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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
A classic in its field, this comprehensive book introduces the core history of phenomenology and assesses its relevance to contemporary psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. It provides a jargon-free explanation of central themes in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. From artificial intelligence to embodiment and enactivism, Käufer and Chemero go on to trace how phenomenology has produced a valuable framework for analyzing cognition and perception, whose impact on contemporary psychological and scientific research, and philosophical debates, continues to grow. New to this second edition are a treatment of nineteenth-century precursors of experimental psychology; a detailed exploration of Husserl's analysis of the body; and a discussion of the work of Aron Gurwitsch and other philosophers and psychologists who explored the intersection of phenomenology and Gestalt psychology. The new material also includes an expanded consideration of enactivism, and an up-to-date examination of current work in phenomenologically informed cognitive science. This is an ideal introduction to phenomenology and cognitive science for the uninitiated, and will shed new light on the topic for experienced readers, showing clearly the contemporary relevance and influence of phenomenological ideas.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introduction
What you will not find in this book
Phenomenology now
Why study phenomenology?
Overview
Notes on the second edition
1 Immanuel Kant: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Background
1.1 Kant’s critical philosophy
1.2 Intuitions and concepts
1.3 The transcendental deduction
1.4 Kantian themes in phenomenology
Key terms
Further reading
2 The Rise of Experimental Psychology
2.1 Wilhelm Wundt and the rise of scientific psychology
2.2 William James and functionalism
2.3 The structuralism–functionalism debate
Key terms
Further reading
3 Edmund Husserl and Transcendental Phenomenology
3.1 Transcendental phenomenology
3.2 Franz Brentano
3.3 Between logic and psychology
3.4
Ideas
3.5 The body
3.6 Phenomenology of time consciousness
Key terms
Further reading
4 Martin Heidegger and Existential Phenomenology
4.1 The intelligibility of the everyday world
4.2 Descartes and occurrentness
4.3 Being-in-the-world
4.4 Being-with others and the anyone
4.5 The existential conception of the self
4.6 Death, guilt, and authenticity
Key terms
Further reading
5 Gestalt Psychology
5.1 Gestalt criticisms of atomistic psychology
5.2 Perception and the environment
5.3 Influence of Gestalt psychology
Key terms
Further reading
6 Aron Gurwitsch: Merging Gestalt Psychology and Phenomenology
6.1
Phenomenology of Thematics and of the Pure Ego
6.2 Others and the social world
Key terms
Further reading
7 Jean-Paul Sartre: Phenomenological Existentialism
7.1
The Transcendence of the Ego
7.2
The Imagination
and
The Imaginary
7.3
Being and Nothingness
Key terms
Further reading
8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Body and Perception
8.1
Phenomenology of Perception
8.2 Phenomenology, psychology, and the phenomenal field
8.3 The lived body
8.4 Perceptual constancy and natural objects
Key terms
Further reading
9 Critical Phenomenology
9.1 The path not taken
9.2 Phenomenology and gender
9.3 Phenomenology and race
9.4 Conclusion
Key terms
Further reading
10 James J. Gibson and Ecological Psychology
10.1 Gibson’s early work: Two examples
10.2 The ecological approach
10.3 Ecological ontology
10.4 Affordances and invitations
Key terms
Further reading
11 Hubert Dreyfus and the Phenomenological Critique of Cognitivism
11.1 The cognitive revolution and cognitive science
11.2 “Alchemy and artificial intelligence”
11.3
What Computers Can’t Do
11.4 Heideggerian artificial intelligence
Key terms
Further reading
12 Enactivism and the Embodied Mind
12.1 Embodied, embedded, extended, enactive
12.2 The original enactivism
12.3 Other enactivisms: The sensorimotor approach and radical enactivism
12.4 Enactivism as a philosophy of nature
Key terms
Further reading
13 Phenomenological Cognitive Science
13.1 The frame problem
13.2 Radical embodied cognitive science
13.3 Dynamical systems theory
13.4 Heideggerian cognitive science
13.5 The future of scientific phenomenology
Key terms
Further reading
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Begin Reading
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 5
5.1 The Hermann grid
5.2 Mach bands
5.3 The Law of Proximity
5.4 The Law of Similarity
5.5 The Law of Direction
Chapter 10
10.1 Example of a field of safe travel
10.2 Body and mind
Chapter 12
12.1 Co-emergence of self and world
Chapter 13
13.1 A unified system
13.2 The HKB model
13.3 A control system for a simple robot
13.4 Cognition as a nested, self-organized, dynamical system
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Phenomenology
An Introduction
Stephan Käufer and Anthony Chemero
polity
Copyright © Stephan Käufer & Anthony Chemero 2021
The right of Stephan Käufer and Anthony Chemero to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2015 by Polity PressThis edition published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4067-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Käufer, Stephan, author. | Chemero, Anthony, 1969- author.Title: Phenomenology : an introduction / Stephan Käufer and Anthony Chemero.Description: Second edition. | Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA, USA : Polity Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The much-anticipated second edition of this celebrated introduction to phenomenology”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2020047814 (print) | LCCN 2020047815 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509540655 | ISBN 9781509540662 (pb) | ISBN 9781509540679 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Phenomenology.Classification: LCC B829.5 .K38 2021 (print) | LCC B829.5 (ebook) | DDC 142/.7--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047814LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047815
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
