Kant's Critique of Pure Reason E-Book

Theodor W. Adorno

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 680

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Kant is a pivotal thinker in Adorno's intellectual world. Yet although he wrote monographs on Hegel, Husserl and Kierkegaard, the closest he came to an extended discussion of Kant are two lecture courses, one concentrating on the Critique of Pure Reason and the other on the Critique of Practical Reason. This new volume by Adorno comprises his lectures on the former. Adorno attempts to make Kant's thought comprehensible to students by focusing on what he regards as problematic aspects of Kant's philosophy. Adorno examines his dualism and what he calls the Kantian 'block': the contradictions arising from Kant's resistance to the idealism that his successors, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, saw as the inevitable outcome of his ideas. But these lectures also provide an accessible introduction to and rationale for Adorno's own philosophy as expounded in Negative Dialectics and his other major writings. Adorno's view of Kant forms an integral part of his own philosophy, since he argues that the way out of the Kantian contradictions is to show the necessity of the dialectical thinking that Kant himself spurned. This in turn enables Adorno to criticize Anglo-Saxon scientistic or positivist thought, as well as the philosophy of existentialism. This book will be of great interest to those working in philosophy and in social and political thought, and it will be essential reading for anyone interested in the foundations of Adorno's own work.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

LECTURE ONE: Methods and Intentions

LECTURE TWO: The Concept of the Transcendental (I)

LECTURE THREE: The Concept of the Transcendental (II)

LECTURE FOUR: Metaphysics (I)

LECTURE FIVE: Metaphysics (II)

LECTURE SIX: Enlightenment

LECTURE SEVEN: Knowledge as Tautology

LECTURE EIGHT: The Concept of the Self

LECTURE NINE: The Concept of the Thing (I)

LECTURE TEN: The Concept of the Thing (II)

LECTURE ELEVEN: ‘Deduction of the Categories’

LECTURE TWELVE: Schematism

LECTURE THIRTEEN: Constituens and Constitutum (I)

LECTURE FOURTEEN: Constituens and Constitutum (II)

LECTURE FIFTEEN: Constituens and Constitutum (III)

LECTURE SIXTEEN: Society

LECTURE SEVENTEEN: Ideology

LECTURE EIGHTEEN: Psychology

LECTURE NINETEEN: The Concept of the Transcendental (III)

LECTURE TWENTY: The Concept of the Transcendental (IV)

LECTURE TWENTY-ONE: ‘The Transcendental Aesthetic’

Bibliographical References

Editor’s Notes

Editor’s Afterword

Acknowledgements

Index

Adorno’s writings published by Polity

The posthumous works

Beethoven: The Philosophy of MusicIntroduction to SociologyProblems of Moral PhilosophyMetaphysics: Concept and ProblemsKant’s Critique of Pure Reason

Other works by Adorno

Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940

Copyright © this translation Polity Press 2001

First published in Germany as Kants «Kritik der reinen Vernunft» © Suhrkamp Verlag, 1995

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LECTURE ONE

12 May 1959

Methods and Intentions

Let me begin with the fiction that you do not yet know anything about the Critique of Pure Reason. This fiction is simultaneously legitimate and illegitimate. It is illegitimate since it is obvious that even today a work like Kant’s epistemological magnum opus radiates such authority that everyone has heard something or other about it. However, in a deeper sense it is less of a fiction than it seems. We might begin by saying that whenever one aspect of a philosophy becomes public knowledge it tends generally to obscure its true meaning rather than to elucidate it. The formulae to which philosophies are commonly reduced tend to reify the actual writings, to sum them up in a rigid fashion and thus to make a genuine interaction with them all the harder. To make the point more specifically in relation to Kant, you have undoubtedly all heard that Kant’s so-called Copernican revolution consisted in the idea that the elements of cognition that had previously been sought in the objects, in things-in-themselves, were now to be transferred to the subject, in other words to reason, the faculty of cognition.1 In such a crude formulation this view of Kant is also false because, on the one hand, the subjective turn in philosophy is much older than Kant – in the modern history of philosophy it goes back to Descartes, and there is a sense in which David Hume, Kant’s important English precursor, was more of a subjectivist than Kant. And on the other hand, this widely held belief is mistaken because the true interest of the Critique of Pure Reason is concerned less with the subject, the turn to the subject, than with the objective nature of cognition.

