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There is no greater satisfaction than breaking the veil of age-old naivety with which we consider the things around us, and looking at the world again with the experience of having read the
Critique of Pure Reason. But it is difficult: other people’s reports are not satisfying, and the meaning of Kant’s intense text cannot be grasped, because the philosopher, seeing things so differently from the usual, could not find a way to express himself that was adequate to the presuppositions of readers of the time to come.
This guide, designed to be read not before, but together with Kant’s text, leads today’s readers to experience the immense pleasure of mastering the meaning of the great Enlightenment scholar’s most important work. A guide that can be read together with Kant’s text because it consists of short comments specifically referring to the paragraphs of the
Critique of Pure Reason which need explanation, comments that translate Kant’s words into clear and familiar language for today’s readers. The instructions in this book first of all warn readers about Kant’s implicit presuppositions, which are the first source of difficulty, and then acknowledge those presuppositions of Kant that a twenty-first century reader cannot accept: so that we will be able to understand Kant standing humbly on his shoulders.
The little we know from experience, what we would like to know, the things we conceive as ideal, after reading the
Critique of Pure Reason appear in a completely different light: no longer as things that overwhelm us, but as ideas that we produce through elementary states of consciousness that are within us, and that determine the way in which we interpret the universe of perceptions that affect us. The explanatory texts of this guide accompany the reader in appropriating Kant’s book while the meaning of the great philosopher’s vision appears increasingly clear, and ultimately also simple, as profound thoughts are once the path that leads to understanding them has been walked with the due commitment.
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Alberto Palazzi
Reading
and Understanding
Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason
A No-Nonsense Guide
GogLiB
ISBN: 9788897527633
First edition: April 2024 (A)
Copyright © Alberto Palazzi and © GogLiB, April 2024
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Contents
Foreword to this Guide
General considerations: why this guide to Kant’s classic
Instructions for readers and prerequisites
The central idea of the Critique of Pure Reason
Organization of the text of this guide
Guide to the text of the Critique of Pure Reason
A - Preface to the first edition (1781)
B - Preface to the second edition (1787)
Introduction
Transcendental doctrine of elements
Part I - Transcendental aesthetic
Part II - Transcendental Logic
I - Transcendental Analytic
Book I - Analytic of concepts
Chapter I - On the guide for the discovery of all the pure concepts of the understanding
Chapter II - On the deduction of the pure concepts of understanding
[A - Transcendental Deduction in the text of the first edition]
[B - Transcendental Deduction in the text of the second edition]
Book II - Analytic of principles
Chapter I - On the schematism of pure concepts of understanding
Chapter II - System of all principles of pure understanding
Section I - On the supreme principle of all analytic judgments
Section II - On the supreme principle of all synthetic judgments
Section III - Systematic presentation of all the synthetic principles of pure understanding
Refutation of idealism
Editor’s note on Hume’s problem and empirical induction
Chapter III - On the basis of the distinction of all objects as such into phenomena and noumena
Appendix - On the amphiboly of the concepts of reflection which arises through the confusion of the empirical with the transcendental use of understanding
II - Transcendental dialectic
Introduction
I - On transcendental illusion
II - On pure reason as the seat of transcendental illusion
Book I - On the concepts of pure reason
Book II - On the dialectical inferences of pure reason
Chapter I - On the paralogisms of pure reason
[A - Discussion of the paralogisms of rational psychology in the first edition]
[B - Discussion of the paralogisms of rational psychology in the second edition]
Chapter II - The antinomy of pure reason
Chapter III - The Ideal of pure reason
Appendix to the transcendental Dialectic
II - Transcendental doctrine of method
Back Cover
Alberto Palazzi
Foreword to this Guide
General considerations: why this guide to Kant’s classic
This volume contains a guide intended to be read together with the text of the Critique of Pure Reason, a book which needs first-hand knowledge in order to enter Kant’s philosophy and to appropriate his grandiose vision of human experience in the world. Therefore readers will not read this guide in full before trying their hand at Kant, but (having read this introductory part) they will keep it open and use it to grapple with the great Kantian classic.
Readers will immediately notice one thing: that here Kant is commented and explained with a language of our present, and not by endlessly mixing and recomposing Kant’s words, which is what secondary literature usually does, leaving the expectations of those who seek help from it unsatisfied. This organization of the text will lead readers to be able to read both of Kant’s theoretical critiques with satisfaction—in this volume the Critique of Pure Reason, later the Critique of Judgment—and will do this through a completely unprejudiced attitude, which will show how Kant’s words can be read and understood after more than two hundred years, in a world that is no longer that of Torricelli’s barometer and rococo taste, climbing on Kant’s shoulders. This way of reading Kant is not an option, but a necessity: we must understand Kant taking into account what happened between his time and ours, and what allows us to stand modestly on the shoulders of this giant. After all, Kant didn’t even know that the formula for water is H2O, and he had a vision of mathematics so tied to the priority of geometry that every time he had to talk about algebra he missed the point (as we will see in detail) and used to say things that were not worthy of him. However, Kant knew that to know something more about water it would be necessary to find a way to break it down into its elements and then recompose it, controlling the process in both cases; he knew that mathematical theorems prove nothing about the existence of things; and he knew that pure form, devoid of semantics, is what we call art, even if he invoked wallpaper and the feathers of stuffed birds as examples of abstract painting, because in his experience he could not find anything better, and on his studio wall did not hang a Kandinsky, but a portrait of Rousseau.