We have been fortunate to study and discuss this material with many teachers and colleagues who have shaped our understanding of phenomenology. In particular we wish to thank Bert Dreyfus, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Bill Mace, Mike Turvey, and Fred Owens for teaching us much of the material in this book. We are also grateful to Mike Anderson, Chris Baber, Ed Baggs, Louise Barrett, Abeba Birhane, Bill Blattner, Taylor Carman, Dave Cerbone, Amanda Corris, Steve Croker, Steve Crowell, Elena Cuffari, Fred Cummins, Rick Dale, Hanne De Jaegher, Ola Derra, Ezequiel Di Paolo, Dobri Dotov, Catarina Dutilh-Novaes, Tom Froese, Shaun Gallagher, Melina Gastelum, Beatrice Han-Pile, Harry Heft, Manuel Heras-Escribano, Dan Hutto, Jenann Ismael, Mark James, Scott Jordan, Chris Kello, Sean Kelly, David Kirsh, Julian Kiverstein, Jonathan Knowles, Tomasz Komendzinski, Mariusz Kozak, Miriam Kyselo, Wayne Martin, Samantha Matherne, Teenie Matlock, Jakub Matyja, Marek McGann, Jonathan McKinney, Richard Menary, Marcin Miłkowski, Ronny Myhre, Erik Myin, Lin Nie, Mark Okrent, Jacek Olender, Kevin O’Regan, Isabelle Peschard, Marek Pokropski, Vicente Raja, Mike Richardson, Erik Rietveld, Etienne Roesch, Komarine Romdenh-Romluc, Joe Rouse, Gui Sanches de Oliveira, Miguel Segundo Ortin, Charles Siewert, Michael Silberstein, Paula Silva, Michael Spivey, Pierre Steiner, John Sutton, Iain Thompson, Bas van Fraassen, Witold Wachowski, Jeff Wagman, Ashley Walton, Mike Wheeler, Rob Withagen, Mark Wrathall, Jeff Yoshimi, Julian Young, and Corinne Zimmerman.
We taught seminars on this material at Franklin & Marshall College, Carleton College, and at the University of Cincinnati. We are grateful to students in those seminars, and to Jenefer Robinson, for helping us to present the material more clearly.
We are grateful to Pascal Porcheron and the editorial team at Polity Press for all of their assistance and to Fiona Sewell for careful and thoughtful copyediting. Thanks also to Gui Sanches de Oliveira and Taraneh Wilkinson for their help with the page proofs and index.
Large portions of the first edition of this book were written during research leaves from Franklin & Marshall College and the University of Cincinnati. We are grateful to these institutions for their support.
Most of all, we are grateful for the love and support of our families.
Introduction
Phenomenology is a loosely grouped philosophical tradition that began with Edmund Husserl in the 1890s and is still practiced today, though some of its current instantiations no longer use the name. The tradition is old enough to have a history, and it includes claims that seem odd, quaint, or outdated. And yet it is recent enough that even the work of its founders is alive with ideas that still challenge us and hold great promise. Arguably philosophers are only now beginning to fully appreciate the core insights of phenomenology, as we learn to construct rigorous analyses of perception and cognition in a phenomenological framework.
This book covers what we believe an interested reader ought to know about phenomenology, its history, its most important authors and works, and its influence on branches of current philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science. We discuss the history of phenomenology through the work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, their arguments against scientific psychology, and their critical examination of Gestalt psychology. As part of this history, we also include extended discussions of Gurwitsch, Sartre, and the history of psychology. We go on to discuss contemporary developments in critical phenomenology of gender and race, ecological psychology, critiques of cognitivist approaches to artificial intelligence, and embodied cognitive science. This mix of topics and level of detail make this a good textbook for undergraduates studying philosophy, psychology, or cognitive science, and a good starting point for graduate students and academics who are new to phenomenology.
What you will not find in this book
Here is one way to explain our focus and distinguish it from strains of phenomenology that we will not pursue in this book. One prominent concern of phenomenology has been to provide an account of the structures that make a shared, objective world intelligible. This account focuses on perception and cognition, and recognizes that bodies and skills are fundamental in making up this intelligibility. We consider this to be the central, most important, and most productive strain of phenomenology, and this book is intended to give a clear introduction to it.
Another strain of phenomenology, which we can only explore briefly in this book, is concerned to give a description of subjective experiences, especially of experiences that are unusual and hard to explain. So, for example, phenomenology might provide an analysis of what it is like to experience religious faith, overpowering sentiments such as love or anxiety, aesthetic highs, inescapable ambiguities and paradoxes, and so forth. This is an important task, and quite often it intermingles with the first task. In Heidegger’s work, in particular, an understanding of anxiety and contingency is part and parcel of his explanation of the intelligibility of the world. In general, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty were broad and innovative thinkers and their writings touch on art, religion, politics, aesthetics, and morality. Existentialism is largely an offshoot of phenomenology, and so is much critical theory in literary studies. Consequently, phenomenology has influenced many different fields, too many to cover in a single book. Browse the faculty pages of a university website, and you may find a large number of people in literature departments, film and theater studies, theology, art, and political science who identify their work as “phenomenology.” We do not deny the importance of this phenomenology in these various fields. But a single book cannot presume to cover all this material. Our choice of topics and authors is motivated primarily by our conviction that contemporary work on embodied cognitive science is a particularly clear and relevant continuation of the most central concerns that Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty were pursuing.
