Synthesis and the Content of Pure Concepts in Kant's First Critique

Synthesis and the Content of Pure Concepts in Kant's First Critique J. MICHAEL YOUNG 1. THE NOTION OF synthesis figures prominently in the central argument of the first Critique. That argument rests, according to Kant, on the principle of the necessary unity of apperception or self-consciousness (B 135). This principle is said to be analytic. Nonethelss, it "reveals the necessity of a synthesis of the manifold given in intuition, without which the thoroughgoing identity of selfconsciousness cannot be thought" (ibid.). The categories of the understanding are said to be the concepts "which give unity to this pure synthesis, and which consist solely in the representation of this necessary synthetic unity" (A79/ B Io4, B 143). It is just because of this, Kant concludes, that "the manifold in a given intuition is necessarily subject to the categories" (B 143). In spite of its prominence, Kant's notion has proved vexing. The problem is not just that he says obscure and apparently conflicting things about it. ~It is rather that the notion itself, and the theory to which it belongs, seem profoundly ill-conceived. In explaining the notion Kant regularly talks about combining, connecting, and uniting representations, about running through a manifold and holding it together, and about producing synthetic unity in that manifold. His aim, it would seem, is to specify the activities that produce experience and to identify the faculties or agencies that direct those activities. Sensibility is apparently to be viewed as a source of raw materials. Understanding and imagination are to be seen as supervisory faculties, which guide the ' He ascribes synthesis both to imagination (A78/Bao3)and to the understanding (Bx3o),for example; and after ascribing it to imagination he comments darkly that imagination is"a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which weshould have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcelyever conscious"(A78/B1o3). [33 x] 332 3OURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 3~:3 3ULY 1994 various activities through which sensible materials are combined or connected. Experience, it seems, is supposed to be the product of these activities, and the categories are supposed to be applicable to experience precisely because they are imposed upon it as it is produced. Admittedly, this talk about mental manufacture sounds to the contemporary ear like a caricature. But much in the text suggests this picture, and many readers, friendly and otherwise, have been led to suppose that this is in fact what the theory of synthesis is supposed to be. If Kant's aim were to propound such a theory, however--more generally, if his theory of synthesis were meant to be a theory as to how experience gets produced--his efforts would be sadly misdirected. For he would be pushed toward one or the other horn of an unwelcome dilemma. If it were meant to be empirical, his theory as stated would be superficial at best, providing merely an armchair account of how it seems to us that we process sensory information. Even if it were built on a more solid empirical foundation, moreover, it would still be inadequate to Kant's purposes, for the most it could establish is that we have a subjective need to employ the categories, not that the objects of experience actually fall under those categories. If it were meant, on the other hand, to describe activities and faculties which produce experience but which are not themselves empirically accessible, Kant's theory would violate his own strictures against speculating beyond the bounds of possible experience. Again, too, it would be inadequate to his purposes. How could Kant claim to know that unobservable processes necessarily impose the categories throughout all experience? How could he know that other forms are not and will not be imposed? Even if he could know such things, how could be justifiably claim that the resulting experience constitutes knowledge? On this view the categories would be nothing more than what Kant himself calls "subjective dispositions of thought," and the difficulties would be obvious: Apart... from the objection that on such an hypothesis we can set no limit to the assumption of predetermined dispositions to future judgments, there is this decisive objection against [such a...