understanding to possible experience, the employment of their synthesis is either mathematical or dynamical, for it is directed partly on the intuition alone, partly on the existence of a phænemenon. But the à priori conditions of intuition are in relation to a possible experience absolutely necessary, those of the existence of objects of a possible empirical intuition are in themselves contingent. Hence the principles of the mathematical use of the categories will possess a character of absolute necessity, that is, will be apodeictic; those, on the other hand, of the dynamical use, the character of an à priori necessity indeed, but only under the condition of empirical thought in an experience, therefore only mediately and indirectly. Consequently they will not possess that immediate evidence which is peculiar to the former, although their application to experience does not, for that reason, lose its truth and certitude. But of this point we shall be better able to judge at the conclusion of this system of principles. (Kant 1855: 121)
Recall that Quantity and Quality were mathematical, while Relation and Modality were dynamical. There is something "mediated" and "experiential" about the latter, though it is not obvious what.
The table of the categories is naturally our guide to the table of principles, because these are nothing else than rules for the objective employment of the former. Accordingly, all principles of the pure understanding are -These appelations I have chosen advisedly, in order that we might not lose sight of the distinctions in respect of the evidence and the employment of these principles. It will, however, soon appear that - a fact which concerns both the evidence of these principles, and the à priori determination of phænomena - according to the categories of Quantity and Quality (if we attend merely to the form of these), the principles of these categories are distinguishable from those of the two others, inasmuch as the former are possessed of an intuitive, but the latter of a merely discursive, though in both instances a complete certitude. I shall therefore call the former mathematical, and the latter dynamical principles. (Kant 1855: 121-122)
Okay. "AXIOMS of Intuition" (Quantity) and "ANTICIPATIONS of Perception" (Quality) are intuitive and mathematical; "ANALOGIES of Experience" (Relation) and "POSTULATES of Empirical Thought in general" (Modality) are discursive and dynamical.
Perception is empirical consciousness, that is to say, a consciousness, which contains an element of sensation. Phænomena as objects of perception are not pure, that is, merely formal intuitions, like space and time, for they cannot be perceived in themselves. (Kant 1855: 126)
Using a term five times before giving a sensible definition on page 126, not good form.
Apprehension, by means of sensation alone, fills only one moment, that is, if I do not take into consideration a succession of many sensations. (Kant 1855: 127)
Again, "All the impressions of mere Motivity are single and momentary" (Chase 1863: 548).
Apprehension is the Kantian word for perception, in the largest sense in which we employ that term. It is the genus which includes under it as species, perception proper and sensation proper. (Meiklejohn 1855: 127; footnote)
Terms for perception screwed up beyond comprehension, as always.
Accordingly, every sensation, consequently every reality in phænomena, however small it may be, has a degree, that is, an intense quantity, which may always be lessened, and between reality and negation there exists a continuous connection of possible realities, and possible smaller perceptions. Every colour - for example, red - has a degree, which, be it ever so small, is never the smallest, and so it is always with heat, the momentum of weight, &c. (Kant 1855: 128)
Explicating the curious statement on the previous page: "Now every sensation is capable of a diminution, so that it can decrease, and thus gradually disappear" (ibid, 127).
Experience is an empirical cognition; that is to say, a cognition which determines an object by means of perceptions. It is therefore a synthesis of perceptions, a synthesis which is not itself contained in perception, but which contains the synthetical unity of the manifold of perception in a consciousness; [|] and this unity constitues the essential of our cognition of objects of the senses, that is, of experience (not merely of intuition or sensation). (Kant 1855: 132-133)
Slightly more specific than "the mind's embrace of an object". The procession from firstness (perception) to thirdness (cognition) is one of determination (rather than, say, discernment).
The three modi of time are permanence, succession, and co-existence. Accordingly, there are three rules of all relations of time in phænomena, according to which the existence of every phænomenon is determined in respect of the unity of all time, and these antecede all experience, and render it possible. (Kant 1855: 133)
Good to know, though doesn't permanence imply co-existence?
Kant's meaning is: The two principles enunciated under the heads of "Axioms of Intuition," and "Anticipations of Perception," authorize the application to phænomena of determinations of size and number, that is, of mathematic. (Meiklejohn 1855: 134; footnote)
It's slowly beginning to make sense: the categories of quantity pertain to number (e.g. single dot, five such dots, the number five), and quality pertains to size (negation of reality leading to limitation, something to do with the diminuation of perceptive experience, effectively having to do with "size"). It is amazing how such elementary stuff begins to make some sense just by sticking it out and bearing the tedium of Kant's exposition. Quantity and Quality, note too, are described with a very familiar phrase from the Russian formalists: "We may therefore entitle these two principles constitutive" (ibid, 134) - god damn constitutive principles!
But the substratum of all reality, that is, of all that pertains to the existence of things, is substance; all that pertains to existence can be cogitated only as a determination of substance. Consequently, the permanent, in relation to which alone can all relations of time in phænomena be determined, is substance in the world of phænomena, that is, the real in phænomena, that which, as the substratum of all change, remains ever the same. Accordingly, as this cannot change in existence, its quantity in nature can neither be increased nor diminished. (Kant 1855: 137)
"For brevity's sake let the naturally ungenerable be known as the perdurable, and all other entity as the non-perdurable. Substance and its inalienable qualities are perdurable" (Clay 1882: 95).
For example, I see a ship float down the stream of a river. My perception of its place lower down follows upon my perception of its place higher up the course of the river, and it is impossible that in the apprehension of this phænomenon, the vessel should be perceived first below and afterwards higher up the stream. Here, therefore, the order in the sequence of perceptions in apprehension is determined; and by this order apprehension is regulated. (Kant 1855: 144)
It sounds like he's approaching the specious present here but I'm not at all certain what the point is. Schiller made the recognition of it easy by referring to the succession of notes in a musical performance.
No doubt it appears as if this were in thorough contradiction to all the notions which people have hithero entertained in regard to the procedure of the human understanding. According to these opinions, it is by means of the perception and comparison of similar consequences following upon certain antecedent phænomena, that the understanding is led to the discovery of a rule, according to which certain events always follow certain phænomena, and it is only by this process that we attain to the conception of cause. Upon such a basis, it is clear that this conception must be merely empirical, and the rule which it furnishes us with - "Everything that happens must have a cause" - would be just as contingent as experience itself. The universality and necessity of the rule or law would be perfectly spurious attributes of it. Indeed, it could not possess universal validity, inasmuch as it would not in this case be à priori, but founded on deduction. (Kant 1855: 146)
Once again a moderately violent reaction against Hume's empiricism and the formation of habits, previously noted in the introduction (Kant 1855: 3); again, "Among philosophers, David Hume came the nearest of all to this problem; yet it never acquired in his mind sufficient precision, nor did he regard the question in its universality" (ibid, 12); and once again later on: "he was forced to derive these conceptions from experience, that is from a subjectie necessity arising from repeated association of experience erroneously considered to be objective, - in one word, from "habit." (ibid, 78). All in all, the contention is somewhat reminiscent of Morris's statistical view of the interpretant (subjective views as opposed to, presumably, logical necessity).
Now how happens it, that to these representations we should set an object, or that, in addition to their subjective reality, as modifications, we should still further attribute to them a certain unknown objective reality? It is clear that objective significancy cannot consist in a relation to another representation (of that which we desire to term object), for in that case the question again arises: "How does this other representation go out of itself, and obtain objective significancy over and above the subjective, which is proper to it, as a determination of a state of mind?" If we try to discover what sort of new property the relation to an object gives to our subjective representations, and what new importance they thereby receive, we shall find that this relation has no other effect than that of rendering necessary the connexion of our representations in a certain manner, and of subjecting them to a rule; and that conversely, it is only because a certain order is necessary in the relations of time and of our representations, that objective significancy is ascribed to them. (Kant 1855: 147)
A semiotic problem, and a hint towards why the "object" is part of Peircean semiotics but not of Saussurean semiology: in the latter it is (presumably, haven't still read Saussure) social convention, which can be however arbitrary it wishes, whereas in the former the guiding principle is logical necessity and subjection to rule.
For example, there is heat in a room, which does not exist in the open air. I look about for the cause, and find it to be the fire. Now the fire as the cause, is simultaneous with its effect, the heat of the room. In this case, then, there is no succession as regards time, between cause and effect, but they are simultaneous; and still the law holds good. The greater part of operating causes in nature are simultaneous with their effects, and the succession in time of the latter is produced only because [|] the cause cannot achieve the total of its effect in one moment. (Kant 1855: 150-151)
This is a valuable addition to my elucidation of Chase's system. The commonplace example I intended to employ, that of a tree falling in the forest, would involve (1) hearing the tree fall, that is, hearing something, (2) spontaneously, "I look about for the cause", and - now the important part - I must be able to see the branches of the falling tree still swinging after the tree has landed to conclude (3) that a tree had fallen. I now realize that this illustration is limited and would pertain only to causal instances, of semiosis "with an object".
Such an analysis, indeed, executed with great particularity, may already be found in well-known works on this subject. (Kant 1855: 151)
Oh, sure, don't bother naming names, I'm sure readers two centuries hence will know what specific works you're thinking of.
The word community has in our language two meanings, and contains the two notions conveyed in the Latin communio, and commercium. We employ it in this place in the latter sense - that of a dynamical community, without which even the community of place (communio spatii) could not be empirically cognized. In our experiences it is easy to observe, that it is only the continuous influence in all parts of space that can conduct our senses from one object to another; that the light which plays between our eyes and the heavenly bodies produces a mediating community between them and us, and thereby evidences their co-existence with us; that we cannot empirically change our position (perceive this change), unless the existence of matter throughout the whole of space rendered possible the perception of the positions we occupy; and that this perception can prove the contemporaneous existence of these places only through their reciprocal influence, and thereby also the co-existence of even the most remote objects - although in this case the proof is only mediate. (Kant 1855: 158)
"Commercium is a legal term relating to ancient Roman Law. The term refers to the general rule that the law of a community was for the members of that community only, and that the stranger was without rights." (Wikipedia) - This is indeed even an aspect of Malinowski's phatic communion, that the stranger is an enemy. "Co-existence" gets at Kant's meaning here more directly, and the connection with the Quantitative category of Totality is palpable (Unity in Plurality - e.g. seeing two things simultaneously). Now that I think about it, the "reciprocity" in such "community" might be comparable to the aspect of hierarchical functionalism that regulates the interactions of functions and establishes their dominant-subordinate relationships - but this is far beyond the point at the present moment.
The three dynamical relations then, from which all others spring, are those of Inherence, Consequence, and Composition. (Kant 1855: 159)
This might be a heck a lot less confusing if he had used Composition instead of Community right from the start.