A further preliminary distinction might be helpful. As is well known, English-speaking philosophy has for over half a century perceived a division between so-called “analytic” and “continental” approaches. Some philosophers on either side of the divide want to identify phenomenology with the “continental” approach, either to acclaim or to disparage the entire tradition wholesale. Those who prefer a “continental” approach would probably choose a sequence of authors that leads from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to Sartre, Derrida, and Levinas, and perhaps more current authors such as Badiou. That is a fine sequence of authors to study, and such overviews are available in many other books. But that is not our approach. We do not think the distinction is helpful or accurate at all, even aside from the obvious incongruity that “continental” is a geographic term while “analytic” is a stylistic or methodological one. Much analytic philosophy is done on the continent, and much good work in English-language philosophy consists of using analytic methods to explain the work of European philosophers. That is what we aim to do in this book. The goal of all philosophy, we think, is to give as clear an account as possible of the best available view on the big questions that motivate philosophy in the first place. We think that Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty articulate hard-won insights into the nature of the human ability to make sense of the world. Their writing is sometimes obscure, because they address very fundamental questions, make unexpected proposals that fly in the face of centuries of philosophical tradition, and often invent new language to render their ideas. Our job is to use what scholars have learned over the past decades to try to make it easier for today’s students to appreciate the insights of phenomenology.
Phenomenology now
A broad range of researchers in philosophy and psychology departments are empirically and conceptually investigating affordances, or the role of our bodies in perception and cognition, or action as a condition for maintaining a sense of the self. We claim that such work is not merely influenced by phenomenology, something that most of these people would readily accede to whether they have read Heidegger or not. We think that they are doing phenomenology, insofar as they are pursuing the basic ideas and insights this tradition was founded on. Still, some readers may be surprised that ecological psychology and embodied cognitive science belong among the proper successors of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. This is understandable, because the chain of influence that leads from Heidegger to, say, Gibson, dynamical systems theory, or enactivism is not clear or well known. It is easier and more common to point out more obvious threads, such as that Merleau-Ponty and Sartre were friends and collaborators for a while, and that Sartre was a giant in post-war French philosophy, from which Levinas, Derrida, and Deleuze emerged as important figures.
We hope that the narrative of this book vindicates our claim in detail, but here are two quick reminders that should make it plausible from the start. Merleau-Ponty’s work is obviously indebted to Husserl, and even more deeply to Heidegger. The third big source of his thought is his sustained critical examination of Gestalt psychology. This also had a major impact on Gibson, who was Kurt Koffka’s colleague at Smith College for several years in the 1930s, just as Gibson was beginning to develop the first ideas of ecological psychology. Beyond this parallel influence of Gestalt psychology on Merleau-Ponty and Gibson, there was possibly a direct influence of the former on the latter. Though Gibson himself would deny it, some of his students recall that later he would often compare his work to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, to the point of trying to ward off prospective graduate students by telling them they should read this impenetrable book first, and only come back when they had understood it.
More crucial than a common ancestry in Gestalt psychology is the work of Hubert Dreyfus, who brought the views of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty into current philosophy and cognitive science. In the 1960s and 1970s Dreyfus used his unusually insightful understanding of Heidegger’s work to formulate sharp criticisms of the then burgeoning research projects in artificial intelligence. The following three decades of artificial intelligence research tell the history of the many ways in which Dreyfus’ original critique transformed the field’s understanding of human intelligence. It has led to many attempts to explain intelligent behavior in terms of the coupling of agent, body, and environment.
Why study phenomenology?
The simplest reason why you should study phenomenology is because everyone should. Even a fairly superficial study of Husserl, Heidegger, or Merleau-Ponty and those influenced by them can have a profound positive impact on your understanding of a host of issues relating to perception, cognition, and the general meaningfulness of human lives. Phenomenological approaches to a broad spectrum of issues are interesting, accurate, and promising. Any serious study of philosophy or psychology ought to include at least some exposure to phenomenology.
At the more ponderous end of the spectrum, phenomenology is an ontology of human existence. Heidegger is most explicit about this, but Merleau-Ponty and Gibson also think of their work in these terms. So their work may lead you to think that people in general, and you specifically, are a different kind of entity than you might have thought. In particular, you might think that you experience the world by passively and reflectively cognizing objects; the phenomenologist, however, argues that you experience it through competent, unreflective action. At the more lively end, the authors and theories we discuss here provide a host of thought-provoking examples to make you question some basic assumptions about what we perceive. We do not see the shapes and sizes of objects, but the possible actions they afford us, invitations to act shaped by our own bodily capabilities. Such examples make reading about phenomenology both rewarding and entertaining.