This guide, which presumes to speak to readers who are either almost completely unaware of Kantian philosophy, or disoriented and perplexed, and which therefore allows itself to give instructions to its readers as if it were a user manual, is based first of all on frank expression of the fact that there were some fundamental considerations that Kant could not make, because the time was not ripe, and which instead after two hundred years we are able to make, and which indeed the entire culture of the twentieth century could have made. So we read Kant’s text differently from the way Kant understood himself, and there is nothing strange in this: Kant spoke about conceptual problems common to his time and ours, but he interpreted them through some prejudices that it was impossible for him to remove, and thus they hindered the potential that was implicit in his immense unconventional attitude and analytical depth. One thing, however, must be frankly premised: that many of Kant’s ideas did not at all resolve the problems that he raised, and the commentary on the text must highlight this clearly, not silence it as interpretative literature usually does, generally presenting the classics to us as if the thought they contain were always completely coherent, complete and conclusive with respect to their premises. The differences in attitude between Kant and us are many, and we will later illustrate them in detail, encountering them in the text; but in general they can be summarized in three or four main factors.
First of all, Kant did not conceive that formal logic could be described differently from the Aristotelian and scholastic tradition, while we know that at least mathematical logic, information science, and perhaps alternative logics do exist. Therefore, on this point, today we conceive in relative terms a matter that Kant took as absolute; and this has many methodological implications: first of all, that Kant believed he could produce a thoroughly demonstrated theory of the object of his research, when instead he gives us an interpretation of it (certainly brilliant, but not demonstrable as he would have liked).
The second capital difference between Kant and us is that Kant believed he could construct a complete, definitive and absolute answer to the problems he posed. He believed, after having theorized that logical and mathematical forms are inside the conscious human subject, that he could describe them and put them into a system with completeness only by looking inside himself, while we know that the experience of struggling with things and the passage of time are needed. We will see that Kant very soon encounters the difficulty of looking inside himself and finding nothing, and that although the potential of his own philosophy could immediately guide him to search outside himself, however the primitive certainty of being able to build the system of Pure Reason introspectively is never questioned. Although the belief of the modern age in the stability of the subject is put into crisis precisely by the speculations on the metaphysical notion of the soul that we read in the first Critique, it remains that Kant believes he has obtained, by looking into himself, a settlement of the philosophical problems of absolute value and immutable in time to come: a belief in which it is obvious that we cannot follow him.
Moreover, a third difference between Kant and us is a factor that rather concerns the interpretation of the Critique of Judgement; therefore as long as we limit ourselves to the Critique of Pure Reason it is premature to talk about it. However, just to mention it, the problem is that we know that the brain of us humans, highly evolved animals at the top of the intelligence scale (for those who want to believe it), but also that of our friends dogs, monkeys etc., works through the implementation of certain shape recognition strategies called Gestalt, and which lead us to say: this is an apple, this is a portrait of my grandfather, and so on, without the need to make explicit the reasoning steps we carry out. Kant had no idea of the concept of Gestalt, however his profound analysis of cognitive processes led him to the need to talk about something very close to Gestalt, but having no idea of it he found himself confusing Gestalt with its product. This means, Kant realized that the proposition “this is an apple” is pronounced when, in the face of experience, a state of the mind has been produced that makes us certain of that judgment, that is, the vision of an apple that is present before us and is distinct from everything else and can be classified into a given species of things; but he was unable to distinguish these two dimensions, the natural event of recognition from logical classification, and he was unable to create an adequate terminology to express what was created by so great effort of his mind. We will see that this limit, which Kant, living in the culture of his time, could not have overcome even if his intelligence had been superhuman, is the reason why the reader, even if he reads with profit and interest the large quantity of observations and descriptions of aesthetic facts that there are in the Critique of Judgement, fails to follow the argument of this book, and it is also the reason why books on the history of philosophy usually reproduce the words that are read in the Critique of Judgment without knowing how to give the minimal convincing illustration of what they mean.
Returning to Pure Reason, there is finally a fourth source of misunderstanding that inhibits in us the possibility of a living relationship with the Kantian text, and which, unlike those mentioned so far, cannot be attributed to Kant’s limits, but comes from a confusion what we do, as a consequence of a legacy that idealist philosophy has bequeathed to the entire culture of the twentieth century and its present appendix in the twenty-first century. In the era of the epochal change in the self-image of modern man, the era of the Revolution and Napoleon, German philosophy produced a new declination of the idealist attitude, which was expressed in proclaiming that the world of values that humanity builds in its historical world is an absolute horizon, outside of which there is nothing, because we cannot see anything outside it. The human spirit is self-sufficient, and so its historical vicissitude is in itself “the absolute”: an idea that would never have occurred to either Plato or Descartes, who nevertheless shared with Fichte and Hegel the label of idealists, and which is an invention with which the culture of the dawn of our age attempted to exorcise the loss of the naive certainties of the world of the ancient regime; and it is an invention from which, despite its fantastic character, we have gained the awareness that the facts and choices of the human spirit are always motivated, and never completely irrational (although they do not deserve to be called always rational in themselves, as Hegel used to do): which is the reason why something of the idealism of that era remains in our present culture as an institution, and it manifests itself when we recognize that what appears to us as irrationality and error in human affairs is nevertheless always a response to a need that stimulates it.
