Rethinking Kant Volume 6 1527584372, 9781527584372

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Rethinking Kant Volume 6

Rethinking Kant Volume 6 Edited by

Edgar Valdez

Rethinking Kant Volume 6 Edited by Edgar Valdez This book first published 2022 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2022 by Edgar Valdez and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book 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 copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-8437-2 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-8437-2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................. vii Abbreviations .......................................................................................... viii Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Edgar Valdez Part I: Transcendental Idealism Kant on our Notion of Representation ...................................................... 14 Houston Smit Kant’s Idealism and His Hylomorphism .................................................. 46 Justin Shaddock Part II: Minds and Bodies Kant’s Canon: “Do Not Increase the Principles of Cognition Without Cause” ................................................................... 64 Jacob Browning Schematism and Embodiment in Kant’s Opus Postumum ....................... 84 Jeffrey Wilson Part III: Freedom Explaining Freedom Without Explaining It Away ................................. 102 Patricia Kitcher Practical and Productive Freedom in Kant’s Metaphysics of Reason .... 119 Clinton Tolley

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Table of Contents

Part IV: Feeling and Passion Kant on Grief and Grieving ................................................................... 152 Robert Colin English Evil or Only Immature? Kant and the Complexity of Moral Failure...... 174 Anastasia Berg Part V: Republican Ideals The Category of Moral Personhood: On Race, Labor and Alienation .... 196 Elvira Basevich Kant’s Commercial Republicanism ........................................................ 216 Nicole Whalen Contributors ............................................................................................ 241

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In her opening remarks at the 2018 Eastern Study Group of the North American Kant Society, Patricia Kitcher expressed optimism about the future of Kant scholarship, praising both the established scholars who have maintained the tradition so well and the next generation poised to keep it rich and vibrant. In my view, Kant scholars are stewards of a dynamic tradition and to rethink Kant is keep that tradition alive. This series speaks to the diversity of interests, applications, and scholars in North American Kantian studies. I share the optimism about its future. This volume contains papers presented in the 2018 to 2019 meetings of the regional Study Groups of the North American Kant Society (NAKS). I am thankful to everyone who contributed to these conferences. I am especially grateful to all the contributors to this volume who have managed revisions and improvements during a pandemic that has brought so much uncertainty. I am also grateful to Victoria Mallorga Hernández for her help proofreading and copyediting. Finally, in the spirit of stewardship, Pablo Muchnik has passed the baton of editing the volume with grace and generosity. His guidance and mentorship have been invaluable to the completion of the volume. —Edgar Valdez 

ABBREVIATIONS

All references to Kant’s works are in accordance with the Akademie-Edition Vol. 1-29 of Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, Berlin, 1900–. References to the Critique of Pure Reason follow the customary pagination of the first (A) and second (B) edition. Unless otherwise indicated, the English translations are from the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992–). The following abbreviations are used throughout the book: AA

Immanuel Kants Schriften. Ausgabe der Königlich Preussischen (Deutschen) Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: W. De Gruyter, 1900–)

Anth

Anthropologie in Pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798), AA 7 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Standpoint

BGSE

Bemerkungen in den Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (1764), AA 20 Notes inserted in the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime

BM

Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschenrace (1785), AA 8 Determination of the Concept of a Human Race

Br

Briefe, AA 10-13 Correspondence

EEKU

Erste Einleitung in die Kritik der Urteilskraft, AA 20 First Introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment

FM

Welches sind die wirklichen Fortschritte, die die Metaphysik seit Leibnizens und Wolf’s Zeiten in Deutschland gemacht hat? (written 1793-1794, published 1804), AA 20 What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made in Germany since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff?

GMS

Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785), AA 4 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

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GSE

Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (1764), AA 2 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime

GUGR

Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume (1768), AA 2 Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space

IaG

Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht (1784), AA 8 Idea toward a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim

KpV

Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788), AA 5 Critique of Practical Reason

KrV

Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781, 1787). Cited by A/B pagination. Critique of Pure Reason

KU

Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), AA 5 Critique of the Power of Judgment

LK

Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen Kräfte und Beurtheilung der Beweise, deren sich Herr von Leibniz und andere Mechaniker in dieser Streitsache bedient haben, nebst einigen vorhergehenden Betrachtungen, welche die Kraft der Körper überhaupt betreffen (1747), AA 1 Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces

Log

Jäsche Logik, AA 9 The Jäsche Logic

MAM

Muthmasslicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte (1786), AA 8 Conjectural Beginning of Human History

MAN

Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (1786), AA 4 Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science MpVT Über das Mißlingen aller philosophischen Versuche in der Theodicee (1791), AA 8

Abbreviations

x

On the Failure of all Philosophic Attempts in Theodicy MS

Metaphysik der Sitten (1797-1798), AA 6 Metaphysics of Morals

MSI

De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis (1770), AA 2 On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World

NG

Versuch den Begriff der negativen Größen in die Weltweisheit einzuführen (1763), AA 2 Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy

NL

Neuer Lehrbegriff der Bewegung und Ruhe und der damit verknüpften Folgerungen in den ersten Gründen der Naturwissenschaft (1758), AA 2 New Theory of Motion and Rest, and the Connected Consequences in the First Principles of the Natural Sciences

NTH

Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels oder Versuch von der Verfassung und dem mechanischen Ursprunge des ganzen Weltgebäudes, nach Newtonischen Grundsätzen abgehandelt (1755), AA 1 Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, or Essay on the Constitution and Mechanical Origin of the Entire Universe, Treated in Accordance with Newtonian Principles

Op

Opus postumum, AA 21, 22 Opus postumum

Päd

Pädagogik, AA 9 Pedagogy

PG

Physische Geographie, AA 9 Physical Geography

PM

Metaphysicae cum geometria iunctae usus in philosophia naturali, cuius specimen I. continet monadologiam physicam (1756), AA 1

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The Employment in Natural Philosophy of Metaphysics Combined with Geometry, of which Sample I Contains the Physical Monadology PND

Principiorum primorum cognitionis metaphysicae nova dilucidatio (1755), AA 1 A New Elucidation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition

Prol

Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können (1783), AA 4 Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

Refl

Reflexion, AA 14-19 Reflection

RGV

Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (17931794), AA 6 Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason

SF

Streit der Fakultäten (1798), AA 7 Conflict of the Faculties

TG

Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik (1766), AA 2 Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics

TP

Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis (1793), AA 8 On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory But It Is of No Use in Practice

ÜE

Über eine Entdeckung, nach der alle neue Kritik der reinen Vernunft durch eine ältere entbehrlich gemacht werden soll (1790), AA 8 On a Discovery whereby Any New Critique of Pure Reason Is to Be Made Superfluous by an Older One

ÜGTP

Über den Gebrauch teleologischer Principien in der Philosophie (1788), AA 8 On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy

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Abbreviations

VAMS

Vorarbeiten zur Metaphysik der Sitten, AA 23 Preliminary Works for the Metaphysics of Morals

VAnth

Vorlesungen über Anthropologie, AA 25 Lectures on Anthropology

VE

Vorlesungen über Ethik, AA 27 Lectures on Ethics

VL

Vorlesungen über Logik, AA 24 Lectures on Logic

VM

Vorlesungen über Metaphysik, AA 28, 29 Lectures on Metaphysics

VPE

Vorlesung philosophische Enzyklopädie, AA 29 Lectures on the Philosophical Encyclopaedia

VPG

Vorlesungen über Physische Geographie, AA 26 Lectures on Physical Geography

VRML

Über ein vermeintes Recht, aus Menschenliebe zu lügen (1797), AA 8 On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy

VRL

Vorlesungen über Religion, AA 28 Lectures on Religion

VvRM

Von den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen (1775), AA 2 Of the Different Races of Human Beings

WA

Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? (1784), AA 8 An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?

WDO

Was heißt: Sich im Denken orientieren? (1786), AA 8 What does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?

ZeF

Zum ewigen Frieden: Ein philosophischer Entwurf (1795), AA 8 Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Project

INTRODUCTION EDGAR VALDEZ

This collection focuses on issues in Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy. Its purpose is to bring Kant into conversation with current developments in these areas. The discussion can be organized into the themes of (I) how to properly understand transcendental idealism, (II) the relationship between minds and bodies, (III) freedom, (IV) the role of feelings and passion in morality, and (V) republican ideals in the political sphere.