If phenomenology is an important and influential school of thought, this is because the main phenomenologists think and write with remarkable insight and creativity. So another good reason to study phenomenology is to become familiar with Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty as authors. Though their writing can sometimes be unclear and frustrating, it is ultimately exhilarating.
Overview
This book proceeds in roughly chronological order and most chapters cover one main figure or movement. The chapters stand on their own, so if you are short on time or more interested in some topics than others, you can pick and choose. However, the overall narrative is richer than a collection of individual portraits.
We have aimed to make this book easy to read without sacrificing accuracy or detail. We avoid jargon. While we use and define key technical terms proffered by the various authors, we think their insights are independent of any particular way of expressing them. In fact, you can only appreciate that phenomenology is alive and ongoing insofar as you can recognize that the same approach and the same basic views animate the different styles of the authors you will encounter in this book. We provide a glossary of key technical terms at the end of each chapter for reference.
Notes on the second edition
For the second edition, we have revised, reorganized, and expanded substantially. A list of the most important changes follows.
Chapter 2 “The Rise of Experimental Psychology” is a new chapter, collecting material that was spread across several chapters in the first edition, and with an additional section on the structuralism–functionalism debate in psychology. In its current form, it is better in keeping with the chronological structure employed in most of the rest of the book.
Chapter 3 “Edmund Husserl and Transcendental Phenomenology” has a new section on Husserl’s writings on the body (section 3.5), the purpose of which is to draw closer connections between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.
Chapter 5 “Gestalt Psychology” collects material that was distributed across several chapters in the first edition.
Chapter 6 “Aron Gurwitsch: Merging Gestalt Psychology and Phenomenology” is entirely new. Gurwitsch is a key figure in the history of phenomenology, and was a major influence on Merleau-Ponty.
Chapter 7 “Jean-Paul Sartre: Phenomenological Existentialism” is significantly expanded from the first edition. It now includes in-depth discussion of three more of Sartre’s major works, The Transcendence of the Ego, The Imagination, and The Imaginary.
Chapter 9 “Critical Phenomenology” is new to this edition. It collects and expands upon the discussions of the phenomenology of gender and race from the first edition, and includes new discussions of Frantz Fanon and trans phenomenology.
Chapter 12 “Enactivism and the Embodied Mind” is also new to this edition. It includes an expanded version of the basic discussion of enactivism from the first edition. It also includes new sections on 4E cognitive science and enactivist approaches to social cognition and language.
All citations give the date of the first edition listed in the references. Where English translations of foreign works are listed, they are the source of our quotations. Where no English translations are listed, the translations are our own.
1Immanuel Kant: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Background
Husserl thinks phenomenology is a new beginning in philosophy, a budding new science. At the same time he acknowledges the deep influence of the philosophical tradition. For most of his career he thinks of his work as “transcendental phenomenology,” thus locating it within Kant’s broad philosophical project. Heidegger similarly thinks he is making a new start, reawakening questions whose meaning, he claims, has been lost since antiquity. But he, too, knows that his work owes much to the tradition. Much of the first part of his most important book, Being and Time, has its origins in his earlier lectures on Aristotle. And in a lecture course in 1927 – the year Being and Time was published – he describes his deep involvement in Kant’s work: “When, a few years ago, I studied the Critique of Pure Reason again and read it against the background of Husserl’s phenomenology, it was as if the scales fell from my eyes, and Kant became for me an essential confirmation of the correctness of the path on which I was seeking” (Heidegger 1927/1928, p. 431). Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception is no less ambitious than the books of his two predecessors, although he is more modest in characterizing its revolutionary nature. He cites and refers to a vast literature of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy and psychology and develops his ideas in an active dialog with his contemporaries. At several points he, too, singles out the importance of Kant’s transcendental framework.
It would be an endless exercise to attempt to explicate all the historical influences that shaped phenomenology. But we think it is important to spend a few pages reviewing central concepts from Kant’s critical philosophy, because many of Kant’s ideas have a very direct influence on Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. While, for the most part, these authors toil within Kant’s overall framework, they are not Kantians in a strict sense. Kant comes in for some trenchant criticism. Heidegger sharply rejects Kant’s focus on cognition through representations, and Merleau-Ponty similarly condemns Kant for ignoring the importance of the body and the indeterminateness of things in our experience. Gibson rails stridently against Kant’s distinction between concepts and intuitions. Still, some of Kant’s key arguments have clear successors in the work of the phenomenologists, and a quick overview of these arguments will prove helpful. For readers with some background in the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy, most of this will be familiar.