Now, it is impossible to deny that there are methodological problems that inevitably appear to us non-historical and non-temporal (or rather: they appear such to us when we assume a certain point of view), and they are those relating to the more general conditions of logical correctness in reasoning and the conditions of truth. However, every attempt at a coherent philosophical arrangement of the principles of logic, of scientific methodology, of the interpretation of experience and nature, and even of the metaphysical world if one wants to take it seriously, if on the one hand intentionally focuses on these things abstracting from every aspect extraneous to them, on the other hand is conditioned, more or less consciously, by the entire system of values and beliefs that gives shape to the culture of its time. It is here that there is a very clear watershed precisely in correspondence with the idealistic philosophy immediately following Kant. The ancients, like the modern age, believed that it was possible to concentrate thought on logical, physical and metaphysical problems, leaving aside every ideological and political dimension concerning values. Idealism and historicism born from the ashes of Enlightenment Kantianism have instead taught us that things are not like this, but quite the opposite: every apparently abstract thought with respect to the historical and conflictual dimensions of this world is actually based on the values of its own time, and while it expresses something about its object abstractly isolated from every conflict of the human world (for example: a problem of mathematical methodology), at the same time, with the words it uses, with what it places attention on and what it neglects, metaphorically expresses something completely different and full of value and conflictual implications. The three words “critique”, “pure” and “reason” are alone an Enlightenment manifesto full of controversy and politics, as was noted by the political philosopher Schmitt (who was a reactionary, and therefore gifted with this kind of sensitivity), and the culture of our time easily accepts this characterization, which probably would have aroused Kant’s horror.
So our present now understands that there is an inevitable dialectic: on the one hand, thought is forced to deal with problems relating to things that man considers external to his own world of history, values and conflicts, and therefore to believe he can escape from the historical world together with its objects, while on the other hand any thought will always be at the same time an act full of meanings within the historical world, and will determine conflicts and divisions, identifications and marginalizations, and will imply choices between contrasting theses. We cannot escape this dialectic, because it will always happen that we will feel the need to analyze in detail the logical process, the methodology and the consistency of a scientific theory or a technical practice, and the more we will fulfil the duty to go into detail and not be satisfied of superficial formulations, the more the professionalism that we will put into our analytical work will take us back to the innocence of the ancients, to the belief that we can be perfectly objective and concentrated on some innocent and irrelevant problem with respect to human conflicts (an example could be a problem referring to the geological history of the Earth, where what happened millions of years ago happened as it happened, and is certainly not the business of men in historical times). But others will see and make us see all the political and historical connotations of our work, and they will destroy our innocence.
But precisely because here there is an inevitable dialectic, when one reads a rich text like Kant’s one, one must know how to be ambivalent: sometimes following Kant in his innocent argument concentrated on things such as the categories of the intellect and the ideas of reason, and appropriating or not his conclusions, correcting them or rejecting them; sometimes going back to considering those discourses as belonging to a time that is no more ours. Because yes, on the one hand, encountering certain arguments in the first Critique, e.g. Mendelssohn’s argument regarding the immortality of the soul and the seriousness with which Kant refutes it, they will seem equally naive to us; but on the other hand we are terribly ignorant regarding to the meaning of words like soul, universe and God, and we still have to learn from Kant, and to be led by him to dismantle what is inside the superficial thoughts which are triggered in our heads when we hear the sound of those words.
In short, the fourth source of difficulty in understanding the writing of this classic author, who for the culture of our time is nominally a classic, but is not at all well understood, and is very far from being metabolized, is an attitude by which we historicize his ideas when we are still much more clueless than him regarding the things he talks about. An attitude that comes from idealistic philosophy, for which problems such as those of the method of science were taboo until the moment of having to say something specific about them, and then it usually expressed its opinion so amateurishly as to expose itself to ridicule; attitude also strengthened by the twentieth-century cultural relativism of anthropological nature, with all its innumerable manifestations (which often teaches us true things, and yet just as often ungenerously dismisses our past); an attitude attested, and this is a very curious story, by the perception that the German culture had of Kant in the few years in which the Critique of Pure Reason was in vogue, the so-called years of the Aetas Kantiana, more or less around 1790, when the book had many readers who understood it more easily than us because they were familiar with the German university philosophy that was taught at the time, and therefore with the language of Kant, but who wanted to see within it what did not yet exist, i.e. the metaphor of the human spirit as creator of itself who marked the philosophy of the following generation. We must read Kant, understand Kant, historicize Kant, and contradict ourselves in doing this as is inevitable, because we are as involved in the game as Kant was: for us too there are problems that inevitably appear absolute, objective and foreign to the historical world, but everything that in a certain perspective appears foreign to the historical world, then in another becomes part of it again. What should not be done is to judge Kant in the way of Hegel, who judged him because he did not find his own declination of idealist philosophy in Kant’s one, and so historicize his ideas for their metaphorical value before having fully understood them.
This volume and the next one, which will offer a guided reading of the Critique of Judgement, are connected. Overall we will talk about the Critique of Pure Reason and that of Judgment as a single work, even if this volume concerns only the first of the two (little or nothing we will say about the Practical Reason, a much simpler text to understand, compared to the other two). The two books are separated by the nine years between 1781, in which the first version of the Critique of Pure Reason was published, and 1790 in which Kant published the Critique of Judgment, and it is absolutely true that the second book contains thoughts of which at the time of the first there was no trace, at least conscious, in Kant’s mind; however we will see that the second theoretical Critique (although at first sight it adds imaginary and artificial solutions to the residual problems of the first) completes the first, gives it the basis of reality that it lacked, makes it walk on its own legs, and therefore ideally the two books make up only one. However, all this must be put aside for now, until the first Critique is truly known.