These, then, are the three analogies of experience. They are nothing more than principles of the determination of the existence of phænomena in time, according to the three modi of this determination; to wit, the relation to time itself as a quantity (the quantity of existence, that is, duration), the relation in time as a series or succession, finally, the relation in time as the complex of all existence (simultaneously). (Kant 1855: 159)
In the copy I'm reading, the original owner of the book has written "sum" over the word "complex". I've employed the word "complex" myself when sorting quotations, tagging passages that pertain to various topics with "complex", as in a multi-vitamin complex. Define:complex - consisting of many different and connected parts.
The combined expression of all is this: All phænomena exist in one nature, and must so exist, inasmuch as without this à priori unity, no unity of experience, and consequently no determination of objects in experience, is possible. (Kant 1855: 160)
Quite possibly related to Peirce's famous synechism.
The Postulates of Empirical Thought(Kant 1855: 161)
- That which agrees with the formal conditions (intuition and conception) of expeirence, is possible.
- That which coheres with the material conditions of experience (sensation), is real.
- That whose coherence with the real is determined according to universal conditions of experience is (exists) necessary.
This is a re-iteration of the logic of unity of plurality making totality, but the formulation is somewhat confusing: are "universal conditions" the same as the "formal conditions"? It may do well upon second reading to keep in mind that intuition and conception pertain to formal conditions and sensation to material conditions, but then again a consequent translation might have different equivalents, and is sensation identical with perception? The third clause does not yet make full sense, as I have still to grasp what exactly he means by determination.
Idealism - I mean material idealism - is the theory which declares the existence of objects in space without us to be either (1) doubtful and indemonstrable, or (2) false and impossible. The first is the problematical idealism of Des Cartes, who admits the undoubted certainty of only one empirical assertion (assertio), to wit, I am. The second is the dogmatical idealism of Berkeley, who maintains that space, together with all the objects of which it is the inseparable condition, is a thing which is in itself impossible, and that consequently the objects in space are mere products of the imagination. (Kant 1855: 166)
Idealism is pretty absurd if put this way.
So that if the conception merely agree with the formal conditions of experience, its object is called possible; if it is in connection with perception, and determined thereby, the object is real; if it is determined according to conceptions by means of the connection of perceptions, the object is called necessary. (Kant 1855: 173)
A restatement of "The Postulates of Empirical Thought". Indeed, "sensation" and "perception" appear to be identical. As to the substance, if you can think of something, it's possible; if you perceive something, it's real; but if you think and perceive it is necessary? Doesn't this somewhat diminish the notion of necessity?
In is very remarkable that we cannot perceive the possibility of a thing from the category alone, but must always have an intuition, by which to make evident the objective reality of the pure conception of the understanding. Take, for example, the categories of relation. How (1) a thing can exist only as a subject, and not as a mere determination of other things, that is, can be substance; or how (2), because something exists, some other thing must exist, consequently how a thing can be a cause; or (3) how, when several things exist, from the fact that one of these things exists, some consequence to the others follows, and reciprocally, and in this way a community of substances can be possible - are questions whose solution cannot be obtained from mere conceptions. (Kant 1855: 174)
And what the hell is "intuition" anyway?
When I think the reality of a thing, I do really think more than the possibility, but not in the thing; for that can never contain more in reality than was contained in its complete possibility. But while the notion of possibility is merely the notion of a position of a thing in relation to the understanding (its empirical use), reality is the conjunction of the thing with perception. (Kant 1855: 174; fn)
A thing not perceived has no reality, then?
The above remarks are of the greatest importance, not only for the confirmation of our previous confutation of idealism, but still more, when the subject of self-cognition by mere internal consciousness and the determination of our own nature without the aid of external empirical intuitions is under discussion, for the indication of the grounds of the possibility of such a cognition. (Kant 1855: 177)
Self-knowledge, as opposed to self-consciousness.
The principles of the pure understanding, whether constitutive à priori (as the mathematical principles), or merely regulative (as the dynamical), contain nothing but the pure schema, as it were, of possible experience. (Kant 1855: 178)
Was there ever any real doubt that experience was impossible?
Although all these principles, and the representation of the object with which this science occupies itself are generated in the mind entirely à priori, they would nevertheless have no significance, if we were not always able to exhibit their significance in and by means of phænomena (empirical objects). Hence it is requisite that an abstract conception be made sensuous, that is, that an object corresponding to it in intuition be forthcoming, otherwise the conception remains, as we say, without sense, that is, without meaning. (Kant 1855: 180)
It is not difficult to see who and how Hegel could have elaborated upon the distinction between abstract and concrete.
That this is also the case with all of the categories and the principles based upon them, is evident from the fact, that we cannot render intelligible the possibility of an object corresponding to them, without having recourse to thec onditions of sensibility, consequently, to the form of phænomena, to which, as their only proper objects, their usem ust therefore be confined, inasmuch as, if this condition is removed, all significance, that is, all relation to an object disappears, and no example can be found to make it comprehensible what sort of things we ought to think under such conceptions. (Kant 1855: 181)
Indeed, something of a theory of meaning, although one limited to finding an object.
Thought is the act of referring a given intuition to an object. If the mode of this intuition is unknown to us, the object is merely transcendental, and the conception of the understanding is employed only transcendentally, that is, to produce unity in the thought of a manifold in general. (Kant 1855: 183)
It becomes more and more clear why Peirce identified thought and sign-process (semiosis).
It may be advisable, therefore, to express ourselves thus. The pure categories, apart from the formal conditions of sensibility, [|] have a merely transcendental meaning, but are nevertheless not of transcendental use, because this is in itself impossible, inasmuch as all the conditions of any employment or use of them (in judgments) are absent, to wit, the formal conditions of the subsumption of an object under these conceptions. (Kant 1855: 183-184)
Knowledge that Wittgenstein, too, had studied Kant, negates any surprise at this distinction.
Reflection (reflexio) is not occupied about objects themselves, for the purpose of directly obtaining conceptions of them, but is that state of mind in which we set ourselves to discover the subjective conditions under which we obtain conceptions. It is the consciousness of the relation of given representations to the different sources or faculties of cognition, by which alone their relation to each other can be rightly determined. (Kant 1855: 190)
Making Dewey's use of this term, reflection, quite loaded. By no means is all thinking about the possibility of thinking.
But all judgment, nay, all comparisons require reflection, that is, a distinction of the faculty of cognition to which the given conceptions belong. The act whereby I compare my representations with the faculty of cognition which originates them, and whereby I distinguish whether they are compared with each other as belonging to the pure understanding or to sensuous intuition, I term transcendental reflection. Now, the relations in which conceptions can stand to each other are those of identity and difference, agreement and opposition, of the internal and external, finally, of the determinable and the determining (matter and form). (Kant 1855: 190)
The last relation is especially important for re-reading Schiller. Is matter determinable and form determining?
Logicians formerly termed the universal, matter, the specific difference of this or that part of the universal, form. (Kant 1855: 193)
This makes intuitive sense. The perdurable and its modifications.
Every conception, every title, under which many cogintions rank together, may be called a logical place. Upon this is based the logical topic of Aristotle, of which teachers and rhetoricians could avail themselves, in order, under certain titles of thought, to observe what would best suit the matter tehy had to treat, and thus enable themselves to quibble and talk with fluency and an appearance of profundity. (Kant 1855: 195)
Clapping back at ya boy Aristotle with an accusation of phaticity ("a flow of language"), evidently not self-aware that the very same could be said of him and his transcendental place and topic.
Conceptions may be logically compared without the trouble of inquiring to what faculty their objects belong, whether as noumena, to the understanding, or as phænomena to sensibility. If, however, we wish to employ these conceptions in respect of objects, previousl transcendental reflection is necessary. Without this reflection I should make a very unsafe use of these conceptions, and construct pretended synthetical propositions which critical reason cannot acknowledge, and which are based solely upon a transcendental amphiboly, that is, upon a substitution of an object of pure understanding for a phænomenon. (Kant 1855: 195)
Is that all that transcendental reflection consists of? Identifying the faculty to which the object belongs? Define:amphiboly - "ambiguity of speech, especially from uncertainty of the grammatical construction rather than of the meaning of the words, as in The Duke yet lives that Henry shall depose."
The conditions of sensuous intuition, which contain in themselves their own means of distinction, he did not look upon as primitive, because sensibility was to him but a confused mode of representation, and not any particular source of representations. A phænomenon was for him the representation of the thing in itself, although distinguished from cognition by the understanding only in respect of the logical form - the former with its usual want of analysis containing, according to hime, a certain mixture of collateral representations in its conception of a thing, which it is the duty of the understanding to separate and distinguish. In one word, Leibnitz intellectualised phænomena, just as Locke, in his system of noogony (if I may be allowed to make use of such expressions), sensualised the conceptions of the understanding, that is to say, declared them to be nothing more than empirical or abstract conceptions of reflection. Instead of seeking in the understansding and sensibility two different sources of representations, which, however, can present us with objective judgments of things only in conjunction, each of these great men recognised but one of these faculties, which, in their opinion, applied immediately to things in themselves, the other having no duty but that of confusing or arranging the representations of the former. (Kant 1855: 196)
Starting to see the crux of his emphasis on both sensation and understanding. The second term, I have a hunch, is missing from this scheme probably because "action" (behaviour) was not yet viewed as a source of representation (may have had something to do with the "disembodied" nature of pre-modern thought), or, which seems more productive, the second term is a "mediating term" between sensation and understanding.
If by the complaint of being unable to perceive the internal nature of things, it is meant that we do not comprehend by the pure understanding what the things which appear to us may be in themselves, it is a silly and unreasonable complaint; for those who talk thus, really desire that we should be able to cognize, consequently to intuite things without senses, and therefore wish that we possessed a faculty of cognition perfectly different from the human faculty, not merely in degree, but even as regards intuition and the mode thereof, so that thus we should not be men, but belong to a class of beings, the possibility of whose existence, much less their nature and constitution, we have no means of cognizing. (Kant 1855: 200)
Recently met a contentious interpretation of Kant by Stephen Hicks, who attributed to Kant the beginnings of postmodernism (?), and summarized Kant's philosophy thus: "Limited to knowledge of phenomena that it has itself constructed according to its own design, reason cannot know anything outside itself" (Hicks 2014: 28). Evidently he missed everything Kant wrote of intuition and sensation and perception. His summary sounds, in light of this passage, like if we can't perceive atoms and molecules, cannot sense the charges on the isotopes, then we can't know anything.
The true use of the conceptions of reflection in the employment of the understanding, has, as we have shown, been so misconceived by Leibnitz, one of the most acute philosophers of either ancient or modern times, that he has been misled into the construction of a baseless system of intellectual cognition, which professes to determine its objects without the intervention of the senses. (Kant 1855: 201)
In other words, not that reason cannot know anything outside itself, but that it cannot do so without the intervention of the senses.