1.1 Kant’s critical philosophy
Kant is fond of astronomy. He thinks of it as an example of a discipline that struggled for a long time to produce theories and predictions with certainty, until Copernicus’ revision of its foundation put it on what Kant calls “the secure path of a science.” Kant likes to compare the main insight of his Critique of Pure Reason to this Copernican revolution. In the preface to the B edition (published in 1787), he writes:
Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition. (Bxvi)
Copernicus enabled progress in astronomy by presupposing that the earth revolves around the sun, despite the intuitive evidence to the contrary. Kant sees himself as enabling progress in metaphysics. By metaphysics Kant means an account of non-empirical truths, that is, propositions that are necessarily true and whose truth we can establish without recourse to particular experiences of the world. He claims that we can only give such an account by presupposing, counter-intuitively, that objects conform to our a priori cognition of them, rather than the other way around. This claim is more readily expressed by saying that the structures of cognition constitute general features of objects or, as Kant himself puts it, that “we can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them” (Bxviii). Besides constituting the objects of our experience, the same basic structures also constitute ourselves. So, although he is not consistently clear about this, Kant ends up with the view that subject and object are two interdependent poles in a single structure that constitutes the origin of meaningful experience. The task of philosophy is to analyze and spell out this underlying origin.
1.2 Intuitions and concepts
Cognition, says Kant, has two stems. On the one hand, we are receptive to sense data. Objects affect our sensory surfaces and give rise to a mostly unstructured “manifold” of sense impressions that means nothing by itself, but is a necessary element of any experience of an object. Kant calls our capacity to be affected by objects our “sensibility,” and he calls this mental content “intuitions.” A book on the desk or a familiar face, for example, affect our sense surfaces and give us a manifold of visual or tactile sense data including colors, lines, lighting, smoothness, and so on. This manifold resembles what William James called a “blooming, buzzing confusion” in his Principles of Psychology. It is mostly unstructured, but not entirely, for the sense data present themselves in a temporal sequence and in a spatial arrangement. The spatial and temporal order may be vague at first, but at least we have a sense that the orange patch is distinct from the brown patch and both are distinct from myself, because we intuit them at different moments and as located in different places. Kant argues that all intuitions must come in some temporal sequence, and all intuitions of objects distinct from us – that is, objects in the world, as opposed to our own thoughts – must present themselves in some spatial arrangement. A rough intuition of space and time, then, underlies all our sense data.
On the other hand our mind also actively structures experiences. We do this by organizing mental content according to concepts. A concept is a rule for recognizing a given intuition or a set of already cognized objects as an instance of a general type. Kant calls our capacity for spontaneously ordering a manifold and recognizing it under a general type the “understanding.” The understanding organizes the orange and brown patches and lines given in intuition as edges of a compact, colored object on a smooth surface, and recognizes it as a book on a desk. Just as space and time underlie all intuition, the understanding has some basic concepts that are required for all active structuring of mental content. Kant thinks, for example, that without basic notions of quantity (such as “one” or “many”), of negation, existence, or substance (a thing can persist as the same while some of its properties change), our understanding could never get off the ground. Kant produces a table of such basic concepts, which he calls the “categories.” The details of this table and Kant’s method for producing it may be challenged. But the overall point is well taken. A cognizer can certainly have experiences without some of our concepts. We can imagine a cognizer who lacks the concept of a book, of food, money, or whatever. But the categories are so fundamental to our cognition that without them no object-recognition, cognition, or experience is possible.
Obviously an unstructured manifold of intuitions is not yet an experience of anything. Less obviously, using concepts by themselves without applying them to intuitions also does not amount to an experience of anything. Cognition requires both stems. Kant puts this eloquently in a famous passage:
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. . . . The understanding is not capable of intuiting anything, and the senses are not capable of thinking anything. Only from their unification can cognition arise. (A51)
This two-stem feature of Kant’s theory of cognition is fairly radical. Most philosophers prior to Kant think that a sense impression of a book and the concept of a book are the same kind of mental content. Hume, for example, thinks that they differ only insofar as the sense impression is more vivid than the concept, which is an attenuated and modified copy of the original impression. Leibniz, by contrast, thinks that the concept is clearer and more distinct, while sense impressions are vague and imprecise instances of conceptually determined experience. Kant’s reasons for claiming that intuitions and concepts cannot be reduced to one another derive mostly from his older argument about “incongruent counterparts,” which are pairs of objects that are conceptually equivalent, but differ perceptually. Regardless, in his Critique he focuses much of his analysis on explaining how intuitions and concepts are brought together in consciousness to produce objective experience. And that is where his view becomes truly groundbreaking.
We saw above that metaphysics, for Kant, consists of non-empirical knowledge, which he also calls a priori knowledge, and that Kant is trying to explain how and to what extent such knowledge is possible. According to the two-stem view of cognition, Kant is committed to saying that metaphysical knowledge must consist of a priori intuitions and a priori concepts. Kant believes that there are such intuitions and concepts. In fact, they are precisely the important basic structures we just outlined – space and time for intuitions and the categories for concepts. This a priori mental content ultimately grounds all possible metaphysical knowledge.
Kant’s argument that space, time, and the categories are a priori is fairly straightforward. All sense data are given as spatial and temporal (except for sense data that the mind gives to itself, which are only temporal). Since we need to have a representation of space and time in order to be given any sense data at all, we cannot derive our representation of space and time from what is given to us. Space and time are thus a priori intuitions. They cannot be concepts, because, as quoted above, Kant states explicitly that the understanding, that is, the faculty of concepts, “is not capable of intuiting anything.”