In his 1923 Book of the It Georg Groddeck warned the reader with these words: “everything in this book of mine that sounds reasonable, or perhaps only a little strange, comes from Professor Freud of Vienna and his colleagues; but for everything that is completely senseless, I claim my paternity.” The same warning applies here, replacing Freud with the letter of Kant’s text, the authoritative issues of the journal Kant-Studien and the innumerable mass of academic writings that reshuffle Kant’s words in search of solutions to problems that are not clear even in their initial formulation, and Groddeck with my work. Readers, after having invested as much of their time as they wish in reading this unorthodox introduction, will be free, if they want, to think badly of it and return to a more conventional way of reading Kant; but even in this case their relationship with the Kantian text will have changed: each of Kant’s sentences will have acquired a concrete meaning and readers will no longer have to resort to conscience transactions to convince themselves that they have understood what they have instead only learned to associate through Pavlovian reactions, rich in rewards and gratifications, agreeing to statements that for them remain shrouded in the black clouds of mental confusion only for having recognized the Kantian style in them, which has a very marked and unmistakable character, and which can also be learned as a kind of music, making oneself capable of reproducing it (even virtuously) despite the absence of any meaning.
Instructions for readers and prerequisites
This introduction (by which I mean not only these premises, but also all the commentary that I have inserted into the Kantian text) is aimed mainly at those who already know (even briefly) the structure of Kant’s philosophy, but are aware of many issues that are not clear to them. However, it should be easily understandable even to those who approach Kant’s philosophy for the first time through it, but in this case readers should always keep in mind that Kant does not say literally what is said in this introduction. The meaning of this introduction is that Kant’s philosophy has a strong potential for clarification with respect to unsolved conceptual problems of our present, but as long as we read it with the experience of the twenty-first century, not the eighteenth. As for the minimum requirements to understand this introduction, the first indispensable condition is that readers know the rudiments of ancient and modern formal logic, even if only from elementary treatises. It is not necessary to have studied the abstract problems of the philosophy of logic, but you need to know what all the following things are, that I will take for granted: Aristotle’s doctrine of concepts and categories, the judgments and syllogisms theory of the scholasticism, including the meaning of the nursery rhyme Barbara, Festino, Baroco (what is this? does baroque have anything to do with it?), as well as the modern logic of propositions and truth tables, and possibly also quantifiers, predicate logic and its demonstrating technique. If readers had the misfortune, as can happen today, of not having had any school teaching of Euclidean geometry, before starting to read Kant they should familiarize themselves with any old treatise on geometry, with the Euclidean axioms and with the technique of demonstration of the first theorems encountered there, those of Thales and Pythagoras.
In this introduction I will accompany my readers in reading the Critique of Pure Reason, and subsequently I will do a similar operation for the Critique of Judgement, assuming that they want to reach the satisfaction of reading and understanding them in full. While proceeding according to the sequence of the Kantian text, I shall save repeating here once more the usual scholastic exposition of the structure, especially of the Critique of Pure Reason, which is available in countless variants, all similar to each other: I therefore assume that readers are documented, by any source (any philosophy textbook used in high schools will do), first of all on the fact that there are two editions of the Critique of Pure Reason, A from 1781 and B from 1787, and then on the fact that the book is divided into a first part called Transcendental Aesthetic, which does not speak of what is meant by Aesthetics in the modern sense, that is, it does not speak of the problems of art and beauty, but speaks of sensitivity in the elementary cognitive sense. Then there is a second part called Transcendental Logic, divided in turn into an Analytic which speaks of the concepts having objective use with respect to experience (such as those of number and cause), and into a Dialectic which speaks of idealized concepts beyond experience (like the soul and the universe), which we always believe to be able to make use of, and which instead destine us to the repetition of inevitable frustrations. Finally, I assume that the reader possesses the scholastic notion that analytic judgments (for example, the tautologies of logic) and synthetic a posteriori judgments (derived from experience) must be distinguished, and that Kant was looking for a third type of judgment, the one called of synthetic a priori judgements, such that they were neither tautologies nor inductive generalizations of experience; but I do not assume that readers have understood how judgments of this kind can be made and where they can be found: the notion of a synthetic a priori judgment, to tell us something useful, is one that requires us to interpret it taking into account what happened in the almost three hundred years that have passed since the time when young Kant attended school. As regards the Critique of Judgement, I shall assume that the reader knows that that book is divided into two parts, the first of which talks about the problem of aesthetics in the sense that has become usual, therefore of beauty and art, and the second of which talks about the methodological problems of biology; and that the two topics are connected, because Kant considered them relevant to each other: something that to a contemporary reader should appear inexplicable and extravagant at first sight. The relationship between these two problems is described by all the scholastic expositions of Kant’s philosophy, but I challenge any readers to understand it unless they go beyond Kant’s technical language, which is precisely what the scholastic treatises cannot do.
Then there is another precondition to take into account, and this is that Kant’s philosophy often says exactly the opposite of twentieth-century speculative physics. I’m not talking about the sciences to which we owe heart transplants, communication via smart phones, the sending of probes to Mars, the mastery of countless chemical processes, and all the technology that surrounds us: this science proceeds in a way that could very well be still described with the means of Kant’s philosophy, if this proved useful. I am talking about non-classical, theoretical physics, which describes scenarios at the borders of customary logic and which through them knows the age of the Universe, the structure of matter and the origin of time: this science is always incompatible with Kant’s philosophy, which denies in principle the possibility of similar knowledge, and which has a concept of the universe and time that is completely different from that of twentieth-century physics. So why still study Kant? The motivation from which we will start will generally be historical, and we will read Kant thinking that his philosophy is part of a path of development that has led to our present, and that its importance in the past and its persistence in our memory is a reason enough to desire to understand it. What will happen then, we will see: perhaps we will be more convinced than before that Kant’s teaching is outdated, perhaps that a more coherent vision of things is obtained by merging together the two perspectives, his and that of twentieth-century physics, perhaps something else. From this introduction readers will come away with clearer ideas than before regarding Kant’s side, and probably more curious than before to understand, for example, why the fastest of Einstein’s two proverbial twins should age later than the slowest: the study of non-classical physics and its methods will be an excellent complement and counterbalance to Kant’s philosophy, starting with Einstein’s very simple theory of special relativity, the understanding of which is within everyone’s reach, and which however almost no one knows, given that those who know it, usually cannot explain it or make it understandable to anyone else.