Part I – Transcendental Idealism The central epistemological viewpoint of Kant’s critical philosophy is transcendental idealism, a core tenet of which is the distinction between concepts and intuitions and the recognition that our knowledge requires both. There is plenty of scholarship devoted to examining how deep the separation runs and the inability for either to perform the function of the other. Despite their differences, they are both under the genus of representation. In his famous letter to Markus Herz, Kant emphasizes this fact, holding that the key to the secret of metaphysics was the question “[o]n what ground rests the relation of that in us that one calls representation to the object (AA 10: 124). That Kant does not define the term “representation” in the Critique has led to some debate on what Kant meant by it. In “Kant on our Notion of Representation,” Houston Smit argues that the proper focus should be rather on what Kant would have expected his readers to understand by the term, something Smit views as distinct from our contemporary notions. Kant’s use of the term is borrowing from a rich and nuanced history Kant expected his German contemporaries to command. For Smit, we nowadays consider representation to be a two-place relation that has as its relata a mental state and what it is about. Kant, however, is operating in a context that conceives of representation in a threeplace relation. For the mental state of a subject to be a representation in the latter sense it must play a functional role in an operation: it must provide this subject content that it is to relate to something as one of its

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Introduction

determinations. This functional role is determined by that subject’s mental capacities. Thus, the mental state occupies the middle term of a three-place relation of the form “.” (p. 15) This is a notion that is more complex but nonetheless implicit in the Aristotelian logic Kant is dealing with. It is what Smit calls “the capacity-relative conception of representation.” (p. 15) Smit holds that Kant emphasizes representation in his famed letter to Herz because he is putting to use the capacity-relative conception to motivate a new focus in doing metaphysics. The implication in this case is that to read representation as only a two-place relation, like that of a mental state with intention, is an anachronism, for it imposes a contemporary notion on Kant’s more complex view. For Smit, the stakes are fairly high because this notion of representation is not ancillary to transcendental idealism and its new way of doing metaphysics. In critical philosophy, then, the ground for ‘the relation to the object’ that one calls representation “cannot lie in God, as Kant’s predecessors had thought, but can lie only in certain supersensible operations of our capacity of cognition.” (p. 15) Another way to view the contribution of transcendental idealism is to consider the limits it places on knowledge. Critical philosophy must recognize that there are things about which we are tempted to inquire but cannot come to cognize. For Kant, we cannot come to know things in themselves because of the limits placed on cognition by the understanding and the a priori intuitions of space and time. Kant holds that philosophers— metaphysicians in particular—have been focusing on the matter of cognition but should be directing their attention to the form of cognition. Thus, in “Kant’s Idealism and Hylomorphism,” Justin Shaddock argues that transcendental idealism is not separable from Kant’s view of the priority of form over matter, which Shaddock calls Kant’s hylomorphism. The neglect of the latter leads to a misunderstanding of the aims of the first Critique. While one interpretation is that things in themselves are not accessible to us because of the limits of sensibility, for Shaddock, Kant limits space and time because the categories cannot apply to things in themselves. In Kant’s hylomorphism, “our faculty of sensibility relates to our faculty of the understanding as matter relates to form, where matter relates to form as ‘the determinable’ to ‘its determination.’” (p. 46) This has an important consequence: it is the form of the understanding that limits the form of sensibility and not the other way around. Put another way, on this view of form determining matter, the understanding must determine sensibility whose limits, i.e., the impossibility of intuiting things in themselves, result from the very structure of human understanding and

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its categories. For Shaddock, Kant’s argument is that concepts can only relate to objects in two possible ways, “either by being made possible by objects, or by making objects possible. The categories cannot derive from things in themselves… nor can the categories produce things in themselves, since they are theoretical concepts. The only way the categories can relate to objects is by making our cognition of objects possible. But in this way, the categories relate to appearances only, not things in themselves.” (p. 57) As such, this view of Kant’s hylomorphism offers some support to a conceptualist reading of transcendental idealism because it subordinates the form of sensibility to the form of the understanding. The synthesis that produces space and time as the intuitions that ground geometrical and mechanical judgments is a synthesis that requires the categories. That is, the categories’ exclusion of things in themselves would pass on to space and time. For Shaddock, this view of Kant’s hylomorphism would make the understanding self-determining though not self-sufficient. This way of thinking of self-determination deals with affectation from objects rather than desires of the moral subject but it is no less grounded in a notion of autonomy.

Part II–Minds and Bodies The debate between conceptualist and nonconceptualists readings of transcendental idealism also has implications for how we consider the relationship between minds and bodies. Kant, of course, views himself as having eliminated, or at least reframed, the dualism of mind and body. More pressing for him is the dualism of phenomena and noumena. Along the way, however, Kant says plenty of interesting things about minds and bodies. Of particular interest is what Kant says about animal minds in trying to contrast them with human minds. The formal condition of human experience is owed to the structure of the subject’s mind and so Kant must say something, at least in analogy, about the structure of animal receptivity to the world. In “Kant’s Canon: ‘Do Not Increase the Principles of Cognitions without Cause’,” Jacob Browning argues that Kant’s references to animal minds are not mere throwaway lines or ways of supporting his own account of human cognition, but a contribution to an ongoing debate on the status of animal minds. In current debates concerning nonconceptual content, nonconceptualists hold that intuition must make a contribution to cognition that is not reducible to the categories.1 Some nonconceptualists argue that

 1

For conceptualists (e.g. Beatrice Longuenesse and John McDowell), the applicability of the categories relies on an original conceptual synthesis that gives

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Introduction

nonhuman animals provide a helpful way for thinking of this nonconceptual contribution. Such animals must have an analogous receptivity to the world, though they surely lack conceptual representation. The commitment to human exceptionalism is consistent throughout Kant’s corpus and so for this analogy to hold nonconceptualists have to contextualize certain remarks Kant makes that seem to deny animals consciousness: “Consciousness is entirely lacking in animals” (VM28:690; see also Br11:345; Log9:11; VL24:845-6; VM28:449-50; VM28:689-90; VM29:878-9; VM29:888). Nonconceptualists hold that Kant in cases like this one is referring more specifically to self-consciousness. For Browning, this is the wrong contextualization, since it is framed in terms of a current debate among epistemologists. The proper context is the debate in eighteenth century Germany between those Browning calls “disanalogists” and “minimalists.” The former group does not presume a correspondence between analogous minds and analogous behavior, while the latter holds that animals possess a minimal form of consciousness. Since Kant believes that animals do not learn, Browning thinks that the minimalist interpretation injects extra layers of cognition to the instinctive behavior we observe in animals, thus violating Kant’s proscription that serves as the title of the paper, “Do Not Increase the Principles of Cognitions without Cause.” Though certain nonhuman behaviors seem similar to analogous human behaviors, analogous minds are ruled out. According to Browning, “Kant also makes explicit that the analogue of reason functions by doing instinctually and unconsciously the work of consciousness: comparing and distinguishing between representations, forming concepts based on similarity and difference, and choosing what is best.” (p.79) Here Kant is not remarking in passing on the nature of animal minds for the sake of distinguishing concepts and intuition; he is, rather, making a more fundamental distinction about animals in nature. The difference between human and nonhuman animals “is not merely cognitive but corresponds to a metaphysical difference in the respective roles of animals and humans in a purposive nature.” (p.80) If Browning is right, animal receptivity is qualitatively distinct from human sensibility. Thus, we can neither deduce what their receptivity is like nor can nonconceptualists use it as a placeholder for distinguishing the epistemological contributions of sensibility and understanding.

 rise to the formal character of sensibility. Nonconceptualists (e.g. Lucy Allais, Lorne Falkenstein) argue that such a view would make sensibility reducible to concepts and in turn undermine Kant’s claim about the fundamental differences between concepts and intuitions.