Moreover, space and time display some crucial hallmarks of intuitions. For example, unlike concepts they are not general terms that have a lot of instances falling under them. Different spaces or times are all parts of the same single space and time, not exemplars or instances of it. Kant’s argument that the categories are a priori is similar. Since they are necessary preconditions for having any experience at all, we cannot derive them from experience. I cannot get my concepts of existence or unity from my visual and tactile experience of a book, because I must be able to conceive of single, existing things in order to have an experience of the book in the first place. But if the categories cannot be derived from experience, they are not empirical (“empirical” just means “derived from experience”) and must be a priori.
If space, time, and the categories are not derived from experience, they must come from somewhere else. Kant thinks that they are innate in the human cognitive apparatus (and non-humans as well, if any of them are cognizers like us). Kant recognizes clearly that as subjective structures space, time, and the categories are specific to our experience. Space, he writes:
is nothing other than the subjective condition of sensibility, under which alone outer intuition is possible for us. . . . We can accordingly speak of space, extended beings, and so on, only from the human standpoint. If we depart from the subjective condition under which alone we can acquire outer intuition . . . then the representation of space signifies nothing at all. (A26, emphasis added)
He makes analogous claims about time (A34–5). And Kant also acknowledges that there could be an altogether different kind of cognizer, whose mind would not require concepts at all. He envisions, for example, a “divine understanding, through whose representation the objects would themselves at the same time be given, or produced” and notes that for such an understanding “the categories would have no significance at all” (B145).
Kant’s view that objects are intelligible to us only from the human standpoint is called his “transcendental idealism.” Idealism is the view that objects depend on our minds. Kant’s idealism is “transcendental,” because on his view this dependence only shows itself insofar as we consider the basic constitutive structures of the human standpoint. This is a specific, limited philosophical perspective that we only adopt when we are doing transcendental philosophy, that is, a philosophical analysis of the constitution of experience. For all ordinary and scientific purposes, we necessarily remain within the human standpoint, and must therefore be realists about objects. In fact the main lesson from transcendental philosophy is that the objects of experience have a lot of universal and necessary features that we can know about. Kant therefore pairs his transcendental idealism with a clear commitment to empirical realism. For example, he insists on:
the reality (i.e., objective validity) of space in regard to everything that can come before us externally as an object, but at the same time the ideality of space in regard to things when they are considered in themselves through reason. (A28)
In this respect, Kant’s transcendental idealism differs from the views of Descartes or Berkeley, who doubted the reality of external objects from within the human standpoint.
1.3 The transcendental deduction
With this we have come to the crux of Kant’s critical philosophy, and also to the beginning of his most important and most difficult argument, the “transcendental deduction.” Obviously space, time, and the categories constitute experience for us. We cannot have experience any other way. But why should we think that the forms of our sensibility and the basic concepts that we must rely on as a matter of the finitude of our minds are an appropriate fit for the way things really are? What rational justification can we have for taking our so-constituted experience to be objective? The purpose of Kant’s transcendental deduction is to explain how these subjective conditions can constitute objective experience. Kant actually produces two versions of this long and complicated argument, one for each edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, accordingly known as the A-deduction and the B-deduction. They differ in the details, but have the same overall strategy. Like the table of categories (and much else in the Critique), some of the detailed claims Kant makes in the deduction can be challenged, and it is debatable whether the overall argument works. Scholars even debate what the structure of the deduction is, whether it consists of a single argument or two independent ones, what the premises are, and so on. However, all agree that the basic insights that drive the deduction are groundbreaking and define the development of post-Kantian philosophy for well over a century.
The deduction hinges on the notion of the unity of our consciousness. As is clear from the two-stem view, any cognition or experience of objects requires that the mind bring together given intuitions and concepts. This can only occur if the mind itself is unified. If one person has the sense data of the orange patch in her mind, while another has the concept of a book in hers, neither of the two perceives the book. All relevant mental content must be held and processed in the same, single mind. This much is obvious. Kant’s genius lies in his realization that the requisite unity of consciousness is more complex and structured than others had realized, and he gives a stunningly subtle analysis of this complexity.
The unity of consciousness is not a passive state. The mind is not a receptacle, like a bowl in which we mix several ingredients to make a cake. Rather, Kant argues that the unity of consciousness is an active mental process of unifying. He calls this process synthesis, and he claims that the unity of consciousness that makes cognition possible is a synthetic unity. Synthesis is required even for the elementary task of intuiting a manifold of sense data. To have such a manifold, the mind needs to be aware of each element of the manifold, and it needs to be aware of them (or at least to represent them at a pre-cognitive level) as distinct from one another. To intuit an orange patch and a brown patch requires that I can represent the orange and the brown as well as their difference. The representation of their difference, and hence the representation of their “two-ness,” or manifold, is more than the sum of two distinct representations. It requires the mind to apprehend one datum and keep it present, or reproduce it, while it apprehends the second. To further recognize these sense data as a book on a desk, or even just as a manifold of colored objects, the mind runs through this manifold of intuitions and organizes them according to a rule that constitutes the concept of that object. Kant therefore speaks of a “threefold synthesis” of apprehension, reproduction, and recognition. The A-deduction goes through this threefold synthesis in great detail. The B-deduction goes through it quickly and focuses on trying to spell out the important philosophical claims that follow from the recognition of this fundamental synthetic process.