This edition of the Critique of Pure Reason has only a not too long introduction, with which to convey to readers the general idea of the book, and then numerous reading aids are interspersed with the text. Remember that the complexity of this classic is such that it is difficult to be satisfied by just one reading: you have to return to it several times. This also gives rise to a particular difficulty in commenting on the text, because on the one hand it is necessary to inform the reader of certain notions without which it is impossible to grasp the meaning of the chapters that are about to be read, on the other hand it is necessary to avoid creating confusion by pretending to anticipate too much what must be assimilated little by little, with repeated readings.
The central idea of the Critique of Pure Reason
Let us now move on to get an idea of the central themes of the Critique of Pure Reason, starting with a very free paraphrase of the central idea of the book. Unlike the following, which will help the reader to master Kant’s text first-hand, what will be read in these introductory pages will not have any exact and literal correspondence with Kant’s expression.
The relation of representation is a primitive notion
The notion of “representation” of things in the consciousness (of men) has a shared meaning, and constitutes something we can talk about because we all understand it. It obviously makes sense for us, as it did for Kant’s time (as a starting point, but also with the aim of analyzing it and then conceiving it in a new way). And it is at the foundation of a way of thinking typical of the mentality of modern times, that is, of the principle according to which philosophical problems make sense if they are addressed by placing attention on the characteristics of the relationship with the things which we call knowledge, or, more generically, representation. What is necessary to assume is only this: that the statement that men have representations, images and concepts of things is a significant statement, and that anyone reading these lines instinctively recognizes that the distinction and relationship between things and their images in human consciousness is something that exists. This distinction is peaceful for the majority of modern men (but not for all men: not for the infantile or primitive mentality), while it is problematic for philosophers, but in any case it is in this relationship, and only in this relationship, experienced subjectively in the existence of each of us, that the world of sensations, images, concepts and ideas that constitutes the cultural community of men has a reality.
Representing, feeling, thinking are the abilities that distinguish the community of men from the whole of existence, taken in general. The Kantian text assumes this, and consequently assumes that the relationship of representation, knowledge and communication that forms the world of culture of men constitutes a given and inexplicable reality as regards its existence, but knowable in its structure, and reducible to a perspective in which it is interpreted like any other known reality, and therefore is reducible to a composition of simple and constitutive elements, just as any other content of experience can be. The Critique of Pure Reason is a science of the structure of the relationship of representation, based on the idea that for us humans things are related to their representations in our consciousness, but are not identical to them.
The fact that the community of beings capable of having representations includes only men, or perhaps in some respects also those animals with which men are capable of establishing some relationship of mutual recognition in communication, is an accidental fact and in itself incomprehensible, just as is incomprehensible everything that generally concerns the event of existence. According to the concept that we possess of it, the general community of culture would include any reality existing in nature with which we could be capable of establishing mutual recognition in communication. That this is a common conception, is sufficiently attested by the example of the naive projections of fairy-tale imagination and fantastic literature regarding our possible cohabitation with unknown species of rational beings in the world: fantasies whose naive character lies in the exchange of the mere possibility with a sufficient reason for the assertion of the reality of things, but whose concept attests the need to think that anything existing in the world, which knows how to place itself in a relationship of communication with men, would for this reason alone become an interlocutor.
Foundation of the distinction between subject and object
After assuming that it is legitimate and significant to say that our consciousness has representations of things other than itself, what distinguishes the terms of the relationship, the subject and the object of the representation? As regards first of all the object, the easiest general characteristic that we can attribute to it (and in fact we are used to doing so) is that of contingency: we know that the object of representation appears to our experience in a contingent way, and that is, in a way which is perhaps governed by some rule inherent to the object itself, perhaps is completely devoid of rules, but which is nevertheless independent of the dimension of subjectivity; otherwise, if subjectivity itself generated the appearance of its own objects, the irreducible heterogeneity of subject and object of representation would cease to be, because the object of representation would be a production of the subject, subordinate to it.
That is, the heterogeneity of subject and object implies that we associate the character of contingency with the object of representation: the object appears to our representation, and its appearance is a fact, a fact which, as far as we know, may always also not occur. Renouncing to consider the object as contingent would lead us to pay a very high price, which would be that of not being any more able to make use of a very important concept for the interpretation of what happens to us: the concept of sensitivity. It is not necessary to give examples of how it happens that we refer in many contexts to the idea that what we know has its source in sensations and perceptions: and understanding the term “sensibility” consists precisely in knowing and thinking that the modifications of the subjectivity produced by the senses do not have their origin in the subjectivity itself, but rather are something foreign, which the subject happens to receive from something foreign to itself.
Thus, assuming the distinction between subject and object of representation as heterogeneous elements, we implicitly characterize the object as a modification that the sensation decides to give to the subject: and indeed, as a multiplicity of modifications, because the object of representation, which presents itself in sensitivity, is an indefinitely vast and varied set of facts, things, events, perceived through sensitivity. That is, if we pay attention to the way the object appears in the generality of cases and experiences, we realize two of its characteristics: the character of indefinite multiplicity of aspects in which it presents itself, and the character of contingency of its appearance, so that the perception of things is for us a happening, not governed by the subject, but by something foreign to it. These two characters, multiplicity and contingency, are those through which we distinguish the object as such, and form a sufficient criterion for each case: the existence of all the things that we perceive and that we analyze with thought never has necessity nor justification; everything outside of us, for all we know, may not exist, and we ourselves, for all we know, may not be alive, have neither consciousness, nor images and feelings.