If I may make a start with a programmatic statement, a sort of motto, encapsulating what you are about to hear, I would say that the Kantian project can actually be characterized not as one that adopts subjectivism in order to do away with the objectivity of cognition, but as one that grounds objectivity in the subject as an objective reality. It stands in contrast to the previously dominant view which downgraded objectivity by emphasizing the subject, and restricted it in a spirit of scepticism. This, we might say, is Kant’s project in the Critique of Pure Reason, and he himself has said so in a not very well-known passage in the Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason. I shall read it out to you at once because it may help to dispel a significant misunderstanding from the very outset. His enquiry, he says, has two sides, one of which is concerned with objects, while the other seeks ‘to investigate the pure understanding itself, its possibility and the cognitive faculties upon which it rests; and so deals with it in its subjective aspect’.2 He goes on to say that, important though this exposition is, it is not essential to his ‘chief purpose’, ‘for the chief question is always this – what and how much can the understanding and reason know apart from all experience? Not: – how is the faculty of thought itself possible?’3 I believe, therefore, that if you accept right from the start that the interest of the Critique of Pure Reason lies in its intention to establish the objective nature of cognition, or to salvage it, if I may anticipate my future argument, this will afford you a better access to the work than if you simply surrender to the widespread idea of Kant’s so-called subjectivism.4 This remains true even though these two aspects of Kant’s philosophy are in constant friction with one another. How this process of friction, how these two aspects, relate to one another in a series of configurations and how this gives rise to a whole set of problems – to explore this will be the task I have set myself in this lecture course.

But let me return to the fiction I started with. It is reasonable for me to assume that you have no preconceived notions about the Critique of Pure Reason because the traditional beliefs surrounding this work no longer survive. Once, some forty years ago, a very important philosopher of the day remarked wittily that a philosopher was someone who knew what was said in the books he had not read. And this remark could probably be said to have applied to the Critique of Pure Reason. In other words, the aura surrounding this book was so extraordinary at the time that even people unfamiliar with the text seem to have had a ‘feeling’ for what it contained – if you will pardon my use of this word; no other word will really do. The intellectual situation of our age is one in which no work belonging to the past really enjoys such authority any more, and certainly not Kant’s magnum opus, for the simple reason that the school that dominated the German universities until around forty years ago has faded somewhat and has become something of a dead dog.5 This was the Neo-Kantian school in its various guises – mathematical in Marburg and arts-orientated in south-west Germany. In consequence the Critique of Pure Reason is no longer able to derive any sort of traditional nourishment from that source either. I imagine, therefore, that you may well approach the Critique of Pure Reason with something of the feeling that it is like an old statue of the Great Elector,6 an idol standing on its plinth gathering dust, something that the professors keep on discussing because, regrettably, they have been in the habit of doing so for the past 150 years, but not anything that need concern us overmuch today. What indeed are we supposed to do with it? You will probably have an idea that the Critique of Pure Reason is concerned on the one hand with particular questions of scientific theory and that it is filled with discourses pertaining to the individual sciences, discourses that for the most part have now been superseded. For example, you will all have heard something to the effect that the Kantian theory of the a priori nature of time and space has been undermined by relativity theory, or that the Kantian theory of causality as an a priori category has been refuted by quantum mechanics. On the other hand, however, the narrower, more specifically philosophical questions of the Critique of Pure Reason that is to say, those not connected with the grounding of the sciences – may well have lost something of their exalted status in your eyes. For when you hear the concept of ‘metaphysics’ – to mention the other term that forms the subject of the Kantian critique – you will not generally be thinking of the same concepts as formed the essence of metaphysics in Kant’s eyes – that is to say, the concepts of God, freedom and immortality, or of the independence or the existence or non-existence of the soul. You have instead been brought up to find the true essence of metaphysics in such concepts as Being [Sein]. Let me say right away that the so-called question of ‘Being’ does not represent an innovation when compared to the Critique of Pure Reason, or a happy rediscovery. We could rather say that Kant has some very definite and unambiguous comments to make about the question of ‘Being’ in a very central chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason, namely the chapter on the Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection. And I may perhaps add that if you do not wish to capitulate to the current talk about ‘Being’ and to succumb helplessly to the suggestive power of this so-called philosophy of ‘Being’, it would be a very good thing for you to familiarize yourselves with these matters. It is not my wish to eliminate the problems involved here by proclaiming in a professorial manner that the Critique of Pure Reason is a God-given work with the kind of authority enjoyed by, say, Plato for the last two thousand years, or to assert that we feel paralysed when confronted with these eternal values and unable to muster the necessary respect and the necessary interest. I would say that, on the contrary, such admonitions themselves smack of the impotence and hollowness implicit in any such concept of unchanging, eternal values.