The first consequence relates to the object side of the synthesis, and addresses the central question of the deduction. Since consciousness of anything is an achievement of synthesis, the structures implicit in this synthesis must be basic determinations of anything that we could encounter as an object of consciousness. That is to say that the very notion of “object” has the structures that accrue to it in synthesis. Kant goes on to claim, more or less plausibly, that these structures are precisely the categories whose objectivity is in question, and that therefore the categories are objectively valid. Note that this conclusion is substantially stronger than the previously established claim that the categories are a priori concepts. One could think that concepts are a priori, that is, not derived from experience, and that we cannot help but use them in experiencing, but still doubt that they characterize intrinsic features of objects. This is what Hume thought about causation, for example. According to Hume, we cannot get the concept of causation from experience, so it is non-empirical, and we use it all the time in judging matters of fact. But we cannot rationally justify this use. One of Kant’s big goals in the Critique is to find a solution to Hume’s skepticism about the rational legitimacy of our a priori concepts. Kant therefore mentions Hume as one of his targets as he introduces the deduction (B128). In the deduction Kant concludes from the necessity of synthesis that we cannot even make sense of the notion of an object aside from categorical determinations. We cannot rationally entertain Hume’s skeptical worry about objects, because the fully understood notion of an object already answers the skepticism.
A second consequence has to do with self-consciousness. Just as a synthesis is required to represent a manifold, a synthesis is also a necessary condition for self-consciousness. In particular, Kant focuses on a kind of self-consciousness that he calls “apperception.” Apperception is my consciousness that a particular thought or cognition is mine. When I see the book on the table, I am conscious that I am perceiving it, or at least I can become conscious of this. In general, I can apperceive any act of my consciousness, for otherwise it would not count as an act of my consciousness. To apperceive distinct conscious acts is to be conscious of myself as the same consciousness in each apperception, and this apperception of the sameness of the self across different self-conscious acts is a further apperceptive act beyond the particular ones. Kant calls this background awareness of the unity of consciousness the “synthetic unity of apperception,” because it presupposes a synthesis. In fact Kant thinks that this is the same synthesis that makes consciousness of objects possible. The same necessary conditions apply to object-consciousness and self-consciousness. Kant’s argument in the transcendental deduction, therefore, establishes an essential connection between objective features of the world and self-consciousness.
In more general terms, Kant’s deduction undermines the starting point of both Humean empiricism and Cartesian skepticism. On the empiricist side, Hume thought that all mental content derives from original impressions. Kant shows that we cannot presume that the mind is simply given discrete impressions of the world. By the time the mind can represent even simple impressions from given objects, it has already engaged in extensive conceptual processes that introduce a robust a priori structure into the world of possible experience. Descartes thought that his famous cogito, that is, subjective self-consciousness, is intelligible in complete isolation from any possible object of thought. Kant undermines this claim as well. Self-consciousness involves a synthesis that constitutes general features of objects, so it depends essentially on some relation to objects. One can tease this claim out of Kant’s argument in the deduction, and he makes it explicitly in a short argument that he adds to the second edition of the Critique, called the “Refutation of Idealism.” Here he argues that the mind can only be conscious of itself insofar as it manages to unify the sequence of its own thoughts, experiences, representations, and so on. Unifying a sequence of different states requires that the mind can contrast the flow of the sequence to something persistent and unchanging that is distinct from it. Therefore the fact that we are self-conscious implies awareness of the existence of something permanent outside of us. We can only have a Cartesian cogito if we also have basic background knowledge of objects.
1.4 Kantian themes in phenomenology
Kant’s influence on the development of philosophy and psychology throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century is enormous, and this sketch only scratches the surface of the main ideas from his critical philosophy. But it suffices to highlight several key aspects in which phenomenology from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty is a Kantian enterprise: the idea of constitution, the temporal structure of synthesis, and the idea of subject–object identity.
The first of these is the idea that subjective structures somehow constitute the objects of experience. In most of his writings, especially early on, Husserl takes his work to be concerned with spelling out constitutive structures of experience. He maintains much of Kant’s cognitivist approach, that is, the idea that the constitutive structures derive from the mental processes that make up conscious experience. But he thinks that these structures are more prevalent and varied than Kant’s comparatively austere list of twelve categories. In some of his later work, Husserl develops other approaches in his phenomenology that are closer to the views of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.
Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty sharply reject the cognitivism of Kant’s philosophy. They do not think that the basic structures that enable us to experience an objective world are conceptual, or even primarily mental. They do not think of object-constitution in Kantian or Husserlian terms. Nevertheless they, too, argue that a hidden, pre-personal structure makes experience possible and that it is the job of philosophy to uncover and describe this structure. Rather than concepts, they argue that pre-personal conditions of intelligibility consist of our bodily habits and skills, developed and deployed in a specific cultural setting.