We realize that this characterization is sufficient if we highlight what distinguishes as such no longer the object, but the subject of the representation. In fact, by continuing to pay attention only to what is common in the knowledge relationship in the majority of cases, we will also be able to find the characteristics that distinguish the knowing subject as such. Finding this, however, first requires that we get rid of a prejudice that represents an inconsistency into which we fall very easily. In fact, if we ask ourselves what defines and distinguishes subjectivity as such, at first we will generally give ourselves an answer that will sound like this: subjectivity is myself, it is the content of my mind, my thoughts, my imaginations, my feelings. That is, at first it will appear obvious to us that the knowing subject consists of nothing other than a multiplicity of states of mind, feelings, imaginative processes, implementations of reasoning, that is, of the whole set of facts that we usually call psychological. That is, at first glance, we would probably distinguish and define the subject of representation by saying that it is the multiplicity of psychological phenomena. But we are now trying to distinguish subjectivity with respect to the object of its representations, and to this end any of our definitions of psychological phenomena is of no use and fails to give us a univocal criterion. In fact, any of our notions of psychological events will prove insufficient for an essential reason, which is completely independent of the degree of complexity of our knowledge of the psychological phenomena themselves: this reason is that psychological phenomena (as is suggested to us by the very fact of calling them “phenomena”) participate in the contingency character of everything that constitutes the sphere of the object of representation: that is, psychological phenomena happen like external and non-psychological phenomena, they present themselves to the subject in a contingent manner, not governed by any rule inherent to the subject.
Many very simple examples can be invoked to illustrate this fact. Let us take a step back, and go back to observing things in the case of events that we consider non-psychological: a man observes things outside himself, and knows that everything he perceives could cease to exist and no longer be perceived. It rains, it doesn’t rain, the Sun shines, then it sets and rises again; he sees the Moon exist, but for all he knows it could not exist, or the Earth could have many satellites and not just one: in front of our mind all this can cease to happen (one day near or far), or cease to exist, and science and reflection are not needed to know this character of contingency. Indeed, on the contrary, if anything science and reflection are needed to arrive at the thought of the possible necessity of things happening, that is, of the relationships with which the different events influence and modify each other. But for now we are not interested in the fact that the appearance of things in sensation can be governed by relative rules, as are causal relations, so that under certain conditions we can deduce the existence of things not currently present in sensible perception from the existence of others. For now we are only interested in noting that in any circumstance nothing can ever prevent us from thinking that new and unknown facts might happen, or from imagining that known facts happen in a different way from the usual ways, or, however unexpectedly, that they cease to happen (regardless of the fact that we also think that if things happen differently, then there must be some cause for the change). Note that things could be otherwise: the universe could be a rigidly determined clockwork machine, a sequence of events theoretically calculable in every detail (and only incalculable by limited human mental power), according to a hypothesis which the eighteenth-century culture was fond to. But this is a hypothesis formulated with a rational elaboration: the immediate reality of the human subject is that, as far as it knows, everything which exists in its representations may not be there, and therefore is contingent.
Kant’s analysis is based on the fact of this contingency, and not on the hypothesis of the clockwork-universe that could extinguish it (and which was a workhorse of rationalism in the modern age). This character of contingency, which we attribute to everything that presents itself to us in sensitive perception in general, corresponds to the original heterogeneity of the object with respect to the subject in representation: the object is not part of the representing subjectivity, but presents itself to it from outside. Outside of us are all the things that we see, hear and touch at this moment.
But if we now consider the psychological events, we see that the matter is exactly the same: a succession of moods occurs in a person, her or his feelings and her or his psychic acts alternate; now she is elated, now she is bored; now her attention is attracted by one thing, now by another; for a certain time she is able to concentrate on a demanding thought, subsequently she feels the need to indulge in restful and easy fantasies. These facts are also governed by relative rules, so in many cases a person can know that certain psychic events will be followed by others (and other people can know this too, when they know us well); but, as with external things, even in the case of internal facts it is always legitimate to expect that they can happen in a new and unexpected way, or that they can cease to happen. Therefore, even the internal facts of the mind are made up of a multiplicity of aspects which present themselves in a contingent way to the subjectivity that first perceives them and then thinks something about them. But then, if the subject as a knowing subject does not govern their appearance, the contingent psychological facts must be representations, or rather, be objects of representation in the same way as things not belonging to the sphere of the psychological. Therefore, the object of the representation could perhaps be called “internal” (psychological) or “external”, but in any case it will be heterogeneous with respect to the subject; and the subject, consequently, will not be able to identify itself with the ensemble of psychological events. In the Kantian text, this idea is capital and recurring: every time this observation is relevant to the topic treated, Kant repeats that the “empirical” subject, the living and real subject, is a phenomenon for itself as much as external things; and that the subject does not know itself in an immediate and absolute way, but knows its own events and their relationships through experience, and through sensitivity for its own phenomena, which Kant calls the “internal sense”.
For the moment it is not necessary, and it would be premature, to identify what terms can precisely distinguish this “internal” from the “external” in the context of representation (we will see exactly, however, that Kant has a unique criterion for going beyond the metaphors of the “internal” and the “external”). For now it is enough for us to be able to make use of the distinction between the sphere of the psychological, or internal, and the non-psychological, or external, conceived as different species of the single genus of the object of representation. We use this distinction simply as it is known to us in the ordinary meaning of the terms (whereby every people know that a feeling within themselves and a solid object before their eyes are things of different kinds), precisely because we are only interested in the equal and common character of contingency, which requires us to place psychic phenomena within the sphere of the object.