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Concerns about minds and bodies are not only relevant for situating ourselves in the world but also for the possibility of knowledge of the natural world. The human body is not only necessary for the sense perception. It also plays a role in shifting our cognition from metaphysics to physics, The importance of embodiment is something Jeffrey Wilson explores in “Schematism and Embodiment in Kant’s Opus Postumum.” Wilson holds that self-positing is the proper bridge between nature and freedom in Kant’s later work. Self-positing serves as a schematism to transition from the metaphysics of natural science to the actual science of physics. That is, human embodiment allows us as knowers to mediate between a priori spatial synthesis and empirical spatial apprehension, a mediation that is necessary if we are to have physical (and other natural scientific) knowledge of the world. “Both the questions physics poses and the knowledge it acquires must be organized according to quantity, quality, relation, and modality, the four “titles” of the Table of Categories.” (OP AA 21: 455-6 and 457) But because physics operates with reference to the material world of physical objects, there is no prima facie assurance that its empirical results will be structurable in this way. While the effects of freedom cannot be available to knowledge, freedom requires the subject to be a world inhabitant (Weltbewohner) able to link sensible and supersensible principles. (OP AA 21: 31). “In order to view herself as a moral agent and not just as another object in the world, the autonomous person must be able to regard the world of spatiotemporal lived experience from two perspectives at once: as governed by a system of physical forces, and as a field of activity for the actualization of free choices.” (p. 86) Gravitational attraction exemplifies the need for a mediating concept (Mittelbegriff) that would allow for the systematic body of knowledge required for physics. A mere aggregate of observed gravitational forces lack the requisite systematicity. It is not even enough to have a conceptual correlate. For Kant, “universal gravitational attraction requires that the entire manifold of material nature must be connected into a thoroughgoing system of moving forces by being understood as the expression of the transcendental unity of consciousness itself.” (p.87) Part of the difficulty is that concepts of forces are not constructible. A constructed mathematical body is presupposed by a physical body, but the former is insufficient to conceptualize the latter. According to Wilson, the human body plays “a schematic role here, mediating between the two heterogeneous elements of the activity of a priori synthesis and movement through space apprehended empirically.” (p. 92) Wilson rejects the notion, suggested by Burkhard Tuschling, that Kant intended to replace the schematism for the transition project with the Ether deduction. “The human body becomes the privileged

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locus both of the imposition of the laws of nature on lived experience and the instrument of the actualization of free choices within the same lived experience. The self-determining moral agent is to inhabit the very same world upon which the transcendental unity of apperception imposes the categorial structural of the laws of nature.” (p. 97) If, as Wilson suggests, human embodiment allows us to schematize from metaphysical to physical explanation, the realms of nature and freedom need not be so starkly separated. Embodiment suggests that theoretical and practical reason, often considered to begin with conflicting premises, can be unified and understood in Kant as a systematic whole.

Part III–Freedom Few issues in Kant scholarship get as much attention as the question of freedom. Kant has situated freedom at the center of the human condition and our endeavor to understand it. Yet, he has brought out many of the tensions we must face in affording freedom its due significance. One such tension is that between our free moral choices and the deterministic natural scientific explanations of the world. Patricia Kitcher works to deal with this tension in “Explaining Freedom Without Explaining It Away.” Drawing on a distinction made by Daniel Dennett, Kitcher considers how often an explanation of certain phenomena simply explains that the phenomena do not actually occur but only seem to occur. In this sense, the explanation explains away the phenomena. Kitcher cites the popular example of the sphex wasp that seems to go through clever preparations to ensure food for its larvae but will mechanistically repeat a step in the process when prompted. Thus, “[w]hen we realize that the wasp’s activities are nothing but rigid mechanism, her cleverness is not explained, but unmasked.” (p. 102) Many explanations of Kant’s notion of freedom, appear to do just that: they offer an explanation for the semblance of freedom but actually eliminate it. Kitcher’s point is that such explanations miss a key element of Kant’s account. While Kant suggests that the possibility of freedom is compatible with determinism, this is not a hard determinism where the complete state of the world at one moment determines the complete state of the world in another. Rather, Kant’s view is that the freedom required for morality is possible while we live in a world that is explainable through natural science. A world subject to the laws of natural science is compatible with the actual freedom required for morality. For Kitcher, Kant’s “explanation of the actual possibility of freedom and morality cannot explain them away, because his moral psychology is based on his functional decomposition of the task of morally good action, as that

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task is understood in ordinary moral cognition.” (p. 115) That is, Kant’s moral psychology is a breakdown of the component functions of moral choice and each component is linked to a faculty he holds to be actual. For morality to be actual, the faculties that make up its component functions must operate as described. This keeps freedom from dissolving into the mere subjective semblance of freedom, but remains compatible with (and even necessary for) the law-governed world of science. Kitcher thinks that the advance of natural science supports Kant’s view, since science can account for how there are those with the capacities for moral action. Though Kitcher resists considering evolutionary explanation as a mere outgrowth of Kant’s views on teleology, an evolutionary perspective would aim to explain the advantages of the capacity for moral behavior and thus provide the kind of natural scientific explanation that is compatible with freedom. If Kitcher is right, this saves Kant from falling into a kind of compatibilism where we must deny metaphysical freedom while stipulating it for the purposes of morality. Such compatibilism would undermine the centrality freedom has for rational and moral pursuits. The tension between our theoretical explanation of the world and our practical moral purposes also arises when considering whether or not we can know or cognize our freedom. That is, must we consider the freedom that is necessary for morality as outside the bounds of objective validity? Clinton Tolley addresses this question in “Practical and Productive Freedom in Kant’s Metaphysics of Reason.” Tolley distinguishes between several senses of freedom and is especially concerned with distinguishing practical and productive freedom. Practical freedom concerns the will and the power of choice, while productive freedom concerns the causality of freedom where its effects are outside the soul, that is, in space. While further clarification is necessary for a comprehensive view of Kant’s account of freedom, this particular distinction is crucial to make sense of certain alleged contradictions. For example, throughout the critical period, Kant both affirms and denies that we can cognize that reason is free –a view that can only be coherent if we recognize the particular sense of freedom Kant has in mind. Our practical freedom is one we can cognize because its causes and effects are contained within the soul. But the same is not true for our productive freedom. One reason Tolley thinks it important that we make this distinction is that it is not an invention of Kant’s, as it can be traced from the Ancient tradition through the Medieval and Early Modern period. Beginning with Aristotle, the distinction is threefold: between theoria (cognition), praxis (willing or deliberation), and poeisis (production). In praxis, the good action is itself the end and the principle inheres in the action. In poeisis, the thing

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Introduction

produced is the end, and although the principle inheres in the producer, it is not in the thing produced. Aquinas preserves a version of this distinction in separating actio, an activity that remains within the agent, and factio, an activity that passes into an external thing. This, in turn, leads to the distinction in Baumgarten between immanent and transient action, where the only genuine case of transient action is the divine creation of the world. “Like Baumgarten, Kant means to emphasize God’s status as being not just ‘distinct from the world [a mundo diversum]’ (against Spinozism) but also ‘outside of the world [extramundanum]’, and ‘outside’ specifically in the sense of not being in reciprocal ‘interaction [commercium]’ with the world, such that each would have ‘influence [Einfluss]’ on the other (and so, also against Stoic doctrine of the divinity as the ‘world-soul’; 28:1041-43). Yet, though the world has no influence on God, God does ‘have influence on the world’ in virtue of being ‘active [thätig]’ (28:1043).” (p. 133) In this way, the productive sense of freedom is the one that is ontologically problematic, while practical freedom can be taken as a given in the formulation of our moral framework. That is, when we distinguish properly between the different notions of freedom, we can identify which is at issue when considering our inability to cognize it. Our practical freedom does not concern producing anything in the world, and is thus not problematic for our cognition.