I should like instead to do something else. I cannot deny that I still believe that this work is one that deserves the very greatest respect. It does so for quite objective reasons, albeit for reasons that are very different from those to which it owed its position when it first appeared. What I should like is to make this book speak to us. I should like to show you what interest the matters that are discussed in it can still hold for us today. And I should like to rehearse the experiences that underlie this work as objective realities, as experiences forming an essential part of the history of philosophy. I attempted something of the sort in my memorial lecture on Hegel that some of you may have heard.7 So what I would like to do is to retranslate this philosophy from a codified, ossified system back into the kind of picture that results from a sustained X-ray examination. That is to say, I should like to urge you to conceive of this philosophy as a force field, as something in which the abstract concepts that come into conflict with one another and constantly modify one another really stand in for actual living forces. At the same time and as a matter of course – if I have any success at all in achieving my aims – an essential task will be to enable you to read the – very extensive – text of the Critique of Pure Reason for yourselves. I hope you will learn how to distinguish between its essential and less essential aspects, a crucial matter when reading Kant. And I hope also to make things come alive by presenting them in terms of a number of models. It is not my intention to give you lengthy paraphrases of the Critique of Pure Reason, or to supply you with commentaries on particular passages. All that has been done countless times and those of you who would like such an approach can find more than enough examples of it in the secondary literature. Instead I shall try to introduce you to the core philosophical problems through the discussion of particular questions that I regard as being of central importance. But I shall do this, as I have said, not through the exposition of Kant’s ideas as a complete philosophy, but as a kind of transcript of the intellectual experiences that lie behind them. And the concept of experience (or what I wish to show you of it) is not one that can be explained abstractly in advance. I would ask you not to expect me to start with a definition of what I mean by it; its meaning will become clear in the course of these lectures.

You will be curious to learn about the actual source of the intimidating reputation of this work as the philosophical work par excellence. A point in time when a tradition has come to an end and when the authority of books is no longer taken for granted has the advantage that it is possible to put such questions. I should like to tell you that if I have spoken of the loss of authority of the Critique of Pure Reason, this is not just an invention of mine. There are in fact philosophical trends today that really do regard the whole of Kant’s philosophy as nothing more than a cult object that has now been superseded thanks to advances in scientific knowledge, and that far from calling for philosophical labour it can at best hope for a certain antiquarian interest. An example is Hans Reichenbach, the logical positivist, who has defended this point of view, with great courage, if not always with the requisite sensitivity, in his book The Rise of Scientific Philosophy and in a number of other writings.8

You may well wonder from where a book like this one of Kant’s actually derives its great authority – particularly when you see that it says nothing about the major topics which might be thought to be of interest. To make this brutally clear to you: if you expect to find in the Critique of Pure Reason proofs for or against the existence of God or the immortality of the soul or of freedom, you will be sorely disappointed. It is true that there is no lack of such proofs, above all in the great second part of the Transcendental Logic, namely the Transcendental Dialectic. However, these proofs suffer from the grave defect that Kant has always arranged them ambiguously because he has always advanced them in the form of antinomies. What this means is that he has demonstrated that both the truth of these concepts and that of their opposites can be proved. What we have here is a theory of cognition, but a theory of cognition in a double sense. The first meaning is that it attempts to lay the foundations of the sciences that in Kant’s eyes are established and free from doubt, that is to say, of mathematics and the natural sciences. The second meaning lies in his attempt to restrict the possibility of knowledge of those absolute concepts that you may be disposed to regard as the most important. You have to be clear about this. The Critique of Pure Reason does not polemicize against these concepts; for example, he does not deny the existence of God. And when Heine remarked, in the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, that the upshot of the Critique of Pure Reason is that even the Lord of Lords is dying, ‘wallowing – unproven – in his own blood’, then the emphasis must be placed on the word unproven.9 That is to say, what is limited is the possibility of proof; judgements about these categories as such are not made in the book. What constitutes the enormous significance of the book and what really changed the whole intellectual climate in a way that reverberates down to the everyday life of our minds today is probably the fact that it denied that certain questions were rational and hence banished them from our horizons. Bernhard Groethuysen, the historian of ideas, has attempted to show in his writings how God and the devil disappeared from the world in the course of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries – not as part of a trend towards atheism, but because the questions about them ceased to be asked.10 Now we might say that the achievement of the Critique of Pure Reason is that a whole series of these great metaphysical, fundamental concepts vanished from the horizon of what could be rationally decided. And in the same way, modern theology, as it has been developed by Karl Barth, following Søren Kierkegaard, has insisted with great feeling on placing the categories of theology in extreme opposition to knowledge and has argued that what applies to them is the paradoxical concept of faith. If this has been possible it is because it is implicit in the Kantian situation, in the sense that the sharp distinction that Kant made between knowledge and those metaphysical categories is a fundamental premise for us today.