Having ruled out that the subject of the representation can be identified with the set of psychological events, it now seems that we are left with no notion of the characteristics of the subject. The subject remains conceived only as something original, opposite and irreducible to the object of its representation, by which it is modified: the distinction at first sight seems unanalyzable, it seems destined to be accepted as it presents itself, as a habitude. And yet we have not been left without resources to discover what distinguishes and positively characterizes the subject of representation as such. Let us start by observing that in particular cases and examples the contingency of the object in the representation can be ascertained with a method that almost seems a rule applicable in a mechanical way: in fact, knowing that something has been given in a way that is contingent to sensitivity means having the ability to imagine its suppression in the representation, or even to imagine the recomposition (according to any order criterion) of the things represented. In the activity of thinking, we can imagine at will that we suppress the existence of things that are known to us, or we can imagine that we generate the existence of things that are not there. We can imagine that the Sun burns out, or that the Earth has three Moons, we can imagine fabulous animals by imaginatively composing them with organs that we have observed in fishes, birds and mammals, we can imagine planets that do not exist, we can design things which do not exist but we could build, and infinite other “external” things; the same happens for “internal” things: we can also imagine and recompose our moods, and for example think that in the past we have invested too much emotional involvement in something that did not deserve it, or we have been careless about something that we should instead have dedicated ourselves to with greater attention and concentration. In doing this, we know well that we are not modifying the reality of things, but we also know that the necessity to represent things in the relationships in which they present themselves to us in sensation and perception, or in the relationships in which things usually find themselves in the knowledge that we have of them, is not absolute, precisely because by imagining we can generate by ourselves representations in which those relationships are modified. Our imagination is not limited to reproducing what it remembers, but is also capable of producing representations that have never been perceived.
The subject therefore has the ability to generate representations through the phenomena of its own imagination. And in doing this the subject does not govern the sensation at all, which continues to generate representations according to modalities unknown and foreign to it, but in a certain sense it seems to govern itself, being able within itself to reproduce and reorder the sensations and imagine situations and new things through this activity. Now, the ability to imagine is not yet sufficient to define the subject as such, because the products of the imagination in turn belong to the ensemble of contingent psychological phenomena, and as such we cannot consider them otherwise than as a subset of the ensemble of objects of the representation. The fact that my imagination is active and generates representations, as a fact, is a psychological phenomenon, which occurs contingently. However, apart from its nature as a contingent psychological event, we must now introduce the consideration that the reproductive and imaginative activity of the subject is not completely arbitrary with respect to the way in which it occurs, even if it is absolutely free with respect to the reality of sensations. The way in which the imaginative activity occurs is bound by rules according to which the things given to sensitivity can indeed be recomposed in the representation generated by the imagination, but always according to some order and some criterion of the relationships that are imagined and placed in the representation of things. That is, the reproductive activity of the imagination is not bound to the existence of things in current perception, but it is bound by the entire set of rules to which we recognize a logical or mathematical character (meaning these terms in the broadest sense); that is, it is bound by all the different types of order, mutual position and relationship, in which thought is capable of freely arranging the sensitive contents received. We can arbitrarily invert the temporal order of events, but never imagine events that are outside of time, that is, that are not either past or future. We can imagine placing things where they are not, and imagine deforming them at will, but we cannot imagine them outside of space and without a geometric shape. We can multiply in our imagination the things we have, but never violate the rules of arithmetic; if we are poor and imagine we are rich, the imaginary assets that we create for ourselves will correspond to an arbitrary multiple quantity of the real assets that we find we have in experience, but the quantitative relationship between the two representations cannot fail to exist. If I daydream about being rich, I dream of having more than I have in reality, and there is no limit to how much, but I cannot take away the “more”, the quantitative dimension. Should I remove it, the dream would lose all meaning, or get a completely different one. And so on.
Here, for thought must be understood, in an extremely broad sense, any psychological activity in which (with imagination) the subject carries out recompositions of the material content of its own sensations and perceptions. So I mean activities ranging from ruleless imagination to the most rigorous logical reasoning; and this happens for a substantial reason: that is, for the reason that any thought, of any kind, even completely fantastic, is bound by logical and mathematical rules that are inviolable for it. It may be that at first glance this assertion seems difficult to accept, because one can argue that science is surely bound by logical rules, but on the contrary, as long as I limit myself to inventing fairy tales, I can invent absolutely everything, and I am not bound by any rules. Ultimately, the traditional idea of fantasy is precisely this. But things are not like this: in reality, it is true that the freedom of imagination can make things happen in such a way as to satisfy conscious and unconscious desires without any limit, but it is also true that the geometric, temporal and logical context of the productions of imagination remains bound by the same rules that bind non-fantastic thought. What fantasy can violate are the real relationships between the things which we have learned from experience, not the formal logical and mathematical relationships. Suppose there are people who are hungry. Non-fantastic thinking says: rational means must be put in place to find food resources. Fantastic thought, on the other hand, imagines that an aerial entity comes and brings a gift of what is desired, such as the bread and accompaniment brought by angels and demons in fairy tales. The fantastic solution seems completely arbitrary compared to the other, and instead it is bound to an underlying framework that is common with the non-fantastic solution. First of all for the temporal sequence: there must be the problem first, then the solution, because by reversing the sequence the story would become another, making sense or not. Then geometry: the deity who gives the food must take it where those who need it are, not to some other part of the world. Then the quantity: the food must be enough, or the need for it must be reduced in the hungry people (fantastic imagination can solve the problem in this way if it wants), but a correspondence between the desired and the available quantity must be taken into account in order the fairy tale makes sense. Note that the imagination has always known that it must add inventions to inventions to maintain a certain consistency. Imagination has typical expedients precisely with respect to this, and children are often masters of stratagems useful for consolidating fantastic solutions to their desires. To give an example among the countless that can be found of this kind, in Sophocles’ Philoctetes the character Neoptolemus narrates that he crossed the Aegean sea in two days to honour the remains of his father Achilles; and since such speed was unlikely in Sophocles’ time, the tragedy takes care to specify that it was possible thanks to the particularly diligent work of the oarsmen, οὐρίῳ πλάτῃ, “with good rowing”. In this case, the imagination intervenes by adding this clarification to justify the possibility that Neoptolemus honoured the remains of Achilles in time, as was required by the plot, but it must intervene because the objection regarding the too great distance to be covered by the character in so little time would have come to the spectator’s mind. And here we see, as in infinite other cases, the component of mathematical and logical consistency in the relationships between things (not regarding the existence of things) that fantasy necessarily shares with non-fantastic thought, against first appearance.