Part IV– Feeling and Passion Kant is often accused of having a view of moral agency that is too harsh on emotions. Such a view, many contend, fails to recognize the fullness and complexity of the human condition. While some Kant scholars will concede that Kant is inflexible, many would see Kant as leaving a role for feeling. One such example comes from Robert English in “Kant on Grief and Grieving.” At least as far back as the Stoics, there are many examples of philosophers who think that grief—and other kinds of affect like fear and anxiety—constrain and inhibit our moral decision making. Beyond the general rigorist outlook of Kant’s moral framework, there are passages where Kant seems to endorse the view that would have us move beyond grief. But English makes room for a Kantian account of grief by separating it from grieving, the intentional brooding that does inhibit our free moral decision making. Though grief seems to be the kind of affect Kant would have us avoid, English suggests that Kant’s prohibition on grief as affect is not as forceful as his prohibition on grief as passion, because he allows for affects to “coexist with the best will” (MS 6:407-8).

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For Kant, both affects and passions can adversely influence free rational deliberation, though they do so in different ways. Affects are short and intermittent while passions are temporally extended and habitual. Affect, Kant tells us, is like drunkenness that one sleeps off, although a headache follows afterward; but passion is regarded as a sickness that comes from swallowing poison, or a deformity which requires an inner or an outer physician of the soul (Anth 7:252) More importantly, we do not subject affects to rational reflection. English wants to distinguish between grief as affect and our intentional brooding over some misfortune. For English, Kant is not such a rigorist as to deny us the sadness and related feelings associated with the misfortunes of life. He “allows for normatively justified feelings of even quite deep sadness in response to loss, provided that these feelings do not undermine the sovereignty of reason.” (p. 172) When it comes to our moral duties and decision making, however, Kant does expect us to keep such sadness from undermining reason. On this view, Kant would remain the rigorist he claims to be because there are no exceptions to or suspensions of the moral law. Distinguishing between grief as an affective response to episodic misfortune and grieving as a passion that undermines reason allows Kant to make room for the misfortunes that befall us all. He thus defends a rigorism that speaks to the complexity of the lived human experience. Another point of resistance to Kant’s rigorism is his all or nothing determination of moral character. Kant’s view of moral character is often criticized for being all or nothing because he seems to allow for only two possibilities: either a moral agent subordinates the sensible to the moral or the moral to the sensible. That is, either an agent is morally good or morally wicked. There is no room for those who sometimes incorporate the moral law into their maxims, because the supreme principle determines the agent’s moral character at the highest level of generality. In “Evil or Only Immature? Kant and the Complexity of Moral Failure,” Anastasia Berg makes the case that too often Kant’s account of moral character too finely differentiates between moral virtue and moral evil. The result is that those of frail and impure moral character, two lesser shortcomings by Kant’s account, can be forced into a qualitative similarity with wickedness. This pitfall must be avoided to allow for the possibility of moral corruption but also of moral improvement. To this end, Berg argues that frailty and impurity ought to be conceived as versions of moral immaturity that allow for the building of moral character through habituation, something Kant is often mistakenly taken to devalue. This is possible because just before Kant’s defense of rigorism he defines the levels of evil, and while wickedness is understood in terms of the general adoption of the supreme maxim, the other shortcomings are not.

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Introduction

Frailty is defined in terms of the agent’s weakness in complying with maxims she has adopted, and impurity in terms of the agent’s tendency to mix immoral incentives with moral ones. For Berg, neither definition appeals to a fixed or stable feature of moral character. We cannot simply dismiss the way in which these flaws differ from wickedness: “frailty and impurity constitute fundamental phenomena of moral life: doing something wrong with some apparent awareness that it is the wrong thing to do and doing the right thing with some apparent awareness that it is anyway in one’s interest to do it. Second, frailty and impurity are necessary in order to make sense of the distinctions between characters that are not wholly good, but that are not wholly and stably bad, either.” (p.181) For Berg, Kant understands frailty and impurity in a way that allows for a process of maturation. They are not fixed and so their wickedness is unlike that of evil. Thinking of frailty and impurity as cases of moral immaturity need not abandon any fundamental Kantian commitments. For Berg, moral immaturity precedes a stable moral character and allows for development. Berg, however, is not suggesting that we must abandon reading Kant as the rigorist he claims to be. Rather, Kant’s distinction of levels (Stufen) of evil requires that the acquisition of moral character be a rational act, not merely an empirical coincidence. The tension in supposing that there are levels of evil comes when juxtaposed with Kant’s view that we cannot have rational agents who on occasion subject their maxims to the moral law.

Part V– Republican Ideals Kant’s political theory has been a cornerstone of political liberalism in the West. Recently, as Western, and especially Anglo-American traditions have begun to come to terms with their racist and sexist pasts, an analogous reckoning appears underway in Kant scholarship. Charles Mills, for example, has denounced the racism imbued in Western political traditions at the feet of Kant, holding that Kant’s notion of personhood is an invention that paves the way for considering some to be subpersons. Rather than dispense with Kant altogether, as some would do, Mills argues that Kant’s notion of moral personhood can be saved and radically reconstructed. Elvira Basevich, however, is skeptical about this project. She argues that Kant’s version of moral personhood lacks some of the tools necessary for such a reconstruction. In her essay, “The Category of Moral Personhood, On Race, Labor and Alienation,” she holds that extending moral personhood to historically-excluded racial groups and trying to accommodate various forms of exclusion and subjugation is necessary but insufficient, precisely because of the concerns of reparative justice that Mills and others have in

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mind. For Basevich, a robust anti-racist political critique would also need: “(1) a clarification of what the public recognition of moral personhood can legitimately entail as a requirement of justice enforceable by legal protections, and (2) an account of non-alienated labor that challenges socially denigrating and exploitative norms in the organization of labor markets.” (p. 198) Even if these factors do not exhaust all that is necessary for a radical reconstruction of Kant, they highlight the thinness of his notion of moral personhood for doing so. Mills’ view is that the just state prescribed by Kant must provide solutions to the nonideal reality of racial subjugation and “a reeducated and reconstructed Anti-Racist Kant” would judge: racial disrespect for others to be a fundamental violation of the categorical imperative and, when implemented as public policy, as an unconscionable transgression of the ground rules of the Rechtsstaat…A reconstructed AntiRacist Kant, then, is not going to be a compromiser on these issues but a hardliner (2015, 551)

Basevich argues that while this recognition of equal moral personhood might offer a schedule of basic rights and liberties in the domain of juridical right— “precisely the upshot of the moral equality of persons that Kant delineates in his theory of justice” (p. 198)—it fails to capture the other dimensions of social life through which personhood and subpersonhood are reinforced and unrecognized. Similar concerns, particularly about labor, emerge in Nicole Whalen’s “Kant’s Commercial Republicanism.” Whalen holds that, as happens often with Kant, contemporary distinctions of economic positions fail to capture his outlook on the market. While the strong connection between Kant’s practical philosophy and republican freedom suggests an uncomplicated association with liberal economics, it is necessary to situate Kant within an eighteenth-century framework of different versions of republicanism and their corresponding relationships to the market. On the one hand, there are philosophical commitments associated with a liberal economic position like those of Adam Smith, which are consistent with Kant’s republican ideals. Here Whalen has in mind Smith’s view that commerce and manufactures lead to liberty and security for individuals. On the other hand, Kant’s commitment to certain interventions on behalf of the state (like import restrictions and wealth redistribution) suggest a welfarist concern compatible with republican political theory but in tension with free market liberal economics.

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Introduction

To resolve this tension Whalen distinguishes between classical, agrarian, and commercial republicanism. An important feature in distinguishing these various forms is the role played by labor. In the classical model “any involvement in trade or labor was associated with unfreedom.” (p. 218) This is because the classical republican society required a class of unfree citizens that made possible the civic engagement and liberties of the free class. These same liberties serve as a justification for liberal economics in the eighteenth-century republican model. While classical and agrarian republicanism see alienated labor (enslaved and hired, respectively) as an impediment to free political participation, commercial republicanism views wage labor as a liberal instrument since laborers own their labor and are free to alienate it. For Whalen, Kant’s embrace of unsocial sociability is a rejection of the classical and agrarian views that think of commerce as opposed to civic virtue. Rather than contrary to republican ideals, Whalen reads Kant as treating contracts and commercial policies as justified by a liberal republican outlook: “through contracts, acts that would otherwise be coercive become expressive of freedom. Granting another the use of your powers or the right to set ends for you, becomes permissible in this context.” (p. 230) Whalen and Basevich are bringing Kant into conversation with contemporary political debates about social and political inclusion and subjugation. In this sense, Kant is not only a key figure in the history of republican political theory, but also a major player in its future. A point that is illustrated, as this volume shows, by all those who –with their particular inflexion– engage in the task of rethinking Kant.