Thus if we are to speak of the critique of pure reason, this critique must be regarded as neither a negative reply, nor indeed as a reply of any sort, to the fundamental questions of philosophy. It is rather a critique of those questions. It is a critique of the ability of reason to pose such questions, to do them justice. We may say perhaps that the enormous impact of the Critique of Pure Reason has its source in the circumstance that it was in effect the first work to give expression to the element of bourgeois resignation, to that refusal to make any significant statement on the crucial questions, and instead to set up house in the finite world and explore it in every direction, as Goethe phrased it.11 This is a very different kind of outlook from the radical atheism of the philosophes of the Enlightenment such as Helvétius or La Mettrie or Holbach, who really did give negative answers and in whose thought reason was sufficiently confident to make statements about the Absolute. It is precisely this that is restricted in Kant. The crucial feature of the Kantian work (and this will perhaps give you an insight into its inner nature) is that it is guided by the conviction that reason is denied the right to stray into the realm of the Absolute, to ‘stray into intelligible worlds’, as he terms it.12 This explains why we can stand with both feet firmly planted on the ground and it is thanks to this that we really know what it is that we can positively and definitely know.

We might almost say, then, that what has been codified in the Critique of Pure Reason is a theodicy of bourgeois life which is conscious of its own practical activity while despairing of the fulfilment of its own utopia. The power of the Critique of Pure Reason resides not so much in its responses to the so-called metaphysical questions as in its highly heroic and stoical refusal to respond to these questions in the first place. What makes this possible for Kant is the self-reflexive nature of reason. By this I mean that, as a rational being, I am capable of reflecting on my own reason, and through this reflection I am able to give myself an account of what it can and cannot achieve. This dual aspect of self-reflexivity is what enables Kant to claim that he has established the foundation of experience – in other words the original leading concepts of our knowledge of nature; and on the other hand, it is what prevents us from going beyond this knowledge and entering into speculations about the Absolute.

Nevertheless, I should say at this point that the idea of the self-reflexivity of reason contains a difficulty and also a challenge that only emerged fully in post-Kantian philosophy and the philosophy of German idealism in the narrower sense. The difficulty is that we can enquire, how can reason criticize itself? Does not the fact that it criticizes itself mean that it is always caught up in a prejudice? That is to say, when reason judges the possibility of making absolute statements, does this not necessarily imply that it has already made statements about the Absolute? And in fact post-Kantian idealism did take up this quite simple idea and turn it against Kant. Perhaps the crucial distinction between Kant and his successors is that in Kant the reflexivity of reason is conceived in a quite straightforward way, much as with the English empiricists who similarly dissect the mechanisms of reason. It is true that at one point Kant does make fun of the concept of the physiology of reason that he found in Locke and which ventured something of the sort.13 But when we look more closely at what he has himself done in the Critique of Pure Reason, we discover that it is not all that far removed from such a physiology of reason, that is, from a dissection of reason, albeit in the case of Kant ‘on the basis of principles’. In contrast his successors then faced up to the question of what it means for reason to criticize itself – and they were led by that question both to criticize Kant and to infer a series of answers that Kant himself was initially unwilling to provide with his critique.

But I believe that it would be good for you to grasp the idea that, for all Kant’s notorious reputation for difficulty, he was a relatively straightforward writer inasmuch as he believed – without wasting too much time thinking about it – that reason is able to treat of the realm of reason, the realm of knowledge, just as effectively as any other field of knowledge. Connected with this – and this is a further prerequisite for understanding Kant that is absolutely indispensable if you wish to see what is involved in his philosophy – connected with this is the fact that underlying Kant’s philosophy lies a huge confidence in the mathematical natural sciences; and that his philosophy is absolutely full of the spirit of these sciences. If we wish to grasp the chief inspiration of the whole Critique of Pure Reason, we might locate it in the idea that the attempts of metaphysics to arrive at absolute certainties by spinning them out of mere thought have all failed – and Hume was right to criticize them. But this does not mean that we should despair because, thanks to the persuasive force of the mathematical sciences – particularly mathematics itself and what today we would call theoretical physics – we possess an entire body of knowledge that actually does satisfy the criterion of absolute truth. Kant’s achievement only becomes comprehensible on the assumption that science provides the absolute knowledge which merely abstract speculation had failed to deliver.