The conception of a cubic foot of space, however I may think it, is in itself completely identical. But two cubic feet in space are nevertheless distinct from each other from the sole fact of their being in different places (they are numero diversa); and these places are conditions of intuition, wherein the object of this conception is given, and which do not belong to the conception, but to the faculty of sensibility. (Kant 1855: 202)
Essentially the type/token distinction. This "numero diversa" brings up interesting results: "It is generally true, therefore, that the individuation of the same essence or form in a species does not come about by any real accidents, whether specifically or numerically different ones, for any substance that receives accidents in itself has to subsist earlier (and so it has to be individuated earlier) than it can become the subject of something else" (Henry of Ghent in Klima 2011: 53).
What we cognize in matter is nothing but relations (what we call its internal determinations are but comparatively internal). But there are some self-subsistent and permanent, through which a determined object is given. That I, when abstraction is made of these relations, have nothing more to think, does not destroy the conception of a thing as phænomenon, nor the conception of an object in abstracto, but it does away with the possibility of an object that is determinable according to mere conceptions, that is, of a noumenon. It is certainly startling to hear that a thing consists solely of relations; but this thing is simply a phænemonon, and cannot be cogitated by means of the mere categories: it does itself consist in the mere relations of some thing in general to the senses. (Kant 1855: 204)
It is not that startling for a semiotician, but then again "sign-relations" (märgisuhted) are different from the categories of relation (subsistence, causality, community).
Thought is certainly not a product of the senses, and in so far is not limited by them, but it does not therefore follow that it may be employed purely and without the intervention of sensibility, for it would then be without reference to an object. (Kant 1855: 205)
This idea, that thought without sense would be without an object, has passed several times already. This must be the first time "reference" is employed in the formulation (at least I'm noticing it for the first time).
To the categories of quantity, that is, the conceptions of all, many, and one, the conception which annihilates all, that is, the conception of none is opposed. And thus the object of a conception, to which no intuition can be found to correspond, is = nothing. That is, it is a conception without an object (ens rationis), like noumena, which cannot be considered possible in the sphere of reality, though they must not therefore be held to be impossible, - or like certain new fundamental [|] forces in matter, the existence of which is cogitable without contradiction, though, as examples from experience are not forthcoming, they must not be regarded as possible. (Kant 1855: 207-208)
This aspect is compatible with Chase's system, in which the "object-object" nexus I've already described as "nothing" (if a subject is not involved, anything occurring in the world is as good as nothing; formulating it thus actually points out a certain limit - Chase's system deals with consciousness, not with the world).
The table of this division of the conception of nothing (the corresponding division of the conception of something does not require special description,) must therefore be arranged as follows:We see that the ens rationis is distinguished from the nihil negativum or pure nothing by the consideration, that the former must not be reckoned among possibilities, because it is a mere fiction - though not self-contradictory, while the latter is completely opposed to all possibility, inasmuch as the conception annihilates itself. Both, however, are empty conceptions. On the other hand, the nihil privativum and ens imaginarium are empty data for conceptions. If light be not given to the senses, we cannot represent to ourselves darkness, and if extended objects are not perceived, we cannot represent space. Neither the negation, nor the mere form of intuition can, without something real, be an object. (Kant 1855: 208)
This is a fourth table already. Now I know that there are four kinds of nothing, though the distinctions seem very fine and require a better grasp of Kant's system than I can acquire upon first reading.
All our knowledge begins with sense, proceeds thence to understanding, and ends with reason, beyond which nothing higher can be discovered in the human mind for elaborating the matter of intuition and subjecting it to the highest unity of thought. (Kant 1855: 212)
Here, as opposed to earlier generalities about sources of knowledge, there is a linear progression, which is repeated in Chase, Peirce and Hodgson with minor variations.
Of reason, as of the understanding, there is a merely formal, that is, logical use, in which it makes abstraction of all content of cognition; but there is also a real use, inasmuch as it contains in itself the source of certain conceptions and principles, which it does not borrow either from the senses or the understanding. The former faculty has been long defined by logicians as the faculty of mediate conclusion in contradistinction to immediate conclusions (consequentiæ immediatæ); but the nature of the latter, which itself generates conceptions, is not to be understood from this definition. (Kant 1855: 212)
Quite possibly the source of spontaneous vs deliberative redintegration. Or, spontaneity and reason.
In the former part of our transcendental logic, we defined the understanding to be the faculty of rules; reason may be distinguished from understanding as the faculty of principles. (Kant 1855: 213)
As arbitrary as Schiller's division between truths and proofs.
The understanding may be a faculty for the production of unity of phænomena by virtue of rules (of the understanding) under principles. Reason, therefore, never applies directly to experience, or to any sensuous object; its object is, on the contrary, the understanding, to the manifold cognition of which it gives a unity à priori by means of conceptions - a unity which may be called rational unity, and which is of a nature very different from that of the unity produced by the understanding. (Kant 1855: 214)
Translation a bit iffy. But essentially we've returned to the "internal legislator" - Reason creates rules according to principles?
Spite of the great wealth of words which European languages possess, the thinker finds himself often at a loss for an expression exactly suited to his conception, for want of which he is unable to make himself intelligible either to others or to himself. To coin new words is a pretension to legislation in language which is seldom successful; and, before recourse is taken to so desperate an expedient, it is advisable to examine the dead and learned languages, with the hope and the probability that we may there meet with some adequate expression of the notion we have in our minds. In this case, even if the original meaning of the word has become somewhat uncertain, from carelessness or want of caution on the part of the authors of it, it is always better to adhere to and confirm its proper meaning - even although it may be doubtful whether it was formerly used in exactly this sense - than to make our labour vain by want of sufficient care to render ourselves intelligible. (Kant 1855: 220)
Peirce being an exception: "To a rich imagination and extraordinary learning he added one of the most essential gifts of succesful system builders, the power to coin an apt and striking terminology." (Cohen 1923: viii)
Ideas are, acording to him [Plato], archetypes of things themselves, and not merely keys to possible experiences, like the categories. In his view they flow from the highest reason, by which they have been imparted to human reason, which, however, exists no longer in its original state, but is obliged with great labour to recal by reminiscence - which is called philosophy - the old but now sadly obscured ideas. (Kant 1855: 221)
...
We are in no want of words to denominate adequately every mode of representation, without the necessity of encroaching upon terms which are proper to others. The following is a graduated list of them. The genus is representation in general (representatio). Under it stands representation with consciousness (perceptio). A perception which relates solely to the subject as a modification of its state, is a sensation (sensatio), an objective perception is a cognition (cognitio). A cognition is either an intuition or a conception (intuitus vel conceptus). [|] The former has an immediate relation to the object and is singular and individual; the latter has but a mediate relation, by means of a characteristic markw hich may be common to several things. A conception is either empirical or pure. A pure conception, in so far as it has its origin in the understanding alone, and is not the conception of a pure sensuous image, is called notio. A conception formed from notions, which transcends the possibility of experience, is an idea, or a conception of reason. To one who has accustomed himself to these distinctions, it must be quite intolerable to hear the representation of the colour red called an idea. It ought not even to be called a anotion or conception of understanding. (Kant 1855: 224-225)
A useful breakdown indeed. To do: check the remainder of the text for illustrations of each. He is sparing with anything concrete but maybe inference will help.
If we connect this subdivision with the main division, all the relations of our representations, of which we can form either a conception or an idea, are threefold: [|] 1. The relation to the subject; 2. The relation to the manifold of the object as a phænomenon; 3. The relation to all things in general. (Kant 1855: 232-233)
Sounds awfully lot like Morris's syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics, though not in that order, and severely restricted.
The thinking subject is the object-matter of Psychology; the sum total of all phænomena (the world) is the object-matter of Cosmology; and the thing which contains the highest condition of the possibility of all that is cogitable (the being of all beings) is the object-matter of all Theology. Thus pure reason presents us with the idea of a transcendental doctrine of the soul (psychologia rationalis), of a transcendental science of the world (cosmologia rationalis), and finally of a transcendental doctrine of God (theologia transcendentalis). (Kant 1855: 233)
Psychology, cosmology, and theology. There is a vague sense of connectness about this order when compared to "Peircean" triadics, but that is because it's modelled after Unity, Plurality, and Totality. Psychology combined with cosmology gives theology.
I, as thinking, am an object of the internal sense, and am called soul. That which is an object of the external senses is called body. Thus the expression, I, as a thinking being, designates the object-matter of psychology, which may be called the rational doctrine of the soul, inasmuch as in this science I desire to know nothing of the soul but what, independently of all experience (which determines me in concreto), may be concluded from this conception I, in so far as it appears in all thought. (Kant 1855: 237)
This distinction between internal and external sense could have been helpful at the start of the book. Another one of those aspects that make a second, third, and possibly twenty-third reading necessary.
It follows, therefore, that this supposed substance - this thing, the permanence of which is not assured in any other way, may, if not be decomposition, by gradual loss (remissio) of its powers (consequently by elanguescence, if I may employ this expression), be changed into nothing. (Kant 1855: 245)
Define:elanguescence - The soul's gradual loss of its powers. No dictionary entry: "Coleridge applies the term to himself at age 60 or so. [...] An avid reader of Kant since the late 1790's, he obviously is using it with Kant's connotation."
But if we proceed analytically - the "I think" as a proposition containing in itself an existence as given, consequently modality being the principle - and dissect this proposition, in order to ascertain its content, and discover whether and how this Ego determines its existence in time and space without the aid of any thing external; the propositions of rationalistic psychology would not begin with the conception of a thinking being, but with a reality, and the properties of a thinking being in general would be deduced from the mode in which this reality is cogitated, after everything empirical had been abstracted; as is shown in the following table:in every state of my thought. (Kant 1855: 247)
I now know that there is a shelf-worth of books explaining Kant's take on the self. In due time, I might come to understand what the heck is going on here.
There does not then exist any rational psychology as a doctrine furnishing any addition to our knowledge of ourselves. It is nothing more than a discipline, which sets impassable [|] limits to speculative reason in this region of thought, to prevent it, on the one hand, from throwing itself into the arms of a soulless materialism, and, on the other, from losing itself in the mazes of a baseless spiritualism. It teaches us to consider this refusal of our reason to give any satisfactiory answer to questions which reach beyond the limits of this our human life, as a hint to abandon fruitless speculation; and te direct, to a practical use, our knowledge of ourselves - which, although applicable only to objects of experience, receives its principles from a higher source, and regulates its procedure as if our destiny reached far beyond the boundaries of experience and life. (Kant 1855: 248-249)
Sounds a bit like pragmatics. Kant's finding the golden mean between empiricism and rationalism really shines through here (soulless materialism vs baseless spiritualism).