Works Cited Allais, Lucy. "Kant, Non-Conceptual Content and the Representation of Space,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 47 (2009): 383-413. Falkenstein, Lorne. KanĢs Intuitionism: A Commentary on the Transcendental Aesthetic. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1995. Longuenesse, Beatrice. Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. McDowell, John. Mind and World, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994 Mills, Charles W. “The Racial Contract Revisited: Still Unbroken after all These Years,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 3.3 (2015): 541-57

PART I: TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM 

KANT ON OUR NOTION OF REPRESENTATION HOUSTON SMIT

I noticed that I still lacked something essential, something that in my long metaphysical studies I, as well as others, had failed to consider and which in fact constitutes the key to the whole secret of metaphysics, hitherto still hidden from itself. I asked myself the question: On what ground rests the relation [die Beziehung] of that in us that one calls representation [Vorstellung] to the object [auf den Gegenstand]? Letter to Herz, February 21, 1772; AA 10: 124

Kant here poses what is, arguably, the fundamental question that drives the investigation he pursues in the Critique of Pure Reason. Indeed, this question, and the answer to it he offers in the first Critique, also directly informs the projects he undertakes in the second and third Critiques. So this question informs his entire critical philosophy. I want to consider a question about this passage that readers of his critical philosophy do well to ask: What sense did Kant expect Herz to know to attach to ‘Vorstellung’ in reading the clause “that in us that one calls Vorstellung”? With other 18th century philosophers writing in German, Kant follows Wolff in using ‘Vorstellung’ as the German equivalent of ‘repraesentatio’. Indeed, in the Critique of Pure Reason he provides the latter as the Latin equivalent of the former (A320/B376), and I will use ‘representation’ to translate both. So we may generalize the question I am raising: What sense did Kant expect his contemporary audience to know to attach to ‘Vorstellung’ and ‘repraesentatio’? Notice that this question – call it ‘our question’ – is one more determinate than the question, ‘What does Kant mean by “representation”? The latter is naturally construed as we would ‘What does Linnaeus mean by “whale”?’: namely, ‘What new sense does Linnaeus’s new system of the classification of living things assign this term?’ This is, obviously, not the sense of our question. I am not, in the first instance at least, asking after the sense of any new philosophical terminology that Kant may be introducing, terminology that breaks with that he took to be standard. What I am asking after is, rather, the sense that Kant expected his target contemporary readers to know to attach to ‘representation’ in reading him, because it already

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enjoyed currency among them, well before he published the Critique of Pure Reason. We will see that Kant and his contemporaries shared, as the one we are to employ in doing philosophy of logic and metaphysics, a conception of representation importantly different from that standard today. On both, what we mean by ‘representation’ in using it to refer to something in us is a mental or psychological state that, in respect of its content, is – in some sense that is not easy to specify – about, or directed toward, something. But we now typically conceive of this aboutness as a two-place relation that has as its relata that state and what it is about. By contrast, on the conception still standard in Kant’s day, this aboutness is conceived rather differently, and as one that consists in a three-place relation. What it is for a mental or psychological state of a subject to be a representation is for it to be suited to playing a certain functional role in an operation of that subject’s capacity of representation: namely, providing this subject content that it is, in this operation, to relate to something as one of its determinations. This functional role is, in respect of its form, determined by the nature of that subject’s mental and/or psychological capacities. A mental or psychological state is suited to playing this role, and constitutes a representation, as what occupies the middle term of a three-place relation of the form . Call this complex conception, one implicit in the Aristotelian conception of logic, ‘the capacity-relative conception of representation’.1 Far from rejecting these conceptions, the Critical Kant purports to find an entirely new way of doing first philosophy, one that puts the capacity-relative conception of representation to use in providing a radically new account of what our capacity of cognition would have to consist in. This account shows that the ground on which rests “the relation to the object” had by “that in us that one calls ‘representation’” cannot lie in God, as Kant’s predecessors had thought, but can lie only in certain supersensible operations of our capacity of cognition.

 1

The conception of representation that I will be ascribing to Kant bears important points of similarity with the conceptions of perception developed and defended by Burge (2010) and by Schellenberg (2018). It would be worthwhile to examine these points, as well as some of their dissimilarities, but I will not do so here.

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I. The Difficulty of Answering Our Question Our question is prompted, in no small part, by the fact that in his Critical works, including the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant puts the term ‘Vorstellung’ to work without providing any preliminary articulation of the sense he expects his reader to attach to it. Now, to be sure, the same can be said of a host of other terms Kant employs. But one might have expected him to make the sense we are to attach to ‘representation’ explicit in introducing the project of the first critique: this work is the first Kant publishes after having posed his question to Herz, and one in which he sets out to provide this question his first and most fundamental answer.2 Shouldn’t he tell us, right at its outset, the sense that one attaches to this term when “one calls” something in us ‘representation’? That he doesn’t, strongly suggests that Kant expected his target contemporary audience to know to attach, without any help, some commonly recognized sense to the term ‘Vorstellung’ generally, and in using it to refer to that in us that we take to answer to it. What I have dubbed ‘our question’ is simply the question, what is this sense? When one sets out to answer our question, one finds a second, equally striking, fact that seems, prima facie, to make our question more challenging to answer than the parallel ones one might ask of the rest of Kant’s philosophical terminology: Kant does not, in the works he published, offer any characterization of representation considered simply as such.3

 2

This answer sets to one side the ground on which rests the relation “that in us that we call ‘representation’” has to the Gegenstand in our practical thinking, our aesthetic judgments, and judgments in which we ascribe purposiveness. Our practical thinking, in the sense I have in mind, is our thinking that is aimed at determining the actions in which we bring about the state of affairs we represent, in that thinking, as what we are to bring about. In the first Critique, Kant answers the question he poses to Herz only with respect to the relation that our representations have to their objects under the principles of the real use of our understanding, which principles are ones of our theoretical (by contrast with practical) cognition. This answer is the most fundamental, because it is presupposed by all these other relations had by “that in us that we call ‘representation’” to the Gegenstand. 3 Dickerson remarks on the absence of any account of representation in general in the Critique of Pure Reason, and on how sharply Kant differs, in this respect, from Leibniz, who of course offers us an account of representation in terms of expression: “The notion of representation tends to be treated as a primitive notion in Kant’s epistemology” (2002, 4). The answer I propose to our question puts us in a position to see how and why, from the early 1760s onward Kant holds, not just that this notion is primitive, but that an account of representation in general, such as Leibniz offers, is one that we cannot give.

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There is an important passage, midway through the Critique of Pure Reason, in which Kant says something by way of explaining the senses in which he has, to that point, been employing his terms for specific kinds of representation (including ‘concept’ and ‘intuition’). This passage is to be found in Kant’s introduction of the Transcendental Dialectic, and it offers a taxonomy of representations intended to restore to ‘idea’ its original sense, that in which Plato used it (A320/B376-7). Because Kant refers to this taxonomy as a ‘Stufenleiter’ (‘stepladder’) of the species of representation, this passage has come to be referred to as ‘the Stufenleiter’, a practice I will follow. I have already cited this passage, and it will figure prominently in what follows. Nonetheless, the Stufenleiter does not offer any characterization at all of representation in general (ueberhaupt); in dubbing what occupies the place of the highest genus in his taxonomy ‘Vorstellung’, all Kant does by way of conveying the sense he expects his reader to attach to this term is to provide ‘repraesentatio’ as its Latin equivalent. It is only when we delve into Kant’s Nachlass that we find him advancing what we are clearly intended to take as characterizations, of some kind, of representation as such (as against particular species of representation, such as those that belong to the Stufenleiter’s taxonomy).4 As will emerge, these characterizations are, however, ones explicitly of that in us that we are to subsume under our concept ,5 and this as what is to have some sort of use for us in acts of thinking that are imputable to us. Moreover, these characterizations are to be found only in his Nachlass on logic: one in a very early Reflexion on logic, the other two in transcripts others made of his lectures on logic. These characterizations have received precious little attention, no doubt because they are themselves somewhat cryptic, as are the contexts in which we find them.6

II. A Puzzle about Kant’s Characterizations of Representation We will be concerned with the two characterizations we find in transcripts of Kant’s lectures on logic. It is hard to see what, exactly, Kant

 4

In the A-Edition Deduction, Kant does advance, as a premise, a crucial claim concerning representation taken in general and as such: “All representations, as representations, have their objects [Gegenstaende]” (A108). But Kant does not advance this claim as a characterization of representation in general. 5 Single brackets () indicate that I am speaking about a concept (the representational content), single quotes, that I am speaking about a word. 6 George (1982) offers a brief treatment of some of the remarks Kant makes in his lectures on logic regarding representation in general; see 31-2.