I believe that to say this is enough to eliminate one of the difficulties that tend to crop up in the mind of the so-called naive reader who embarks upon the Critique of Pure Reason for the first time. For Kant begins with the question ‘How are synthetic a priori judgements possible?’ (This comes in the Introduction and it is explored at length in the course of the book.14) This is one of the chief questions of the Critique of Pure Reason. Without bothering with any long drawnout preambles I should like to say something about the significance of this question. But first I want to comment on the shock contained in the expression ‘How are they possible?’ For when the speculative philosopher approaches this book he expects a completely different question, namely, Are synthetic a priori judgements, in other words, absolutely valid statements, possible? This question is not put in the Critique of Pure Reason.15 You can see here plainly how difficult it is to understand a work simply by reading the text, without any prior assumptions. And if a lecture course like this one (and every lecture course on comparable topics) has any justification beyond the mere fact that it is advertised in the university lecture programme, this justification must surely be sought in the realization that such works cannot simply be understood on their own. This is not meant in the ominous schoolmasterly sense that you need to know the historical context so as to be able to place them correctly – I am quite indifferent to such matters – but in order to grasp the fact that the problems under discussion are only comprehensible if you are familiar with certain force fields within which philosophies may be said to move.

Kant’s work is called The Critique of Pure Reason, and the emphasis here doubtless falls on the word ‘critique’. In essence there is nothing new in this since we might say that the entire history of philosophy is nothing but one vast nexus of criticism which has led consciousness to its ideas, its concepts and ultimately to itself. In this sense the Critique of Pure Reason is an encounter of philosophy with itself. Thus what I wish to say is that this strange formula ‘How are synthetic a priori judgements possible?’ does become meaningful and at the same time it reveals something of the entire complexion, the inner workings of Kant’s thought. It does so because what is truly substantial, the element that seems to constitute its unquestionable truth, manifests itself in the shape of the synthetic a priori judgements and because it does not spin the truth abstractly from within itself, but proceeds from the truth, as Kant calls it, as if from a ‘given’, and sticks to knowledge that it holds to be true and absolute.

Judgements may be synthetic or analytic. This means that the concept in the predicate adds something to the concept in the subject, or, more precisely, the concept in the predicate is not contained in that of the subject. Where that is not the case, that is to say, if we have a judgement that adds something new and is what we may call an ‘ampliative judgement’, then we speak of synthetic judgements. And where that is not the case, where the predicate is simply a repetition of the subject, where it is implied in the definition of the subject, then we speak of analytic judgements. In that case the judgement is a mere analysis, a mere analysis of its own subject; it merely makes explicit what is already contained in the subject. In other words, analytic judgements are really all tautologies.

Kant combines these concepts with the additional concepts of a priori and a posteriori. It is self-evident that the analytic judgements are all a priori, that is to say, they are valid absolutely and unconditionally – precisely because they are tautologous. Because they are actually not judgements at all, they cannot be refuted. They are simply repetitions of definitions that are presupposed. Synthetic judgements, on the other hand, can be either a priori or a posteriori. This means that if you make a statement about something, form a judgement about it, then this judgement may either arise from experience (Kant would say) or it can be necessary even though it is not already contained in the concept. Thus if you say, ‘All men are mortal’, that is a judgement of experience, since mortality is not implicit as such in the concept of ‘men’. However, when you say ‘All bodies are extended’, that is a synthetic a priori judgement.16 It means that extension is not contained in the concept of the body, but notwithstanding that all bodies necessarily possess the quality of extension.