For his natural gifts, not merely as regards the talents and motives that may incite him to employ them - but especially the moral law in him, stretch so far beyond all mere earthly utility and advantage, that he feels himself bound to prize the mere consciousness of probity, apart from all advantageous consequences - even the shadowy gift of posthumous fame - above everything; and he is conscious of an inward call to constitute himself, by his conduct in this world - without regard to mere sublunary interests - the citizen of a better. (Kant 1855: 251)
Define:sublunary - belonging to this world as contrasted with a better or more spiritual one. Even the dictionary entries have a Kantian tint: "transcendental motives for sublunary actions" and "fleeting sublunary pleasures". Kant's own posthumous fame even permeates dictionaries.
But it is worthy of remark, that the transcendental paralogism produced in the mind only a one-sided illusion, in regard to the idea of the subject of our thought; and the conceptions of reason gave no ground to maintain the contrary proposition. The advantage is completely on the side of Pneumatism; although this theory itself passes into nought, in the crucible of pure reason. (Kant 1855: 255)
Define:pneumatism - the manifestation of spiritual gifts; specifically, observable phenomena and exterior signs frequently interpreted as indicating that one is possessed by the Holy Spirit; A belief in the soul, spirit, or life force; the theory or beliefs of the pneumatists. Used in sentence: "The Jerusalem community, he [Goguel] claims, considered Jesus to have become Messiah after his death when God exalted him to the position; their faith lacked all pneumatism; their emphasis was on Jesus as teacher" (Snape 1954: 1). Could one call the Pythagorean theory of the soul pneumatism?
Thetic is the term applied to every collection of dogmatical propositions. By antithetic I do not understand dogmatical assertions of the opposite, but the self-contradiction of seemingly dogmatical cognitions (thesis cum antithesi), in none of which we can discover any decided superiority. Antithetic is not therefore occupied with one-sided statements, but is engaged in considering the contradictory nature of the general cognitions of reason, and its causes. (Kant 1855: 263)
Define:thetic - Presented dogmatically; arbitrarily prescribed. Thesis - A statement supported by arguments. From Greek θετικῶς - positively, affirmatively; origin: "via late Latin from Greek, literally 'placing, a proposition', from the root of tithenai 'to place'". In other words, the core of the expression "I place before you".
A dialectical proposition or theorem of pure reason, must, according to what has been said, be distinguishable from all sophistical propositions, by the fact that it is not an answer to an arbitrary question, which may be raised at the mere pleasure of any person, but to one which human reason must necessarily encounter in its progress. (Kant 1855: 264)
A grander version of Peirce's "real doubt". Descart's hyperbolic doubt in his own existence was a "sophistical proposition".
If it understands little or nothing about these transcendental conceptions, no one can boast of understanding any more; and although it may not express itself in so scholastically correct a manner as others, it can busy itself with reasoning and arguments without end, wandering among mere ideas, about which one can always be very eloquent, because we know nothing about them; while, in the observation and investigation of nature, it would be forced to remain dumb and to confess its utter ignorance. (Kant 1855: 296)
On the whole this is the appeal of pure theory. It's why so much effort has been spent on, say, communication theory, without an analysis of any concrete situation of communication (or, worse yet, "communicationalize" phenomena that have very little, if at all, to do with communication, i.e. phatic fountains and such).
For the object is in our own mind, and cannot be discovered in experience; and we have only to take care that our thoughts are consistent with each other, and to avoid falling into the amphiboly of regarding our idea as a representation of an object empirically given, and therefore to be cognized according to the laws of experience. (Kant 1855: 303)
Bold. And surely modified by context (unquoted) to a less dogmatic degree.
In the transcendental æsthetic, we proved, that everything intuited in space and time - all objects of a possible experience, are nothing but phænomena, that is, mere representations; and that these, as presented to us - as extended bodies, or as series of changes - have no self-subsistent existence apart from human thought. (Kant 1855: 307)
Phenomena = representation, which in turn encompasses (cf. ibid, 224-225) perception, sensation, cognition, conception and idea. This run-down of phenomena by itself is worth examining.
But time and space, with all phænomena therein, are not in themselves things. They are nothing but representations, and cannot exist out of and apart from the mind. Nay, the sensuous internal intuition of the mind (as the object of consciosuness), the determination of which is represented by the succession [|] of different state in time, is not the real, proper self, as it exists in itself - not the transcendental subject, but only a phænomenon, which is presented to the sensibility of this, to us, unknown being. This internal phænomenon cannot be admitted to be a self-subsisting thing; for its condition is time, and time cannot be the condition of a thing in itself. (Kant 1855: 307-308)
This much we've already established, that time and space are not things in themselves but representations (contingent upon our "intuition"?). Likewise, we've also seen that the self we are aware of, and the contents of consciousness, are not things in themselves, not "subjective" but as-if sub-systems of the "objective". The thing in itself is, thus, without time and space. Or: "For I can say only of a thing in itself that it exists without relation to the senses and experience." (ibid, 308).
That there may be inhabitants in the moon, although no one has ever observed them, must certainly be admitted; but this assertion means only, that we may in the possible progress of experience discover them at some future time. (Kant 1855: 308)
"There was an LDS [Mormon] belief that the moon was inhabited, but they simply refer to "the inhabitants of the moon". (Stack Exchange) - lunatics.
We may, at the same time, term the non-sensuous cause of phænomena the transcendental object - but merely as a mental correlate to sensibility, considered as a receptivity. To this transcendental object we may attribute the whole connection and extent of our possible perceptions, and say that it is given and exists in itself prior to all experience. (Kant 1855: 309)
Thing in itself. Not following his own distinction, it should properly be called "transcendent object", no?
For in the world of sense, that is, in space and time, every condition which we discover in our investigation of phænomena is itself conditioned; because sensuous objects are not things in themselves (in which case an absolutely unconditioned might be reached in the progress of cognition), but are merely empirical representations, the conditions of which must always be found in intuition. The principle of reason is therefore properly a mere rule - prescribing a regress in the series of conditions for given phænomena, and prohibiting any pause or rest on an absolutely unconditioned. (Kant 1855: 317)
There is nothing non-semiotic inside the semiosphere because everything that enters it gets semiotized upon entry. Noting "rule" because Regeln turns out to be one of the crucial moments in Kant's philosophy.
There are only two modes of causality cogitable - the causality of nature, or of freedom. The first is the conjunction of a particular state with another preceding it in the world of sense, the former following the latter by virtue of a law. (Kant 1855: 330)
Once again, physical reality following the causality of nature by virtue of a law and semiotic reality following the causality of freedom in the world of sense.
Freedom, in the practical sense, is the independence of the will of coercion by sensuous impulses. A will is sensuous, in so far as it is pathologically affected (by sensuous impulses); it is termed animal (arbitrium brutum), when it is pathologically necessitated. The human will is certainly an arbitrium sensitivum, not brutum, but liberum; because sensuousness does not necessitate its action, a faculty existing in man of self-determination, independently of all sensuous coercion. (Kant 1855: 331)
"They suggest to Will to apply what was known to the Latins under the name arbitrium, - an act which founds resolve on mere opinion, an act indispensable to those who have to navigate a sea of conjecture" (Clay 1882: 10) - Clay certainly does not distinguish varieties of arbitrium, though he finds infinite distinctions in everything else.
For, if we attend, in our inquiries with regard to causes in the world of phænomena, to the directions of nature alone, we need not trouble ourselves about the relation in which the transcendental subject, which is completely unknown to us, stands to these phænomena and their connection in nature. The intelligible ground of phænomena in this subject does not concern empirical questions. It has to do only with pure thought; and, although the effects of this thought and action of the pure understanding are discoverable in phænomena, these phænomena must nevertheless be capable of a full and complete explanation, upon purely physical grounds, and in accordance with natural laws. And in this [|] case we attend solely to their empirical, and omit all consideration of their intelligible character, (which is the transcendental cause of the former,) as completely unknown, except in so far as it is exhibited by the latter as its empirical symbol. (Kant 1855: 337-338)
No idea what's going on here, just noting it down, so that I'll find and maybe understand it in a subsequent translation.
Be the object what it may, purely sensuous - as pleasure, or presented by pure reason - as good, reason will not yield to grounds which have an empirical origin. Reason will not follow the order of things presented by experience, but, with perfect spontaneity, rearranges them according to ideas, with which it compels empirical conditions to agree. It declares, in the name of these ideas, certain actions to be necessary which nevertheless have not taken place, and which perhaps never will take place; and yet presupposes that it possesses the faculty of causality in relation to these actions. (Kant 1855: 339)
The interpretation that, acconding to Kant, "reason can know nothing beyond itself" seems almost justified - reason rearranges experience, we see what we want to see. But, then again, the context implies that it might be a hypothetical supposition, without which "[Reason] could not expect its ideas to produce certain effects in the world of experience" (ibid, 339).
Let us take a voluntary action - for example, a falsehood - by means of which a man has introduced a certain degree of confusion into the social life of humanity, which is judged according to the motives from which it originated, and the blame of which and of the evil consequences arising from it, is imputed to the offender. We at first proceed to examine the empirical character of the offence, and for this purpose we endeavour to penetrate to the sources of that character, such as a defective education, bad company [|] a shameless and wicked disposition, frivolity, and want of reflection - not forgetting also the occasioning causes which prevailed at the moment of the transgression. (Kant 1855: 342-343)
Sounds like some of the stuff I've heard Kant's Anthropology contains.
The sensuous world contains nothing but phænomena, which are mere representations, and always sensuously conditioned; things in themselves are not, and cannot be, objects to us. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that we are not justified in leaping from some member of an empirical series beyond the world of sense, as if empirical representations were things in themselves, existing apart from their transcendental ground in the human mind, and the cause of whose existence may be sought out of the empirical series. This would certainly be the case with contingent things; but it cannot be with mere representations of things, the contingency of which is itself merely a phænomenon, and can relate to no other regress than that which determines phænomena, that is, the empirical. (Kant 1855: 348)
This point is starting to feel repetitious. Though, admittedly, even this iteration is riddled with fine distinctions I've not mastered (empirical representation vs mere representation?).
But ideas are still further removed from objective reality than categories; for no phænomenon can ever present them to the human mind in concerto. They contain a certain perfection, attainable by no possible empirical cognition; and they give to reason a systematic unity, to which the unity of experience attempts to approximate, but can never completely attain. (Kant 1855: 350)
Ideas give a systematic unity to reason.
Now a negation cannot be cogitated as determined, without cogitating at the same time the opposite affirmation. The man born blind has not the least notion of darkness, because he has none of light; the vagabond knows nothing of poverty, because he has never known what it is to be in comfort; the ignorant man has no conception of his ignorance, [|] because he has no conception of knowledge. All conceptions of negatives are accordingly derived or deduced conceptions; and realities contain the data, and, so to speak, the material or transcendental content of the possibility and complete determination of all things. (Kant 1855: 354)
This is something I've been thinking about frequently as of late. Specifically, about how the negations, accusations and defamations of an ideologue often contain their opposites. The clearest case being that when Trump tweets that something isn't case, it will sooner or later turn out to be the case. Even if you spray your lies from a firehose, they still have short legs.