It is by considering this complex of formal rules that binds every thought, that we become able to say what characterizes the subject of representation as such. That is, what characterizes the subject as such is implicit simply and precisely in the inviolability of the logical and mathematical framework of imaginative activities. If what belongs to the object, heterogeneous with respect to the representing subject, is always characterized by the contingency of its appearance and can in any case be suppressed by the subject (not in the appearance of the sensation, but in the imaginative elaboration of the representation produced by it), on the other hand, what belongs exclusively to the subject, as its characteristic, coincides with what can never be suppressed in the reproduction of representations carried out by the subject itself: because the representing subject, exercising its own activity, will never be able to suppress what is its own way to be and to represent.
Therefore, the subject is defined as a subject by the fact of modifying its own representations of objects through a set of ways of representing, which as ways of representing cannot be altered in imaginative activity: they are the way in which thought alters and processes the representation of perceived objects, but in themselves they are not subject to the same processing. This set of ways of representing, which we conceive as belonging to the representing subject and not to the represented object, will in the following always be called the logical structuring of representing. This logical structuring (not a term used by Kant, but which we will use to explain Kant) is the set of formal aspects that coincides with the set of rules and modalities that limit the arbitrary will of the subject when it modifies the representation of what is sensibly given to it. In concrete terms, what we know about this logical structuring coincides with the entire set of our logical and mathematical knowledge, and it is a knowledge that grows on itself and changes over time, like any other knowledge.
This notion of the logical structuring of representation is what allows us to distinguish subjectivity as such. But it should be noted that this notion of logical structuring was derived by introducing a further assumption: that what can be considered to be the formal structure of the subject and of the representational relationship is the entire set of characteristics of this relationship, which the elaboration of imagining thought recognizes as necessary precisely on account of the fact that it does not have the power to modify or suppress them. “Logical” is what thought cannot escape from, it is the limit that the imagination cannot violate because it is not able to represent its rupture: we will soon see how in this principle is implicit a perspective on logical thought that does not coincide with the most usual and obvious one.
Thus, everything that presents itself in sensation (internal and external indifferently) constitutes the material element of the representation and the side of the object, because thought can always legitimately imagine its non-existence. Conversely, everything that constitutes an essential constraint on the act of thinking belongs to the subject. Thus, the formal structure of any logical principle, for example the principle of non-contradiction, must be considered belonging to the formal structure of the relation of representation, and consequently belonging to the subject, because thought cannot formulate a contradictory judgement, and not be immediately and necessarily certain of the inadmissibility of such a judgment, when it gets an awareness of the character of its contradictory nature. A person may very well say the words “I am in Rome at the moment and I am not in Rome”, but if the words make sense to her or him, she cannot help but know that she is making a necessarily false statement.
We can say that logical structuring is known to us in the complex of our logical and mathematical knowledge, as long as these terms are not understood in a too literal sense, that is, they are not understood in the sense they have when they are used as concepts of the conventional division of scientific fields (or even of school systems). Every time we realize that formal relations between things have certain properties independent of the contents that we can put into these relations, then we obtain some logical-mathematical knowledge (in a broad sense), and therefore a knowledge that makes us conscious of something pertinent to the logical structuring of the representation. In this type of knowledge we must consider included all the experiences in which the distinction between a form and a content is somehow learned: also, for example, the awareness of the formal element that children can acquire in games in which sand or other materials are mould, and therefore they learn that identical specimens (in terms of shape) of the same material can be produced. I observe this because what the Critique of Pure Reason describes is thought as a human experience absolutely in general, identical in quality regardless of the generality and complexity of the knowledge available. It is not limited to the scientific fields that we usually consider as such, or to the type of technical-scientific relationship with nature that as modern men we tend not only to consider characteristic of our time, but also to overload with meanings and values.
The character of subjectivity is logical structuring
At this point the question regarding the distinctive character of subjectivity has received an answer that can be summarized in a formula: what necessarily belongs to representation, that is, what to which we are forced to recognize a character of mandatory and irrepressible necessity, is inherent to the subject and not to the object of the representation itself, because the object is an object insofar as it is contingent, while what is necessarily part of the representation inheres in the subject as its mode of being, from which mode of being the subject itself neither is nor can be able to free itself. And therefore what defines the subject as such is the fact of knowing how to represent according to a logical structuring.