You will now ask me – and this brings me back to the Great Elector and to the question of whether he has a wig or a pigtail – you may well object: for goodness’ sake, this is supposed to be the most important work in the history of philosophy and now we have to endure an account of how synthetic a priori judgements are possible. We have to put up with listening to the assertion that judgements are possible which say something new, but which are valid for all time … On this point we have to say that the concept of truth in Kant – and this is profoundly bound up with bourgeois thought – is itself that of a timeless truth. ‘To be absolute’ for Kant means as much as to be irrefutable by the passage of time; an absolutely secure possession; something that cannot be taken away from you, that you can keep safe in your own hands for ever. The concept of a timeless truth, the concept that only that which is timeless can be genuinely true, whereas whatever can be refuted cannot really aspire to the concept of truth – that is one of the innermost driving forces of Kantian philosophy. And if, finally, the idea of immortality appears as one of the supreme ideas, that provides you with the key to the enormous emotional weight that this concept of an a priori status has in Kant. What he is concerned with in his work is a kind of tendering of accounts in which he seeks to crystallize those truths that I end up possessing with absolute certainty, without incurring any debts and without their being exposed to any claims through the passage of time. Incidentally, what may seem to you to be rather philistine analogies from the bourgeois world of commerce play a major role in Kant and in the Critique of Pure Reason. And I may tell you that they are profoundly related to what is magnificent about Kant, to his particular kind of sobriety, of self-possession, even when confronted by the most sublime and impressive objects. It is all quite inseparable from his bourgeois and philistine cast of mind. In all probability you will do better to seek the core of Kantian metaphysics in this sobriety than at the point where he seems more directly metaphysical.

Thus this interest in synthetic a priori judgements is connected with the fact that Kant really does require truth to be timeless. I should like to point out to you already at this stage that this is the site of one of the profoundest difficulties in Kant. On the one hand, he perceives, like no one before him, that time is a necessary condition of knowledge, and hence of every instance of allegedly timeless knowledge, and that it exists as a form of intuition. On the other hand, he perceives the passage of time as a kind of flaw, and something that truly authoritative knowledge ought to avoid. This explains why the question of whether and how synthetic a priori judgements are possible occupies such a key position in the Critique of Pure Reason.

LECTURE TWO

14 May 1959

The Concept of the Transcendental (I)

I should like to begin by correcting a misunderstanding or rather a crude blunder that I made in the heat of battle, so to speak, towards the end of the last lecture. I gave you a completely idiotic example of a synthetic a priori judgement – it is the kind of thing that sometimes happens when you try to compress too much into the final moments of a class. Needless to say, the statement ‘all bodies are extended’ is an analytic judgement, not, as I stupidly said, synthetic – at least, inasmuch as we are speaking of the definition of bodies in geometry, or more precisely, stereometry. An instance of a synthetic judgement – and this is the classical example that is always cited – ‘all bodies are heavy’. This is because the concept of weight is not already contained in three-dimensionality.1

But the need to clarify this misunderstanding gives me the opportunity to point to a problem that really does exist here – a very serious problem, as it happens. This is that it is very difficult to make a clear distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements on the basis of single examples. There is, for example, the question of whether propositions in mathematics are synthetic, as Kant claimed, or analytic, as Leibniz believed and as has since been reiterated by modern mathematicians. I may refer you to Henri Poincaré’s well-known assertion that the whole of mathematics is nothing but a single tautology. The answer to this question depends largely on the context within which such claims are made. For example – I am improvising somewhat here, without being able to guarantee the scientific accuracy of my statements, but I am concerned more with the general argument than with what happens to be the case in the different sciences – if you take the definition of a body in chemistry, where weight is one of the basic elements, then the proposition that all bodies are heavy can be analytic, while it was synthetic in the realm of mathematics. These are highly complex questions, as is in general the question whether logical forms such as judgement, inference and concept can be defined in isolation or whether they can only be grasped in the context of the intellectual systems or structures in which they appear. These are questions that have emerged only in the course of modern developments in logic. Hence in order to understand Kant, or indeed in order to understand any thinker, you need to make certain assumptions; this holds good for all intellectual activities that are to be found between heaven and earth. If you refuse to make any assumptions, if you attempt to understand a thing purely on its own terms, then you will understand nothing. I shall return to this point in a moment. In the case of Kant you have to assume – and this is essential for an understanding of the in general – that the whole of traditional logic is in place. There is a passage in the where he asserts in all innocence that, apart from a few improvements, logic has made no progress since Aristotle, and nor could it have done. In consequence, in his conception of logic he simply cleaves to the traditional Aristotelian logic which makes a clear distinction between the different categories in ways familiar to us – namely in accordance with the practice of a linguistic analysis, and without taking any notice whatever of the interconnections between the categories of logic and the systems to which they refer.