This individual thing or being is then, by means of the above-mentioned transcendental subreption, substitued for our notion of a thing which stands at the head of the possibility of all things, the real conditions of whose complete determination it presents. (Kant 1855: 359)
Define:subreption - In canon law and Scots law, subreption is the obtainment of a dispensation or gift by concealment of the truth, whereas obreption is the obtainment of a dispensation or gift by fraud.
The notion of a supreme being is in many respects a highly useful idea; but for the very reason that it is an idea, it is incapable of enlarging our cognition with regard to the existence of things. It is not even sufficient to instruct us as to the possibility of a being which we do not know to exist. (Kant 1855: 370)
Are notion and idea interchangeable? According to the definitions given above (cf. ibid, 224-225), a notion is a pure conception originating from understanding alone, and an idea a conception formed from notion, transcending the possibility of experience.
An ideal is not even given as a cogitable object, and therefore cannot be inscrutable; on the contrary, it must, as a mere idea, be based on the constitution of reason itself, and on this account must be capable of explanation and solution. For the very essence of reason consists in its ability to give an account of all our conceptions, opinions, and assertions - upon objective, or, when they happen to be illusory and fallacious, upon subjective grounds. (Kant 1855: 377)
A special, "legislative", account of Reason.
In this mode of viewing them, both principles, in their purely heuristic and regulative character, and as concerning merely the formal interest of reason, are quite consistent with each other. The one says - you must philosophise upon nature, as if there existed a necessary primal basis of all existing things, solely for the purpose of introducing [|] systematic unity into your knowledge, by pursuing an idea of this character - a foundation which is arbitrarily admitted to be ultimate; while the other warns you to consider no individual determination, concerning the existence of things, as such an ultimate foundation, that is, as absolutely necessary, but to keep the way always open for further progress in the deduction, and to treat every determination as determined by some other. But if all that we perceive must be regarded as conditionally necessary, it is impossible that anything which is empirically given should be absolutely necessary. (Kant 1855: 378-379)
Here he almost manages to be inspiring, but then smashes that possibility with the last sentence. The distinction between these philosophical outlooks itself is serviceable. It sounds almost like our modern-day antinomy between those who believe in "natural law" and those derided as "relativistic".
The philosophers of antiquity regarded all the forms of nature as contingent; while matter was considered by them, in accordance with the judgment of the common reason of manking, as primal and necessary. But if they had regarded matter, not relatively - as the substratum of phænomena, but absolutely and in itself - as an independent existence, this idea of absolute necessity would have immediately disappeared. (Kant 1855: 379)
This is news to me, but then again I know next to nothing about antiquity. For the purpose of this first cursory reason, and possible links with Schiller, I'm highlighting the distinction between form and matter.
In fact, extension and impenetrability - which together constitute our conception of matter - form the supreme empirical principle of the unity of phænomena, and this principle, in so far as it is empirically unconditioned, possesses the property of a regulative principle. (Kant 1855: 379)
An intelligible illustration of a regulative principle.
Space is the primal condition of all forms, which are properly just so many different limitations of it; and thus, although it is merely a principle of sensibility, we cannot help regarding it as an absolutely necessary and self-subsistent thing - as an object given à priori in itself. (Kant 1855: 380)
Starting to make sense. Forms are limitations of space, meaning material delineates space, divides it up into segments of this and that.
The world around us opens before our view so magnificent a spectacle of order, variety, beauty, and conformity to ends, that whether we pursue our observations into the infinity of space in the one direction, or into its illimitable divisions on the other, whether we regard the world in its greatest or its least manifestations, - even after we have attained to the highest summit of knowledge which our weak minds can reach, we find that language in the presence of wonders so inconceivable has lost its force, and number its power to reckon, nay, even thought fails to conceive adequately, and our conception of the whole dissolves into an astonishment without the power of expression - all the more eloquent that it is dumb. (Kant 1855: 382)
Downright poetic. Calls to mind that famous scene from Contact (1997: "Some... ...celestial event... No! No words! No words... ...to describe it! Poetry! They should have sent... ...a poet. It's so beautiful! Beautiful! So beautiful. I had no idea."
Everywhere around us we observe a chain of causes and effects, of means and ends, of death and birth; and, as nothing has entered of itself into the condition in which we find it, we are constantly referred to some other thing, which itself suggests the same inquiry regarding its cause, and thus the universe must sink into the abyss of nothingness, unless we admit that, besides this infinite chain of contingencies, there exists something that is primal and self-subsistent - something which, as the cause of this phænomenal world, secures its continuance and preservation. (Kant 1855: 382)
Reminiscent of infinite semiosis. Though everything anchored to the self-subsistent... God?
This highest cause - what m agnitude shall we attribute to it? Of the content of the world we are ignorant; still less can we estimate its magnitude by comparison with the sphere of the possible. But this supreme cause being a necessity of the human mind, what is there to prevent us from attributing to it such a degree of perfection as to place it above the sphere of all that is possible? This we can easily do, although only by the aid of the faint outline of an abstract conception, by representing this being to ourselves as containing in itself, as an individual substance, all possible perfection - a conception which satisfies that requirement of reason which demands parsimony in principles, which is sfree from self-contradiction, which even contributes to the extension of [|] the employment of reason in experience, by means of the guidance afforded by this idea to order and system, and which in no respect conflicts with any law of experience. (Kant 1855:383)
It's so difficult to tell if this says that the supreme cause (e.g. God) is a necessary and self-consistent logical abstraction or if is the creation of our minds (specifically Reason, which finds necessity and no self-contradiction in the premise of a supreme being) and thus too perfect to be possible, or both. Since the very next sentence gives an appraisal: "This argument always deserves to be mentioned with respect" (ibid, 383), it might be possible that he's doing that thing, rehearsing the arguments of yore, playing around with them, considering them, before passing judgment and arriving at a deduction. This past page reads like it should have been the very first page of the book, illuminating the problems the whole is trying to answer (e.g. a "false start"). I wonder if the commentaries to CPR attempt their own reconstruction of the whole book, removing Kant's matter from its all too systematic form, and present it more cogently? That is to say, Kant might have been systematic to a fault, and either shot himself in foot in terms of intelligibilty, or made the difficulty of his work a virtue, or both. In any case, juggling arguments this way might be contagious.
This knowledge of nature again re-acts upon this idea - its cause; and thus our belief in a divine author of the universe rises to the power of an irresistible conviction. (Kant 1855: 383)
Is a divine author of the universe the cause of nature? Or was it all just random? Already looking forward to the distinctions of (anti-)naturalist (a)theist commitments (Byron & Lopes 2020).
I maintain, then, that the physico-theological argument is insufficient of itself to prove the existence of a Supreme Being, that it must entrust this to the ontological argument - to which it serves merely as an introduction, and that, consequently, this argument contains the only possible ground of proof (possesed by speculative reason) for the existence of this being. (Kant 1855: 383)
"The metaphysics of Professor Kant, at Koeningsberg, gain ground. A parson in Brandenburg has been suspended from his office for endeavouring to prove to his peasants, that, upon Kant's principles, there exists no God." (The English Review, 1783: 67)
The chief momenta in the physico-theological argument are as follow: 1. We observe in the world manifest signs of an arrangement full of purpose, executed with great wisdom, and existing in a whole of a content indescribably various, and of an extent without limits. 2. This arrangement of means and ends is entirely foreign to the things existing in the world - it belongs to them merely as a contingent attribute; in other words, the nature of different things could not of itself, whatever means were employed, harmoniously tend towards certain purposes, were they not chosen and directed for these purposes by a rational and disposing principle, in accordance with certain fundamental ideas. 3. There exists, therefore, a sublime and wise cause (or several), which is not merely a blind, all-powerful nature, producing the beings and events which fill the world in unconscious fecundity, but a free and intelligent cause of the world. 4. The unity of this cause may be inferred from the unity of the reciprocal relation existing between the parts of the world, as portions of an artistic edifice - an inference which all our observation favours, and all principles of analogy support. (Kant 1855: 383)
Essentally, is the orderly concurrence of aptitudes (here, harmonious unity of relations) a sign of an intelligent creator? My biggest take-away here is the analogy this presents with the unity of consciousness (the self), discussed the earlier portions of the book.
In the above argument, it is inferred from the analogy of certain products of nature with those of human art, when it compels Nature to bend herself to its purposes, as in the case of a house, a ship, or a watch, that the same kind of causality - namely, understanding and will - resides in nature. It is also declared that the internal possibility of this freely-acting nature (which is the source of all art, and perhaps also of human reason) is derivable from another and superhuman art, - a conclusion which would perhaps be found incapable of standing the test of subtle transcendental criticism. (Kant 1855: 384)
Wow, now it makes sense why Chase's Secondness is Spontaneity (understanding and will). It remains to answer, how does Schiller's Truth fit in? With the Supreme Being uttering truths that make themselves come true?
According tot he physico-theological argument, The connection [|] and harmony existing in the world evidence the contingency of the form merely, but not of the matter, that is, of the substance of the world. To establish the truth of the latter opinion, it would be necessary to prove that all things would be in themselves incapable of this harmony and order, unless they were, even as regards their substance, the product of a supreme wisdom. But this would require very different grounds of proof from those presented by the analogy with human art. This proof can at most, therefore, demonstrate the existence of an architect of the world, whose efforts are limited by the capabilities of the material with which he works, but not of a creator of the world, to whom all things are subject. Thus this argument is utterly insufficient for the task before us - a demonstration of the existence of an all-sufficient being. If we wish to prove the contingency of matter, we must have recourse to a transcendental argument, which the physico-theological was constructed expressly to avoid. (Kant 1855: 385-386)
In other words, it is impossible to prove that the world wouldn't work exactly as well as it does without a Supreme Being. Sadly, we can't replicate the Supreme Being in creating a world in order to prove that the world began as an intelligent creation. If we could, we would become Supreme Beings ourselves and thus defeat the whole purpose of looking up to one we can't see.
Where we have to do with the magnitude (of the perfection) of a thing, we can discover no determinate conception, except that which comprehends all possible perfection or completeness, and it is only the total (omnitudo) of reality which is completely determined in and through its conception alone. (Kant 1855: 385)
This sheds some light on the category of Totality. It being completely determined implies that the preceding two were not completely determined. A possible triadic riff here: (1) indeterminableness; (2) determining; (3) determination. An odd thought pops into mind: if finite beings proceed from indeterminableness to determination, does an infinite being proceed from determination to indeterminableness? In other words, a human being perceives, reacts, and comes to a conclusion but a Supreme Being begins from a final truth, acts, and then dissolves into a void. The only thing this schema is consistent with is an inconsistent revelation of triadicity.