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takes himself to be doing in offering them, in part because he gives them hard on the heels of denying that we can define representation: What representation is cannot actually be explained [erklaert]. It is one of the simple concepts we necessarily must have. Every man knows [Jeder Mench weiss] immediately what representation is. . . . Cognition and representation are taken in logic to be of the same sort. Every representation is something in us [etwas in uns], which, however, relates to something else [sich beizieht auf etwas anderes], which is the object [Object]. (Blomberg Logic; AA 24: 40; early 1770s).

Call this C1, short for Characterization 1. Representation cannot be defined [definiert], because for that one would need ever new representations. All representation is either sensation or cognition. It is something that has a relation to something in us [etwas, welches eine Beziehung auf etwas in uns hat]. (Vienna Logic; AA 24: 805; early 1780s)

Call this C2, short for Characterization 2. In each of these lecture notes, Kant goes on to put the characterization he supplies to use, inter alia, to provide a philosophical account of logic, where logic is understood, along traditional Aristotelian lines, as itself a purely a priori science of our capacity of understanding. These passages raise a puzzle: how can these characterizations be fit for the use to which Kant puts them if they are not explanations, of some sort, of what representation is? Even though C1 and C2 are characterizations specifically of that in us that we call representation, why aren’t they explanations of what representation is, merely as representation? Moreover, mustn’t they implicate some characterization of representation that holds for representation more generally? Why don’t they, then, implicate some explanation of what representation is more generally, if only one that elucidates the content of some concept of representation we have? Here, in brief, is the solution I propose to this puzzle. Kant does not offer C1 or C2 as characterizations of representation, per se, at all, let alone as explanations of what representation is. He offers them, rather, as characterizations of “something in us” that we take to answer to our simple concept in taking it to have some use in acts of thinking that are imputable to us. However, as we will see, Kant holds that this is but one way in which we can conceive of something as what answers to our notion . Notice how this reading explains why Kant supplies these characterizations in lecturing on logic: he intends C1 and C2 as characterizations, suitable for use in logic, of what makes representations

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in us representations that belong to us as thinkers in virtue of their conforming to the rules and principles of logic. C1 and C2 reflect a conception of representation that, though unfamiliar to us, was standard in the broadly Aristotelian logical tradition that prevailed through the early modern period. On this tradition, what it is for representations to be representations for us, as thinkers, is for them to provide us grounds on which we are to determine our thinking that is imputable to us. Moreover, representations provide us such grounds only in playing functional roles in our thinking that are determined by the nature of our capacity of understanding itself. 7 This nature determines these roles in containing the principles of pure logic, purely a priori principles conformity to which is constitutive of things being possible objects of our thinking. Take, for example, the distinctive functional role in acts of our thinking that pertain to any concept as such: this is a role a concept plays as to what consists, in respect of its content, determinations of its object that we, as subjects of conceptual understanding, grasp as essentialia or propria that provide us sufficient grounds for positing an essence potentially common to more than one object. This is the role that any concept plays, merely as a general representation, and so in a way that prescinds from its determined content. The nature of our understanding, merely as one of conceptual understanding, determines this functional role in determining the logical form of generality as a purely intellectual principle of logic: the principle conformity to which we represent the object of a concept as having in grasping that concept. On the Aristotelian logical tradition, logic is itself a science of our understanding that delivers a distinctive sort of rational cognition of these principles inherent in its nature. But, on this tradition, logic does not itself deliver rational cognition of these principles as ones inherent in our understanding: it does not, itself, employ the concept at all; it falls, rather, to philosophy of logic to explain how and why the nature of our capacity of understanding itself grounds the principles of logic. Moreover, Kant subscribes to a certain view regarding the principles of logic that prevailed in this logical tradition: because they are principles according to which we are to govern our own thinking, and this in determining our thinking in acts that are imputable to us, we must be able, at least in principle, to achieve insight into how and why these

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Gary Hatfield (1998) brings out instructively how 17th century philosophers continued to frame the fundamental questions with which they engage in terms of our mental capacities. I depart from Hatfield, however, in proposing that Kant, in particular, continues to frame the fundamental questions of philosophy in these terms.

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principles enjoy the strictly universal and necessary objective validity for our thinking to which they lay claim. This internalism is what motivates the traditional quest for a first philosophy (construed broadly enough so that Descartes’s first philosophy belongs to this venerable tradition): such a philosophy aims to deliver the requisite rational insight, one that establishes for the fundamental principles of all the genuine sciences of which we are to be capable – including those of pure logic – the a priori warrant they require. It is ultimately in virtue of the possibility of the rational insight that first philosophy aims to achieve in delivering an adequate philosophy of general logic that the principles of general logic govern our thinking with the strict necessity and universality to which they lay claim.8 Pursuing this solution, just proposed, to the puzzle regarding C1 and C2 would yield a solution to the puzzle noted in the previous section: namely, why Kant doesn’t offer us any characterizations of representation in general, not just in the Critique of Pure Reason, but in any of his published work. This absence is not due to an oversight on his part; rather, it reflects a set of sophisticated views at which he had already arrived by the early 1760s. It reflects, in particular, his considered accounts of the following: a) Our notion : this notion is an absolutely simple one and, as such, one for which we can provide no exposition all, let alone any sort of definition9;

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In the first Critique, Kant breaks with this tradition by introducing a new kind of pure logic, transcendental logic, that is, itself, a philosophy of logic; transcendental logic purports finally to achieve the rational cognition, proper to first philosophy, of all the purely a priori principles of logic, including its own. 9 Already by the early 1760s Kant had arrived at the view that we cannot, by analysis of what we mean by ‘representation’ – i.e., what we grasp in grasping our notion –arrive at a resolution of what we mean “through a definition”: Even in the most profound science the term ‘representation’ is understood exactly enough [genau genug] and used with confidence, although its meaning [Bedeutung] can never be resolved [aufgeloest] through a definition [eine Erklaerung]. (Only Possible Basis (1763): AA 2: 52) Indeed, as the account of the methodology proper to metaphysics, conceived as natural theology, that Kant offers in his Prize Essay (1763) makes clear, the impossibility of such a resolution is what Kant is claiming when he declares that representation cannot be defined, and that what representation is cannot be explained. Notice that, since the sort of metaphysics is theological, the concept it employs must encompass divine representation, and not merely the sort of representation of which we humans are capable. Kant’s claim

