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Thought and Intuition in Kant's Critical System DANIEL C. KOLB KANT'S CRITICS invariably focus on the distinction between thought and intuition as the weak link in his system. Kant's Rationalist contempo.raries and his early successors, the so-called Absolute Idealists/as well as contemporary philosophers and historians of philosophy,' offer criticism of the thoughtintuition distinction which are strikingly similar. The distinction is generally criticized along two lines. First, it is objected that in order to establish that thought and intuition are really distinct faculties it must be shown that we have some access to intuitions apart from conceptual representation. No intuitive element, however, can be isolated in experience. All experience is conceptually mediated, so it is nonsense to speak of thought and intuition as two independent faculties. Second, it is ' See, e.g., J. A. Eberhard, Philosophische Magazin i (1789), for a Rationalist critique of the Kantian distinction; revelant passages are cited and translated by H. E. Allison, The KantEberhard Controversy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973), 15-46. Typical criticisms from the early Idealists are found in J. G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge, trans. P. Heath and J. Lachs (New York: Appleton Meredith, 197o), 48; F. W. J. Schelling, On the I as the Principle of Philosophy, in On the Unconditioned in Human Knowledge, ed. and trans. F. Marti, 64-73, and G. W. F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. H. S. Harris and W. Cerf (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1977), 65-69 , 82. Two recent articles provide insightful discussions of the philosophical climate surrounding these developments. These are:. D. Breazeale, "Between Kant and Fichte: Karl Leonhard Reinhold's 'Elementary Philosophy'," Review of Metaphysics 35 (1982): 785-882, and I. M. Wallner, "A New Look at J. S. Beck's 'Doctrine of the Standpoint'," Kant Studien 75 0984): 294-3t6. " In "The World Well Lost," Journal of Philosophy, 69 (197u): 649-65, Richard Rorty criticizes the distinction and presents an insightful analysis of why many of the recent trends in philosophical analysis and philosophy of science rest on the collapse of the distinction. See also, Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 131-39, 148-55. For a contemporary discussion of the centrality of the distinction in Kant's system, see H. E. Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 63-115. [223] 224 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY objected that Kant's inability to establish certain fundamental characteristics which distinguish intuitions from concepts renders the Deduction of the Categories unintelligible. The distinction between thought and intuition is architechtonically prior to the Deduction; for the problem of Deduction, i.e., establishing the necessary unity of thought and intuition in experience, arises only after it is established that thought and intuition are really two distinct and independent faculties and that both play essential roles in knowledge. Given its centrality to the entire Kantian system, it is surprising that Kant nowhere undertakes a sustained, rigorous defense of the distinction. From his passing comments as well as from his more extended discussion of the distinction in his correspondence, it is clear that Kant is aware both of its importance and the problems associated with it. His comments indicate two lines of defense of the distinction. First, we find Kant maintaining that certain 'marks' or characteristics which are absent in the conceptual representation of an object are always present in its intuition. These allow us to identify separately the intuitive and conceptual element in our consciousness of objects. Second, Kant argues that is is a fundamental characteristic of our intellect that it is neither actively nor passively intuitive. We can be brought into relation with objects only through a intuitive faculty disdnct from the faculty of conceptual representation. It should be noted that these two lines of defense are independent of one another. The first is a phenomenological account of the differences in our awareness of objects; the second is a transcendental account of the possibility of representations like those with which we find ourselves. In what follows I shall examine both of these defenses of the distinction. I shall argue that...

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