Now it cannot be expected that any one will be bold enough to declare that he has a perfect insight into the relation which the magnitude of the world he contemplates, bears (in its extent [|] as well as in its content) to omnipotence, into that of the order and design in the world to the highest wisdom, and that of the unity of the world to the absolute unity of a Supreme Being. Physico-theology is therefore incapable of presenting a determinate conception of a supreme cause of the world, and is therefore insufficient as a principle of theology - a theology which is itself to be the basis of religion. (Kant 1855: 385-386)
We have seen that both "absolute" and "unity" are very loaded in this book. The unity of human consciousness is not so absolutely unified, it starts from sensation and reaches a necessarily partial relation with the totality of the universe. Moreover, the unity of human consciousness is itself such a partial, mediated, sensed thing that it can barely be identical with itself or identify with itself in time, whereas that of a Supreme Being should by definition be perfect and absolute, at all times and never. In other words, this impotence to have insight into the relation of the magnitude of the world with omnipotence (which would require a "transcendental deduction", to experience things-in-themselves?) is why so much philosophical ink has been spilled on the incapacity of human mind to measure infinity (we don't delineate space, space delineates us).
After elevating ourselves to admiration of the magnitude of the power, wisdom, and other attributesof the author of the world, and finding we can advance no further, we leave the argument on empirical grounds, and proceed to infer the contingency of the world from the order and conformity to aims that are observable in it. [...] Thus the physico-theological, failing in its undertaking, recurs in its embarrassment to the cosmological argument; and, as this is merely the ontological argument in disguise, it executes its design solely by the aid of pure reason, although it at first professed to have no connection with this faculty, and to base its entire procedure upon experience alone. (Kant 1855: 386)
So if measuring God is out of the question, let's get empirical and observe. But what we wish to observe is the that order determines the world, but that is itself an inference from a transcendental concept (presumably, that order determining the world necessitates an author), but this is an embarassing cosmological argument because the "argument" originates from Reason and/or is executed with the aid of Reason, so there is nothing empirical. I feel like there is something amiss here, as if Kant is constructing a self-defeating argument, pretending to argue for observing the orderly concurrence of aptitude, but dismissing it because it itself originates from Reason. Now that I think about it, what probably is unsaid here is what he's been saying throughout the book, that Reason is limited and cannot observe objectively. So he's just distrusting of sense-perception?
Continuing on the triadic reverse time-scale model, I wonder if it could be formulated as "easily" as the vaguely Indic (Soviet semiotic Indology is vague? Zilberman is difficult, but probably not vague if better translated and more fully interpreted) conception of becoming one with the totality and through that cosmic unification experience, perhaps at the moment of that becoming, achieve a oneness with the world that plays out in the opposite direction, your life passing through the "absolute unity" of the Supreme Being as first an idea (a conception formed of notions), a notion (pure conception), then as an empirical cognitive conception (an intuiton), then an objective perception, then as a modification of consciousness (a perception, which relates solely to the subject), and then a general representation (a representation without consciousness) - this is "a gradual list" of "words to denominate every mode of representation" (cf. ibid, 224-225). It might be completely arbitrary, or it might be "graduated" by three steps: in the ascending direction it proceeds from a representation without consciousness (the problem of the unconscious, the processes of perception), then proceeds to "modify" consciousness and by transforming this representation (of the world) from a purely empirical cognitive conception (an intuition) into a notion (a pure conception), and then ascending as a conception into an idea; in the descending direction it proceeds from an idea, dissolving into conceptions and notions, then consciousness modifies the state of the world (?) and this (?) further dissolves into (pure?) perception of the world in reverse? See, the tricky hook is that Reason constructed this series, thus it is limited to perceive the world, and is unable to think it into existence, which, in this morbid image, implies death and oneness and all that jazz. Many vaguenesses detectable, and dominated by a revelatory theory of triplicity, which really just boils down to isology between the reverse temporal orientations of 123 and 321 in some vague semiotic phenomenology? What's worse, it's a neo-Kantian musement that doesn't distinguish between ["k_h{nt] and ["k_hVnt] but considers them "isological"? Vague stuff that. Just put down "ibid", they'll know the ["kA{nt] by memory. Long annotation brings the mind's inability to fully embrace the object of its searches to the foreground in a disagreeable manner. Is the soul searching for itself this way, or is a soul admonishing its eventual abolishment?
The physico-theologians have therefore no reason to regard with such contempt the transcendental mode of argument, and to look down upon it, with the conceit of clear-sighted observers of nature, as the brain-cobwebs of obscure specialists. (Kant 1855: 386)
Did Kant just categorize me? Herr, I resent the implications that obscure specialists constitute a cobweb of brains (how materialistic!), ash being labelled vaguely a "physico-theologian" as if he is addressing a contingent of specific obscure specialists and not his own weird cobweb of an argument about how empirical observations of nature acting according to purpose and the world showing signs of order is a fallacy, and not of the straw-man kind, of having contempt towards the transcendental mode of argument while casting logical contempt upon observing the world because if you do that, you're using Reason and thus not being purely empirical. This page was such a tangled mess. A later translation better come across better.
For if they reflect upon and examine their own arguments, they will find that, after following for some time the path of nature and experience, and discovering themselves no nearer their object, they suddenly leave this path and pass into The region [|] of pure possibility, where they hope to reach upon the wings of ideas, what had eluded all their empiricla investigations. Gining, as they think, a firm footing after this immense leap, they extend their determinate conception - into the possession of which they have combe, they know not how - over the whole sphere of creation, and explain their ideal, which is entirely a product of pure reason, by illustrations drawn from experience - though in a degree miserably unworthy of the grandeur of the object, while they refuse to acknowledge that they have arrived at this cognition or hypothesis by a very different road from that of experience. (Kant 1855: 386-387)
In what is essentially philosophical slang, Kant here once again diminishes his imagined philosophical enemies, the empirical investigators or physico-theologians by implying that they are able to hold a complete conception of the entirety of the universe, you don't know shit about what's going on with the Egyptian nematodes on Ärikas. By the "ideal", I take it, he has in mind the standard of orderliness that ought to be used in appraising how much purpose nature demonstrates. "There is only one really serious philosophical problem," Camus says, and they don't call it the first philosophy for no reason, they wouldn't, would they?
Thus the physico-theological is based upon the cosmological, and this upon the ontological proof of the existence of a Supreme Being; and as besides these three there is no other path open to speculative reason, the ontological proof, on the ground of pure conceptions of reason, is the only possible one, if any proof of a proposition so far transcending the empirical exercise of the understanding is possible at all. (Kant 1855: 387)
This chapter cut me so bad I'm gonna simmer a bit, grow my little cobwebs on sovereign estnet, consult some big boys and come and beat it up. It's called Chapter Third, Section Sixth in this place (see kant, "place", "neighbourhood", "edging", "neck of the woods") but I'll find out it's A=B and harass it with a knife, which I now carry because of him. Why must German philosophers be such traumatizing bullies?
In whatever way the understanding may have attained to a conception, the existence of the object of the conception cannot be discovered in it by analysis, because the cognition of the existence of the object depends upon the object's being posited and given in itself apart from the conception. But it is utterly impossible to go beyond our conception, without the aid of experience - which presents to the mind nothing but phænomena, or to attain by the help of mere conceptions to a conviction of the existence of new kinds of objects or supernatural beings. (Kant 1855: 392)
And... objects are not given in themselves to our experience?
Reason never has an immediate relation to an object; it relates immediately to the understanding alone. It is only through the understanding that it can be employed in the field of experience. It does not form conceptions of objects, it merely arranges them and gives to them [|] that unity which they are capable of possessing when the sphere of their application has been extended as widely as possible. Reason avails itself of the conceptions of the understanding for the sole purpose of producing totality in the different series. This totality the understanding does not concern itself with; its only occupation is the connection of experiences, by which series of conditions in accordance with conceptions are established. The object of reason is therefore the understanding and its proper destination. As the latter brings unity into the diversity of objects by means of its conceptions, so the former brings unity into the diversity of conceptions by means of ideas; as it sets the final aim of a collective unity to the operations of the understanding, which without this occupies itself with a distributive unity alone. (Kant 1855: 394-395)
So, indeed, (3) Reason, (2) Understanding, and (1) Experience. Reason organizes the conceptions of understanding by means of ideas, and understanding itself forms those conceptions from experience.
When I observe intelligent men disputing about the distinctive characteristics of men, animals, or plants, and even of minerals, those on the one side assuming the existence of certain national characteristics, certain well-defined and hereditary distinctions of family, race, and so on, while the other side maintain that nature has endowed all races of men with the same faculties and dispositions, and that all differences are but the result of external and accidental circumstances, - I have only to consider for a moment the real nature of the subject of discussion, to arrive at the conclusion that it is a subject far too deep for us to judge of, and that there is little probability of either party being able to speak from a perfect insight into and understanding of the nature of the subject itself. (Kant 1855: 409)
Another iteration of that all-too-familiar antinomy between "natural law" and relativism (cf. above, 378-379).
Pure reason is, in fact, occupied with itself, and not with any object. Objects are not presented to it to be embraced in the unity of an empirical conception; it is only the cognitions of the understanding that are presented to it, for the purpose of receiving the unity of a rational conception, that is, of being connected according to a principle. (Kant 1855: 416)
The mind's embrace of an object thus not a misplaced metaphor.
Under the guidance of this idea, or principle, no empirical laws of corporeal phænomena are called in to explain that which is a phænomenon of the internal sense alone; no windy hypotheses of the generation, annihilation, and palingenesis of souls are admitted. (Kant 1855: 418)
Define:palingenesis - the exact reproduction of ancestral characteristics in ontogenesis.
The full discussion of this subject will be found in its proper place in the chapter on the antinomy of pure reason. (Kant 1855: 419)
Which was many many pages ago. The order of chapters in this book is really messed up.
If, then, the question is asked, in relation to transcendental theology; first, whether there is anything distinct from the world, which contains the ground of cosmical order and connection according to general laws? The answer is, Certainly. [|] For the world is a sum of phænomena; there must therefore be some transcendental basis of these phænomena, that is, a basis cogitable by the pure understanding alone. If, secondly, the question is asked, whether this being is substance, whether it is of the greatest reality, whether it is necessary, and so forth? I answer that this question is utterly without meaning. For all the categories which aid me in forming a conception of an object, cannot be employed except in the world of sense, and are without meaning, when not applied to objects of actual or possible experience. Out of this sphere, they are not properly conceptions, but the mere marks or indices of conceptions, which we may admit, although they cannot, without the help of experience, help us to understand any subject or thing. If, thirdly, the question is, whether we may not cogitate this being, which is distinct from the world, in analogy with the objects of exprience? The answer is, undoubtedly, but only as an ideal, and not as a real object. That is, we must cogitate it only as an unknown substratum of the systematic unity, order, and finality of the world - a unity which reason must employ as the regulative principle of its investigation of nature. (Kant 1855: 425-426)
Another iteration of the point of categories, which is to give meaning to objects. The Supreme Being is not an object, so the categories are useless on it.