Kant’s analysis of the threefold synthesis has a direct impact on the work of both Husserl and Heidegger. It is the basis for Husserl’s theory of time consciousness. Inspired by his mentor Franz Brentano (who, in turn, is influenced by Kant), Husserl develops an account according to which we are always conscious of temporally thick objects. A present intention is always coupled with conscious retention of the immediate past and a forward-looking “protention.” We discuss this account in Chapter 3. Like Kant, Husserl also uses his analysis of the temporal structure of consciousness to give an account of the nature of the conscious self, analogous to Kant’s analysis of apperception.
Heidegger writes and lectures extensively on Kant’s analysis of the threefold synthesis (Heidegger 1927/1928, 1929). Since Heidegger rejects Kant’s cognitivism, though, his interpretation forces a substantial transformation onto Kant’s core insight. The synthesis, for Heidegger, is not an activity of the mind in which it brings distinct conscious representations together. Instead it is a pre-cognitive unifying activity of the whole person, in which your purposive abilities reveal things as already mattering and inviting you to act. Like Kant, Heidegger locates the structure of the self in this unifying structure, and like Husserl he thinks the structure is fundamentally temporal. But both the notion of time and the notion of the self undergo a deep transformation. We discuss Heidegger’s account of temporality and the self in Chapter 4.
A final theme from Kant that becomes a fundamental tenet of phenomenology is the idea of subject–object identity. As we saw, Kant argues in the deduction – and more explicitly in the refutation of idealism – that the cognizing subject can only exist as such in relation to some object. This becomes one of the dominant themes in German idealism. In this movement the generation of philosophers after Kant, led by Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, sets to work on adapting and changing Kant’s critical philosophy in order to overcome some of the tensions they perceive in it. In particular, they think that a more detailed account of the identity of the knowing subject and its object can obviate the need for the awkward and unpopular aspect of transcendental idealism that claims that we cannot know objects as they are in themselves. The basic idea is that any perceived limitation on our ability to know things as they are in themselves is due to an incomplete understanding of ourselves as knowing subjects. Hegel drives this thought to its full logical conclusion in his Phenomenology of Spirit, in which he argues that we achieve absolute knowledge of the world of objects at the same time, and by virtue of the same conceptual transformation, as we achieve complete self-consciousness.
Hegel’s system is a breathtaking and daring revision of Kant’s critical philosophy. But Hegel still maintains Kant’s overall focus on consciousness. Absolute knowing, for Hegel, is the province of a conscious, conceptually mediated relation to objects. Even though he recognizes the crucial role of desire, the body, physical work, and the fear of death as constitutive processes in a gradual, historical process of achieving self-consciousness, their contribution to his analysis is always conceptual. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, think that the essential connection between subject and object consists of non-conceptual interaction. The subject, they argue, only exists and can only find itself “out there” among the entities it is at grips with in the course of pursuing some purposive way of being.
Key terms
a priori – non-empirical. Intuitions, concepts, and cognitions are a priori if we do not derive them from, or justify them on the basis of, sensory experience.
apperception – Kant’s term for self-consciousness.
cogito – the “I think” that, according to Descartes, constitutes our identities as thinking things. Kant claims that the “I think” must be able to accompany all our representations.
cognition – human knowledge about, or experience of objects. Cognizing objects requires the unification of intuitions and concepts.
cognitivism – Kant’s focus on mental cognition as the basic way in which objects are intelligible to us.
intuitions – the given data yielded by our senses. They are spatially and temporally structured, but not yet cognized.
metaphysics – propositions about the world that are necessarily true and whose truth we can establish without recourse to particular experiences of the world.
refutation of idealism – Kant’s argument that some external, persisting object distinct from us must exist.
representation – mental content, such as intuitions, concepts, ideas, or judgments. We cognize objects by representing them in our minds.
representationalism – the broad philosophical view that objects are intelligible to us only insofar as we have mental representations of them. This view is a commonplace for Kant and eighteenth-century philosophy, but is rejected by phenomenologists from Heidegger onwards.
sensibility – our capacity to be affected by objects. Sensibility yields a manifold of given sense data called intuitions.
synthesis – a cognitive process of combining a manifold of representations by subsuming them under a concept. Synthesis is the precondition for our ability to cognize objects.
synthetic unity of apperception – the role of self-consciousness in making a synthesis of a manifold of representations possible.
threefold synthesis – a basic form of synthesis that makes up the background processing through which we can acquire representations. It consists of three processes that condition one another: apprehending a manifold, distinguishing individual elements of the manifold, and recognizing them according to a concept.
transcendental deduction – a key argument in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Kant argues that the processes that enable self-consciousness also make cognition of empirical objects possible according to general rules.
transcendental idealism – Kant’s claim that the objects of experience are empirically real, yet transcendentally ideal. This means that anything we can experience as an object is structured by a general lawfulness. However, we cannot know anything about the nature of things considered beyond the human standpoint.
transcendental philosophy – Kant’s philosophical stance in the Critique of Pure Reason. Transcendental philosophy aims to uncover the hidden background conditions that make experience possible and structure experience according to general rules.
understanding (Verstand) – Kant’s term for our capacity to use concepts.
Further reading
Allison, H. (2004). Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Henrich, D. (1994). The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant’s Philosophy, ed. R. Velkley. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Longuenesse, B. (2005). Kant on the Human Standpoint. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