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b) The purely intellectual conceptions of representation that we are to employ in doing logic and philosophy of logic, ones into which our notion enters: Kant, along with other early moderns, inherited these conceptions from the scholastic Aristotelian tradition; he presupposes his readers’ familiarity with these conceptions, and works with them before, during, and after his Critical turn10; c) The methodology proper to philosophy: philosophy is rational cognition from concepts, and first philosophy must work with purely a priori concepts that are not made (as are the pure sensible concepts of mathematics), but rather given by the nature of our capacity of cognition itself. Examining these accounts would put us in a position to see why, from the early 1760s onward, Kant provides characterizations of representation only in lecturing on logic, all of which are ones specifically of our mental representations in respect of the relation they have to their objects under principles of logic. Any characterization of representation as such, be it of our notion or of some purely intellectual conception of representation, would, if offered in any work of metaphysics, including the Critique of Pure Reason, be misconstrued: his contemporaries would have naturally, but mistakenly, taken it as one Kant intends as an explanation of

 encompasses definitions in the less demanding sense of ‘definition’ on which he holds that philosophy does provide definitions, though not ones that meet the highest standard that we may set for the exposition of a concept to count as a definition, one that only mathematics can meet. Because its a priori concepts are given, and not made, philosophy can provide expositions that meet a lower standard, though only after, and in virtue of, having put its expositions of complex given concepts to work to achieve the distinctive sort of rational insight at which it aims. See A727/B755. 10 In pairing ‘concept of x’ and ‘conception of x’ here, I mean by the latter a determined way of conceiving of the object of the former. This terminology is inspired by Rawls, but I do not mean to suggest that a conception, in the sense I intend, need be the product of an analysis of the concept to which it corresponds. The analysis that we carry out in transcendental logic that yields the correct conceptions that correspond to our notions is not an analysis of the content of these notions themselves; it is rather “the much less frequently attempted analysis of the capacity of understanding itself” that Kant announces he will undertake in the first book of the Transcendental Analytic “in order to research the possibility of a priori concepts by seeking them only in the understanding as their birthplace” (A65B90f.). This analysis of our capacity of understanding itself serves, inter alia, to raise to clarity and distinctness what we actually think in forming the intellectual conceptions we employ in our ordinary thinking.

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what representation is of just the sort that he maintains we cannot, in principle, provide. Now a notion (Notio), here and throughout the present essay, is to be understood in Kant’s technical sense, on which a notion is one species of a purely intellectual concept: a notion is such a concept “that has its origin merely in the understanding” (A320/B377). A notion, then, is to be distinguished not just from concepts that have sensible content, but also from an idea: the latter is a purely intellectual concept that does not have its origin “merely in the understanding,” because it is one the determined content of which originates in an operation of our pure reason that puts notions to a real use (A298/B355f.). All our notions (which include the pure concepts of our understanding) originate in the original activity of our capacity of apperception in which we realize it as our capacity of understanding itself.11 Since they are purely intellectual, all notions, including our notion , must, on Kant’s account, have some genuine purely a priori use in our thinking. The notion , moreover, is one that we put to one such a use, constitutively, in the logical reflection that realizes logical form in any acts of our thinking that are imputable to us. As I just explained, Kant holds that their having such a use requires that we be able, in doing first philosophy, to achieve a rational insight that suffices to establish a purely a priori warrant we have to take representations in us to have the conformity to the rules and principles of logic that they must if we are to be subjects of acts of thinking that are imputable to us. Where the Critical Kant parts with tradition is in claiming that this first philosophy cannot be theological: we can achieve the requisite insight, one that establishes for all the first principles of human cognition, including those of logic, their purely a priori warrant; but this insight locates the ground of these principles, not in God, but rather in certain supersensible operations of our capacity of cognition. The Critique of Pure Reason purports to achieve this rational insight, one that demonstrates that the only possible ground “on which rests the relation of that in us that one calls ‘representation’ to the object [Gegenstand]” lies in these operations.

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I develop a reading along these lines in (Smit 2019). This origin, of course, is one in respect of the content of these concepts: the form of generality our concepts have as clear concepts is common to all concepts.

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III. Two Extant Answers to Our Question Many of Kant’s interpreters have addressed the less determinate question–namely, that of what Kant means by ‘representation’–and, in so doing, arrived at very different answers. Fewer have said much by way of addressing our, rather more determinate, question: namely, whether there was some sense that Kant expected his intended audience to attach, as one that already enjoyed currency, to his use of ‘Vorstellung’ and ‘repraesentatio’, and, if so, just what this sense is. And the things these scholars have had to say, in respect to this narrower question, also diverge sharply. In the present section I briefly present two of the most explicit answers to our question on offer, by Robert Howell and Rolf George, respectively. Consider first Robert Howell, who maintains that Kant uses ‘representation’ in two different fundamental senses, one narrower than the other. And it is what Howell says in the service of motivating the ascription of the narrower sense to Kant that has most bearing on our question. This part of his reading is one to which we will later return: it is one worth considering in some detail, since it has the considerable virtue of drawing our attention to some important points of continuity between Kant’s conception of cognition, on the one hand, and the conception of an idea with which Descartes and Locke operate, on the other.12 Howell reads Kant as at points working with a notion of representation on which a representation is “an inner determination of the mind that signifies an object” and at other points with a wider notion of representation, on which any determination of the mind, as such, counts as a representation (Howell 1992, 27). Howell maintains that the narrower notion – which seems like the contemporary two-place conception of representational content – is continuous with Descartes’ and Locke’s notion of an idea: with these figures, Kant holds that we cognize only by means of inner determinations of our mind that are representations in the narrower sense, and that “knowledge occurs in us only insofar as” these representations “represent the objects [to be known by means of them] to a certain sort of inner consciousness that is possessed by our mind” (Howell 1992, 5). Howell contends that the wider notion must be in play in the Stufenleiter’s characterization of sensation, one he glosses as (and here I quote Howell)

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Dickerson (2004, 5 f.), and Knuefer (1902) also stress this continuity. The latter canvasses characterizations of representation in Leibniz, Wolff, Meier, Lambert, Sulzer, Mendelssohn, and Tetens. When it comes to interpreting what Kant means by ‘representation’, Dickerson sides with George, as against Howell (2004, 24).

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“a representation ‘related merely to the subject, as a modification of its state’ (A320/B376)” (ibid, 27). Rolf George also reads Kant as using ‘Vorstellung’ in the Stufenleiter in a sense in which all mental states, whether they have intentionality or not, count as representations. Unlike Howell, however, George maintains that this is the fundamental sense in which Kant univocally uses this term (George 1982, 1983). According to George, Leibniz’s influence explains how ‘Vorstellung’ came to have this use, shared by Kant and his contemporaries, on which some of our representations do not have any objects. Leibniz and his followers held that every mental state represents something. As a result, ‘repraesentatio’ came to be used as the term for all mental states, and Wolff introduced ‘Vorstellung’ as the German equivalent of ‘repraesentatio’. Crusius, Tetens, and Feder subsequently rejected the view that every mental state represents something; they maintained, quite commonsensically, that some mental states, and sensations among them, do not represent anything, and so do not have objects. The terms ‘Vorstellung’ and ‘repraesentatio’, nonetheless, continued to be used as the general terms for every mental state, despite their misleading connotations: hence Kant’s talk of representations that do not have any objects (George 1983, 32-3).13 The Stufenleiter, and in particular the distinction Kant draws in it between sensation and cognition, is the only evidence that George cites in support of his reading of Kant’s use of ‘representation’. And this passage is the text Howell cites in support of his ascription to Kant of the broader of the two fundamental senses in which he reads Kant as using this term. For

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George’s reading of what Kant means, fundamentally, by ‘representation’ has had considerable influence on Kant scholarship. Many, following him, ascribe to Kant a position George dubs ‘sensationism’: sensations are not intentional or referential states – they are “mental states in which no object, other than the state itself, is present to the mind” – but they are, nonetheless, “foundations of empirical knowledge” (George 1981, 230). For something to be ‘present to the mind’ in its mental state is for it to be something of which the mind is aware in being in that state (ibid, 229). Sensation plays the foundational role in question in making our experience possible, which they do as states of awareness that provide matter for the empirical cognition we have in experience. Kant, however, classifies sensations as a species of representation. So, George concludes, it cannot be essential to a state of mind’s being a representation, in the sense in which Kant uses ‘representation’, that it be intentional, in the sense of ‘intentional’ George specifies. NB: George assumes that what individuates sensation itself, as a species of representation, is not its functional role in an operation of the subject’s capacity of representation, but rather what the subject is aware of in having sensation. Westphal (2004, 44-5), Dickerson (2004), and Allais (2015, 161n), among others – all endorse readings similar to George’s, explicitly crediting him.