Thus all human cognition begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to conceptions, and ends with ideas. (Kant 1855: 429)
Finally it is made red-wooden clear: (1) intuitions, (2) conceptions, and (3) ideas.
And as the inferences of which this dialectic is the parent, are not only deceitful, but naturally possess a profound interest for humanity, it was advisable at the same time, to give a full account of the momenta of this dialectical procedure, and to deposit it in the archives of human reason, as a warning to all future metaphysicians to avoid these causes of speculative error. (Kant 1855: 430)
Teasing with the title of the next book in his bibliography.
The restraint which is employed to repress, and finally to extirpate the constant [|] inclination to depart from certain rules, is termed Discipline. It is distinguished from culture, which aims at the formation of a certain degree of skill, without attempting to repress or to destroy any other mental power, already existing. In the cultivation of a talent, which has given evidence of an impulse towards self-development, discipline takes a negative, culture and doctrine, a positive part. (Kant 1855: 432-433)
Last I thought of this meaning of culture was at a fashionable business district that has turned an old machine factory into a hodgepodge of hipster restaurants. The sign said "there's culture in the air". How would self-improvement be "in the air" in such a commercial setting, I do not know. It gave off the distinct impression of having a vague understanding that "culture" is something good, and so an association with it is desirable. Words don't have to mean anything.
I am well aware that, in the language of the schools, the term discipline is usually employed as synonymous with instruction. But there are so many cases in which it is necessary to distinguish the notion of the former, as a course of corrective training, from that of the latter, as the communication of knowledge, and the nature of things itself demands the appropriation of the most suitable expressions for this distinction, that it is my desire that the former term sholud never be employed in any other than a negative signification. (Kant 1855: 433; footnote)
"A great mistake lies at the root of such an opinion, which assumes that the first object of conversation is not to please but to instruct." (Mahaffy 1888: 26-27) - The pedantic self-inserter who begins a sentence with "Actually..." is not even instructing but disciplining.
Philosophical cognition is the cognition of reason by means of conceptions; mathematical cognition is cognition by means of the construction of conceptions. The construction of a conception is the presentation a priori of the intuition which corresponds to the conception. For this purpose a non-empirical intuition is requisite, which, as an intuition, is an individual object; while, as the construction of a conception (a general representation), it must be seen to be universally valid for all the possible intuitions which rank under that conception. Thus I construct a triangle, by the presentation of the object which corresponds to this conception, either by mere imagination - in pure intuition, or upon paper - in empirical intuition, in both cases completely a priori, without borrowing the type of that figure from any experience. The individual figure drawn upon paper is empirical; but it serves, notwithstanding, to indicate the conception, even in its universality, because in this empirical intuition we keep our eye merely on the act of the construction of the conception, and pay no attention to the various modes of determining it, for example, its size, the length of its sides, the size of its angles, these not in the least affecting the essential character of the conception. (Kant 1855: 325)
Type/token (representation, presentation) applied on triangles. This paragraph is buzy with various grades of representation. What, for example, is a non-empirical intuition?
Those thinkers who aim at distinguishing philosophy from mathematics by asserting that the former has to do with quality merely, and the latter with quantity, have mistaken the effect for the cause. The reason why mathematical cognition can relate only to quantity, is to be found in its form alone. For it is the conception of quantities only that is capable of being constructed, that is, presented a priori in intuition; while qualities cannot be given in any other than an empirical intuition. (Kant 1855: 435)
This feels like an important qualification.
The only a priori intuition is that of the pure form of phænomena - space and time. A conception of space and time as quanta may be presented a priori in intuition, that is, constructed, either along with their quality (figure), or as pure quantity (the mere synthesis of the homogeneous), by means of number. But the matter of phænomena, by which things are given in space and time, can be presented only in perception, a posteriori. (Kant 1855: 439)
Again, something that could have been better laid out at the beginning of the book, rather than the end.
The evidence of mathematics rests upon definitions, axioms, and demonstrations. I shall be satisfied with showing that none of these forms can be employed or imitated in philosophy in the sense in which they are understood by mathematicians; and that the geometrician, if he employs his method in philosophy, will succeed only in building card-castles, while the employment of the philosophical method in mathematics, can result in nothing but mere verbiage. The essential business of philosophy, indeed, is to mark out the limits of the science; and even the mathematician, unless his talent is naturally circumscribed and limited to this particular department of knowledge, cannot turn a deaf ear to the warnings of philosophy, or set himself above its direction. (Kant 1855: 443)
Inducing flashbacks to an intro to philosophy class and how philosophy has been reduced to the cracks and crumbs left in science.
Of Definitions. - A definition is, as the term itself indicates, the representation, upon primary grounds, of the complete conception of a thing within its own limits. Accordingly, an empirical conception cannot be defined, it can only be explained. For, as there are in such a conception only a certain number of marks or signs, which denote a certain class of sensuous objects, we can never be sure that we do not cogitate under the word which indicates the same object, at one time a greater, at another a smaller number of signs. Thus, one person may cogitate in his conception of gold, in addition to its properties of weight, colour, malleability, that of resisting rust, while another person may be ignorant of this quality. We employ certain signs only so long as we require them for the sake of distinction; new observations abstract some and add new ones, so that an empirical conception never remains within permanent limits. (Kant 1855: 443)
A semiotics of definition. Conceptions contain signs?
The definition must describe the conception completely, that is, omit none of the marks or signs of which it is composed; within its own limits, that is, it must be precise, and enumerate no more signs than belong to the conception; and on primary grounds, that is to say, the limitation of the bounds of the conception must not be deduced from other conceptions, as in this case a proof would be necessary, and the so-called definition would be incapable of taking its place at the head of all the judgments we have to form regarding an object. (Kant 1855: 443; footnote)
Actually something useful for a change: in order to define "communion", for example, only the essential aspects must be included, and whatever is extraneous can be compared in other conceptions (e.g. communication, eranos, etc.).
Consequently, the science of mathematics alone possesses definitions. For the object here thought is presented a priori in intuition; and thus it can never contain more or less than the conception, because the conception of the object has been given by the definition - and primarily, that is, without deriving the definition from any other source. [|] Philosophical definitions are, therefore, merely expositions of given conceptions, while mathematical definitions are constructions of conceptions originally formed by the mind itself; the former are produced by analysis, the completeness of which is never demonstratively certain, the latter by a synthesis. In a mathematical definition of conception is formed, in a philosophical definition it is only explained. (Kant 1855: 444-445)
The explanation preceding this absolutism makes no sense. Only pure conceptions can be defined?
The former - discursive proofs - ought to be termed acroamatic proofs, rather than demonstrations, as only words are employed in them, while demonstrations proper, as the term itself indicates, always require a reference to the intuition of the object. (Kant 1855: 447)
Online sources say this means just "argumentative" proof. Th is a rare instance of Kant using an obscure term.
A philosophical method may, however, be systematical. For our reason is, subjectively considered, itself a system, and, in the sphere of mere conceptions, a system of investigation according to principles of unity, the material being supplied by experience alone. (Kant 1855: 449)
A short step to sign systems studies.
But there are cases in which a similar misunderstanding cannot be provided against, and the dispute must remain unsettled. Take, for example, the theistic proposition: There is a Supreme Being; and on the other hand, the atheistic counter-statement: There exists no Supreme Being; or, in psychology: Everything that thinks, possesses the attribute of absolute and permanent unity, which is utterly different from the transitory unity of material phænomena; and the counter proposition: The soul is not an immaterial unity, and its nature is transitory, like that of phænomena. The objects of these questions contain no heterogeneous or contradictory elements, for they relate to things in themselves, and not to phænomena. There would arise indeed, a real contradiction, if reason came forward with a statement on the negative side of these questions alone. (Kant 1855: 451)
And once again, the antinomies brought out here could have been much better served at the start, instead of the antinomies on time and space.
I cannot agree with the opinion of several admirable thinkers - Sulzer among the rest - that in spite of the weakness of the arguments hithero in use, we may hope, one day, to see sufficient demonstrations of the two cardinal propositions of pure reason - the existence of a Supreme Being, and the inimortality of the soul. (Kant 1855: 451)
Inimortality = the mortality of initialization (.ini) files, which store system configurations. The third column of the m letter has a dot above it, which makes me think that it was really typed as inimortality - and yet the m looks almost complete, which makes me think that there was some obscure error with typography (the kind I've seen with one of Mahaffy's books where there was an s instead of an e, or something, throughout the book). I can relate with this novelty because just today I tried to update my Mint and it didn't work out, so I had to Timeshift back to the configuration I have.
Have no anxiety for the practical interests of humanity - these are never imperilled in a purely speculative dispute. Such a dispute serves merely to disclose the antinomy of reason, which, as it has its source in the nature of reason, ought to be thoroughly investigated. Reason is benefited by the examination of a subject on both sides, and its judgments are corrected by being limited. It is not the matter that may give occasion to dispute, but the manner. (Kant 1855: 453)
Some good advice. Though, to be honest, this method of considering both sides of a given subject has produced no small amount of confusion within this book.
Let each thinker pursue his own path; if he shews talent, if he gives evidence of profound thought, in one word, if he shows that he possesses the power of reasoning, - reason is always the gainer. If you have recourse to other means, if you attempt to coerce reason, if you raise the cry of treason to humanity, if you excite the feelings of the crowd, which can neither understand nor sympathise with such subtle speculations, - you will only make yourselves ridiculous. (Kant 1855: 454)
A rare instance of Kant invoking something social. Not that surprised that his view of "the crowd" is negative.
There is in human nature an unworthy propensity - a propensity which, like everything that springs from nature, must in its final purpose be conductive to the good humanity - to conceal our real sentiments, and to give expression only to certain received opinions, which are regarded as at once safe and promotive of the common good. It is true, this tendency, not only to conceal our real sentiments, but to profess those which may gain us favour in the eyes of society, has not only civilized, but, in a certain measure, moralized us; as no one can break through the outward covering of respectability, honour, and morality, and thus the seemingly-good examples which we see around us, form an excellent school for moral improvement, so long as our belief in their genuineness remains unshaken. (Kant 1855: 455)
All of a sudden he's speaking my language: social sentiments vs self-regarding sentiments.
So long as mere personal vanity is the source of these unworthy artifices, - and this is generally the case in speculative discussions, which are mostly destitute of practical interest, and are incapable of complete demonstration, - the vanity of the opposite party exaggerates as much on the other side; and thus the result is the same, although it is not brought about so soon as if the dispute has been conducted in a sincere and upright spirit. (Kant 1855: 456)
It's almost as if Kant is here checking off an item-by-item list of tropes in Malinowski's phatic communion. It's every bit as surprising as Schiller's essay on Pathos. Finally something that's "in my cabbage patch", so to say. I expect to go at it with a succeeding translation with numerated paragraphs. This translation is just a first acquaintance, a "how do you do" to very complicated text.
Experience is itself a synthesis of peception; and it employs perceptions to increment the conception, which I obtain by means of another perception. [|] But we feel persuaded that we are able to proceed beyond a conception, and to extend our cognition a priori. We attempt this in two ways - either, through the pure understanding, in relation to that which may become an object of experience, or, through pure reason, in relation to such properties of things, or of the existence of things, as can never be presented in any experience. (Kant 1855: 464-465)
If only the whole demonstrated such clarity of conception. Why must his core terms be cobbled together from random passing remarks?
The conceptions of reason are, as we have already shown, mere ideas, and do not relate to any object in any kind of experience. At the same time, they do not indicate imaginary or possible objects. They are purely problematical in their nature, and, as aids to the heuristic exercise of the faculties, [|] form the basis of the regulative principles for the systematic employment of the understanding in the field of experience. If we leave this ground of experience, they become mere fictions of thought, the possibility of which is quite indemonstrable; and they cannot consequently be employed, as hypotheses, in the explanation of real phænomena. (Kant 1855: 468-469)
"Problematical" is the first category of modality, keep in mind.
It follows that such a proof must demonstrate the possibility of arriving, synthetically and a priori, at a certain knowledge of things, which was not contained in our conceptions of these things, which was not contained in our conceptions of these things. Unless we pay particular attention to this requirement, our proofs, instead of pursuing [|] the straight path indicated by reason, follow the tortuous road of mere subjective association. (Kant 1855: 475-476)
One man's tortuous road is another's scenic route.
I term all that is possible through free-will, practical. But if the conditions of the exercise of free volition are empirical, reason can have only a regulative, and not a constitutive, influence upon it, and is serviceable merely for the introduction of unity into its empirical laws. In the moral philosophy of prudence, for example, the sole business of reason is to bring about a union of all the ends, which are aimed at by our inclinations, into one ultimate end - that of happiness, and to show the agreement which should exist among the means of attaining that end. In this sphere, accordingly, reason cannot present to us any other than pragmatical laws of free action, for our guidance towards the aims set up by the senses, and is incompetent to give us laws which are pure and determined completely a priori. On the other hand, pure practical laws, the ends of which have been given by reason entirely a priori, and which are not empirically conditioned, but are, on the contrary, absolutely imperative in their nature, but are, on the contrary, absolutely imperative in their nature, would be products of pure reason. Such are the moral laws; and these alone belong to the sphere of the practical exercise of reason, and admit of a canon. (Kant 1855: 485)
Stuff to keep in mind when I reach The Critique of Practical Reason.
A will is purely animal (arbitrium brutum), when it is determined by sensuous impulses or instincts only, that is, when it is determined in a pathological manner. A will, which can be determined independently of sensuous impulses, consequently by motives presented by reason alone, is called a free will (arbitrium liberum); and everything which is connected with this free will, either as principle or consequence, is termed practical. (Kant 1855: 486)
Repetition (cf. ibid, 331).
All practical conceptions relate to objects of pleasure and pain, and consequently, - in an indirect manner, at least, - to objects of feeling. But as feeling is not a faculty of representation, but lies out of the sphere of our powers of cognition, the elements of our judgments, in so far as they relate to pleasure or pain, that is, the elements of our practical judgments, do not belong to transcendental philosophy, which has to do with pure a priori cognitions alone. (Kant 1855: 486; footnote)
Feelings are not a priori.
The whole interest of reason, speculative as well as practical, is centred in the three following questions:The first question is purely speculative. We have, as I flatter myself, exhausted all the replies of which it is susceptible, and have at last found the reply with which reason must content itself, and with which it ought to be content, so long as it pays no regard to the practical. But from the two great ends to the attainment of which all these efforts of pure reason were in fact directed, we remain just as far removed as if we had consulted our ease, and declined the task at the outset. So far, then, as knowledge is concerned, thus much, at least, is established, that, in regard to those two problems, it lies beyond our reach. The second question is purely practical. As such it may indeed fall within the province of pure reason, but still it is not transcendental, but moral, and consequently cannot in itself form the subject of our criticism. The third question, if I act as I ought to do, what may I then hope? - is at once practical and theoretical. The practical forms a clue to the answer of the theoretical, and - in its highest form - speculative question. For all hoping has happiness for its object, and stands in precisely the same relation to the practical and the law of morality, as knowing to the theoretical coginition of things and the law of nature. The former arrives finally at the conclusion that something is (which determines the ultimate end), because something ought to take place; the latter, that something is (which operates as the highest cause), because something does take place. (Kant 1855: 488)
- What can I know?
- What ought I to do?
- What may I hope?
The general plan for the three critiques. It is very interesting that the third question proceeds from a similar arithmetic as the third category, by uniting the second with the first.
Happiness is the satisfaction of all our desires; extensive, in regard to their multiplicity; intensive, in regard to their degree; and protensive, in regard to their duration. The practical law based on the motive of happiness, I term a pragmatical law (or prudential rule); but that law, assuming such to exist, which has no other motive than the worthiness of [|] being happy, I term a moral or ethical law. The first tells us what we have to do, if we wish to become possessed of happiness; the second dictates how we ought to act, in order to deserve happiness. The first is based upon empirical principles; for it is only be experience that I can learn either what inclinations exist which desire satisfaction, or what are the natural means of satisfying them. The second takes no account of our desires or the means of satisfying them, and regards only the freedom of a rational being, and the necessary conditions under which alone this freedom can harmonize with the distribution of happiness according to principles. This second law may therefore rest upon mere ideas of pure reason, and may be cognized a priori. (Kant 1855: 488-489)
Sadly, this makes all too much sense. The first is pragmatic and opportunistic (empirical in a chance sense), the other is moral or ethical, and follows the dictates of reason in practical matters, rather than the nearest expedience to happiness.
Hence, also, we find in the history of human reason that, beforet he moral conceptions were sufficiently purified and determined, and before men had attained to a perception of the systematic unity of ends according to these conceptions and from necessary principles, the knowledge of nature, and even a considerable amount of intellectual culture in many other sciences, could produce only rude and vague conceptions of the Deity, sometimes even admitting of an astonishing indifference with regard to this question altogether. (Kant 1855: 495)
The paradox of the creator of the universe revealing itself to illiterate mediterranean sheep herders. Poor choice or intentional swindle?
Holding for true, or the subjective validity of a judgment in relation to conviction (which is, at the same time, objectively valid0, has the three following degrees: Opinion, Belief, and Knowledge. Opinion is a consciously insufficient judgment, subjectively as well as objectively. Belief is subjectively sufficient, but is recognized as being objectively insufficient. Knowledge is both subjectively and objectively sufficient. Subjective sufficiency is termed conviction (for myself); objective sufficiency is termed certainty (for all). I need not dwell longer on the explanation of such simple conceptions. (Kant 1855: 498)
I wish he dwelled longer on the explanation of such simple conceptions.
In the wisdom of a Supreme Being, and in the shortness of life, so inadequate [|] to the develompent of the glorious powers of human nature, we may find equally sufficient grounds for a doctrinal belief in the future life of the human soul. (Kant 1855: 500-501)
Upon second reading I should pay special attention to the numerous variations on this triad (God, free will, and the soul) because the variations themselves are interesting: "the shortness of life" echoes more numerous iterations of "future life" - in all cases the problem appears to be that of the permanence of the soul and the question of the afterlife.
By the term Architectonic I mean the art of constructing a system. Without systematic unity, our knowledge cannot become science; it will be an aggregate, and not a system. Thus Architectonic is the doctrine of the scientific in cognition, and therefore necessarily forms part of our Methodology. (Kant 1855: 503)
So, system-building.
The whole is thus an organism (articulatio), and not an aggregate (coacervatio); it may grow from within (per intussusceptionem), but it cannot increase by external additions (per appositionem). It is thus like an animal body, the growth of which does not add any limb, but, without changing their proportions, makes each in its sphere stronger and more active. (Kant 1855: 504)
Anatomical etymology does imply "jointed structure, division into joints" (articulus, "joint"), and órganon (ὄργᾰνον) is first and foremost an instrument, implement, or tool. Odd.
We require, for the execution of the idea of a system, a schema, that is, a content and an arrangement of parts determined a priori by the principle which the aim of the system prescribes. A schema which is not projected in accordance with an idea, that is, from the stand-point of the highest aim of reason, but merely empirically, in accordance with accidental aims and purposes (the number of which cannot be predetermined), can give us nothing more than technical unity. But the schema which is originated from an idea (in which case reason presents us with aims a priori, and does not look for them to experience), forms the basis of architectonical unity. (Kant 1855: 504)
A very loaded explanation of schema.
Whatever may be the original source of a cognition, it is, in relation to the person who possesses it, merely historical, if he knows only what has been given him from another quarter, whether that knowledge was communicated by direct experience or by instruction. Thus the person who has learned a system of philosophy, - say the Wolfian, - although he has a perfect knowledge of all the principles, definitions and arguments in that philosophy, as well as of the divisions that have been made of the system, he possesses really no more than a historical knowledge of the Wolfian system; he knows only what has been told him, his judgments are only those which he has received from his teachers. Dispute the validity of a definition, and he is at completely a loss to find another. He has formed his mind on another's; but the imitative faculty is not the productive. His knowledge has not been drawn from reason; and, although, objectively considered, it is rational knowledge, subjectively, it is merely historical. He has learned this or that philosophy, and is merely a plaster-cast of a living man. Rational cognitions which are objective, that is, which have their source in reason, can be so termed from a subjective point of view, only when they have been drawn by the individual himself from the sources of reason, that is, from principles; and it is in this way alone that criticism, or even the rejection of what has been already learned, can spring up in the mind. (Kant 1855: 506)
This is pretty much how I feel about university courses that give you the gist of Durkheim or Kant, for example, and don't require you to read them and figure them out for yourself. The end result has practically no value - you're being taught someone's particular interpretation of these historical figures, and there is no shortness of examples where a difficult thinker has been rendered a complete opposite of the original (see, for example, Stephen Hicks' Kant, the first post-modernist). In other words, the difference is metaphorically that between slurping up pre-digested goop with another's enzymes already included or taking a bite out of the raw stuff, cooking it to your liking and digesting it yourself.
Empirical psychology must therefore be banished from the sphere of Metaphysics, and is indeed excluded by the very idea of that science. In conformity, however, with scholastic usage, we must permit it to occupy a place in metaphysics - but only as an appendix to it. We adopt this course from motives of economy; as psychology is not as yet full enough to occupy our attention as an independent study, while it is, at the same time, of too great importance, to be entirely excluded or placed where it has still less affinity than it has with the subject of metaphysics. It is a stranger who has been long a guest; and we make it welcome to stay, until it can take up a more suitable abode in a complete system of Anthropology - the pendant to empirical physics. (Kant 1855: 513)
With its problems of verification, psychology is today still almost like a guest in the house of science.