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both of these scholars, it is also the chief textual basis on which they contend that Kant uses ‘cognition’ (‘Erkenntnis’ and ‘cognitio’) as his term for a mental state that represents something, a mental state that has an object.14 Notice that the Stufenleiter draws the distinction between sensation and cognition as one between two species of Perception. And it does so immediately after specifying that Perception is, itself, one species of representation – namely, “representation with consciousness” (ibid).15 As many scholars have noted, ‘Perception’, in Kant’s sense, is not to be conflated with ‘Wahrnehmung’: all Wahrnehmung, though not all Perception, is empirical. Indeed, Wahrnehmung is not only empirical, but a species of Perception that, as we will see, itself consists, in respect of its matter, of what Kant calls ‘objective sensation’, sensation that has a relation to what produces that sensation in us. Hereafter, I will leave ‘Perception’ untranslated, since our use of ‘perception’ connotes ‘Wahrnehmung’. What Kant actually says in the Stufenleiter, in distinguishing sensation and cognition, is that sensation is Perception that is subjective in that it “relates merely to [sich bezieht bloss auf] the subject, as the modification of its state” (ibid). All he says here by way of characterizing cognition (Erkenntnis) is that it is objective Perception, relying on the contrast with sensation, and his pithy characterization of its subjectivity, to convey the sense of the objectivity characteristic of cognition. The ‘merely’ in this characterization is crucial16: it implies that cognition also bezieht such auf the subject “as the modification of its state.” Indeed, in presenting the division of Perception into sensation and cognition as exhaustive, Kant implies that any and all Perception, as such, “relates to the subject, as the modification of its state.” The objectivity characteristic of cognition, then, consists in its being Perception that sich bezieht, not just to the subject, as the modification of its state, but also to something in some other way. Discerning just what this contrast between cognition and sensation comes to is no easy matter.

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Werner Pluhar, in his translation of the Critique of Pure Reason, opts to translate ‘Vorstellung’ with ‘presentation’ on the grounds that ‘vorstellen’, as Kant uses it, “never means anything like ‘represent’ in the sense of ‘stand for’” (Pluhar 1996, 22); in doing so he acknowledges that Kant provides ‘repraesentatio’ as the Latin equivalent of ‘Vorstellung’ and that his doing so tells against his interpretation. Wolfgang Schwarz and Robert Hartmann also translate ‘Vorstellung’ with ‘presentation’ (1974; cf. Schwartz 1982). McLear (2013) espouses Pluhar’s reading, as does Allais (2015, 25), citing McLear. 15 For the bearing that this point has, more narrowly, on how we are to interpret Kant’s distinction between concept and intuition, as two species of cognition, see Smit 2000. 16 The Guyer-Wood translation omits it.

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Kant on Our Notion of Representation

We will see that the way Howell and George read the Stufenleiter, and the distinction it draws between sensation and cognition, is mistaken. Their reading is, admittedly, entirely natural for us, working as we do in Frege’s wake. But, once we have the capacity-relative conception of representation standard in the Aristotelian logical tradition back in view, we will be able to see that their reading is not forced on us, and that Kant does not use ‘representation’, here or elsewhere, to mean a mental or psychological state. And here it will prove crucial to appreciate how the Stufenleiter distinguishes sensation and cognition as two species of Perception.

IV. A New Answer to Our Question What, then, is the sense Kant expected his readers to know to attach to his use of ‘representation’? The answer, I have already suggested, is to be found by examining a venerable purely intellectual conception of representation early moderns inherited from the Aristotelian logical tradition. Recall that this conception informs the Aristotelian conception of logic as a science of the human understanding. And it employs a concept that is not to be confused with this conception itself. Kant, rightly, assumed his readers would be well acquainted both with this conception of representation and with the concept it employs. For – when construed at a sufficiently general level so as to be wrung of certain contentious metaphysical commitments – they both continued to be standard among early moderns. Now, as I noted earlier, our notion owes its standing, as a notion, to its entering into a purely a priori conception of the representations that we employ in achieving the rational insight into the necessary objective validity of the principles of logic. But this notion is one that most thinkers working within the Aristotelian logical tradition (broadly construed) held to be one we can put to use in forming conceptions of representation different in kind from ours. These include the conception of divine representation as what plays a functional role within the operation of God’s understanding, an intellectus archetypus. Rationalist practitioners of theological first philosophy put this conception to use in offering their answer to the question Kant poses to Herz. These thinkers purport to provide this answer in achieving the most fundamental rational insight we can achieve into the inner possibility of our representations in general, one that locates in God “the ground on which the relation of that in us that we call ‘representation’ to the object [Gegenstand]”. Kant points out to Herz that such an answer cannot account for the use that these thinkers themselves, in developing their first philosophies, purport to put the intellectual

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representation we have as subjects of an intellectus ectypus (AA 10: 130). For any answer of this sort – versions of which he discerns in Plato, Malebranche, and Crusius, among others – suffers “vicious circularity in drawing conclusions regarding our cognitions” (AA 10: 131). We may formulate as follows the conception of our representation that the Aristotelian logical tradition specifies as that to be used in doing philosophy of logic: The Conception of Representation of Philosophy of Logic (CRPL): an inner determination of a human being’s mind or soul that plays the functional role characteristic of it as the representation that it is under certain principles inherent in our capacity of understanding itself; it is as what plays a role of this kind, that such a determination constitutes what she is to relate to something else (i.e., something distinct from that determination itself) in an act of thinking that she herself (as thinker) determines, in respect of its logical form, according to these rules and/or principles.

On this tradition, pure logic is cognition of these purely a priori principles inherent in this way in our capacity of pure understanding, and this, as principles according to which we are to determine our own thinking. Insofar as it constitutes a representation that has a use for us, as subjects of our capacity to think, an inner determination of our mind or soul must realize a logical form that suits it to play the functional roles these principles determine. Any such representation, to be sure, has a determinate content, as what we are to relate, in our thinking, to that of which it is the representation. But pure logic, as conceived on the Aristotelian tradition, prescinds from these differences among representations, and is concerned with our representations only in respect of how they answer to the rules and principles of general logic. Now CRPL is the conception of representation we are to use specifically in doing philosophy of logic: it is one of our representations specifically in respect of the distinctive functional roles they have, under the rules and principles of logic, in virtue of which they constitute representations that have a use for us as subjects of acts of thinking that are imputable to us. And, as noted earlier, CRPL employs our notion constitutively. We need now to appreciate how, again in line with the Aristotelian tradition, Kant holds that we may, in two different basic ways, employ this notion to form other conceptions of representation. The first is by forming conceptions of inner determinations of our mind or soul that constitute representations under a principle inherent in a mental or psychological capacity we have that is fundamentally distinct from our capacity of thinking itself. These capacities include the other two of our

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three fundamental mental capacities Kant distinguishes: our capacity of desire and our capacity of pleasure and displeasure. Moreover, by the 1770s, Kant had come to side with Aristotle: our capacity of representation includes sub-capacities fundamentally distinct from our capacity to think and so, a fortiori, to think according to the rules and principles of logic. Breaking with the Leibnizian tradition, he now maintains that our sensible representations are not confused intellectual representations. They are different in kind from intellectual ones, because the sensibility to which they belong is now conceived as “the ability [Faehigkeit] (receptivity) to acquire representations through the way in which we are affected by objects [Gegenstaende]” (A19/B33). And our sensible representations play the functional role distinctive to them under principles that are grounded in the nature of our sensibility: namely, Space and Time, understood as the forms of our sensibility. The second is one in forming conceptions of what constitutes representation in relation to some subject of mental or psychological capacities different in kind from ours. For example, with Leibniz and a venerable tradition, Kant holds (both before and after the Critical turn) that we can conceive of God as an intellectus archetypus. What, in writing to Herz, he calls into question is not our ability to form this purely intellectual conception, but rather the viability of the use to which practitioners of theological first philosophies purport to put this conception. Because an intellectus archetypus would, as such, have to be the subject of an understanding that is not conceptual but intuitive, in conceiving of such an intellect we conceive of a kind of representation – an intellectual intuition – of which we are not capable. Consider now the most general conception of representation that, in keeping with the Aristotelian tradition, Kant holds we can form; this is the conception into which our notion enters that encompasses all of the kinds of representation of which we can conceive: The Generalized Conception of Representation (GCR): an inner determination of a mind or soul17 that occupies the middle relatum in some particular three-place relation of the form