Review Robert Pippin Kant Et Le Pouvoir de Juger

Journal of Philosophy, Inc.

Kant et le pouvoir de juger: Sensibilité et discursivité dans l'Analytique transcendentale de laCritique de la raison pure by Béatrice LonguenesseReview by: Robert B. PippinThe Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 94, No. 6 (Jun., 1997), pp. 318-324Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2564544 .

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318 THEJOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

BOOK REVIEWS Kant et le pouvoir de juger: Sensibilite et discursivite dans l'Analytique transcendentale de la Critique de la raison pure. BEATRICE LONGUENESSE. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993. 482 p.

In the two editions of the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant claimed that thinking about any object, any possible "representing of an object," was a '5udging."Judgings were understood to be rule-gov- erned mental acts, and the formal characteristics of any possible object were said to reflect or depend in some way on the formal rules of judging. His language of mental faculties and mental activities and their "logical rules" has suggested to many generations of read- ers that, if Kant was tiying to justify a priori knowledge about the necessary characteristics of any world we could experience, that argument must have two steps: an appeal (1) to some (implausible) claim about the way the human mind must work, about the necessity of our thinking in certain ways (or some "psychologism"), and (2) to some idealist reduction of "the world" to a world of mental states and mental "products." This impression is strengthened by Kant's infamous claim for a "strict parallelism" between the rules the mind is subject to in com- bining, subsuming, or comparing any representations at all (the rules for judging itself, or "general logic") and the rules to which the understanding is subject in making any objective (possibly true) judgment ("transcendental logic"), as if some argument could show that the discursive forms of logical combination as such, when thought together in some way with our modes of sensible contact with the world, determine could be said to anticipate in some way what could be a possible content of sensible experience. This again looks like it could only be a "mind making the world" argument. This claim for a link between general logic and a transcendental logic constitutes Kant's famous "clue" or "guiding thread" (Leitfaden, le fkil conducteur), the founding claim which begins the Transcenden- tal Analytic" and which is supposed to help us understand, say, the relevance of the subject-predicate form to the claim that there must be underlying, permanent substance in any possible experience; hy- pothetical judgments to the necessity that all events are causally con- nected with others according to a rule; even disjunctive judgments to

0022-362X/97/9406/3 1 8-24 (C) 1997 The Journal of Philosophy, Inc.



319 BOOK REVIEWS

reciprocal causation and a community of substances. The guiding thread is summarized this way:

The same function which gives unity to the various representations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition; and this unity, in its most general expression, we entitle the pure concept of the understanding. The same understanding, through the same operations by which in concepts, by means of analytic unity, it produced the logical form of a judgment, also introduces a transcendental content into its representations, by means of the synthetic unity of the manifold in intuition in general (A79/B105).

Beatrice Longuenesse's veiy ambitious new book takes a fresh, comprehensive look at this Kantian theoxy of judging, and remark- ably (given the notorious obscurity of the issues), concentrates veiy heavily on the above Leitfaden problem, the most difficult and obscure implication Kant drew from his theoxy of judgment. She has thereby produced a rich, often demanding, sometimes elusive and metaphorical, but always provocative and bold approach, one that will likely command and sustain a good deal of attention, especially when the English translation is published next year by Princeton University Press.l

Its nearly five hundred pages are also not easy to summarize or to respond to briefly. In order to address the question of how Kant could think that consideration of the forms of judgment could "guide" an argument about the necessaxy conditions of experience, Longuenesse must produce an account of the theory of judgment itself, assess its historical origins and distinctness, anticipate and inte- grate Kant's later treatment in the third Critique, tiy to make sense of his own architectonic presentation of the table of judgments, and then, especially, tiy to detect and to follow veiy closely any possible relevance of claims about judgmental forms to claims about possible objects of experience throughout the "Deduction," "Schematism," and "Principles." I know of no other commentator who has taken Kant so much at his word that there is a guiding thread uniting the entire argument of the "Analytic"-or who has produced such a plau- sible view of what he might have had in mind. Much of what she says in the course of her interpretation is compelling and original. The treatment of the uniqueness of Kant's understanding of general

' The English edition, Kant and the Capacity to Judge, will be expanded and re- vised. In the text above, in order to ensure fidelity to the author's intentions, I have cited the preferred translations from this manuscript (translated by the author, from a draft by Charles Wolfe).




logic (and the differences between his and modern conceptions), and the demonstration of the overall coherence of Kant's account of judgment throughout most of the critical period (especially her demonstration of the implicit presence and power in the first Crz- tique of his later distinction between determinative and reflective judgments) are signal accomplishments.

Although details only begin to emerge in the third of the book's three sections, there is also a "guiding thread" throughout Longue- nesse's own treatment, a theme that is supposed to pull all the various parts together successfully into one overall argument. That issue is already apparent in the dense passage from Kant cited above: What could he have meant by saying that "functions" which give unity to representations in a judgment "also" give unity to the mere synthesis of representations in an intuition"? How does whatever "produces" logical form in a judgment "introduce" "transcendental content" into representations? What could such a claim about content even mean?

Longuenesse finally finds what is for her the clue to all such questions in an even more obscure claim hidden in a small section of the second edition deduction, one which Longuenesse unearths and reads backward and forward into a number of other crucial sections, Kant's account of the "synthesis speciosa," or the figurative synthesis at B151. This is where, she thinks, the heart of the matter, Kant's overall view of the discursivity-sensibility relation, and so the relation between forms of judgmental discursivity and possible sensible content, might be illuminated.

It is certainly true that this approach trying to follow whatever "guiding thread" an attention to the forms of judgment might actu- ally provide throughout the details of the "Analytic"-illuminates the course and connections in Kant's defense of a priori knowledge in ways quite different from many other commentators. There is usu- ally, at the center of any such commentary, some such orienting concern; a claim that the whole argument finally turns on the possibility of self-ascribing my mental states, or on tying down somehow claims about time determinations, or on being able to distinguish what seems to me from what is the case, and so on. Longuenesse's pro- posed clue (any object of experience, that is, any sensibly given, must be the kind of content susceptible to such judgmental organization, and we must be able to explain how it could be) provides her with a two-part claim for such a basic orientation. First, since thinking any thought is a judging, we should keep in mind what judging is, pri- marily what Kant often calls "reflecting" (or "analysis"), an activity



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most clearly on view in the formation of empirical concepts, but involved in all mental content. Thinking according to Kant is an order- ing of concepts "under" each other: a classifying, subsuming, and most especially, Longuenesse shows to great effect, a comparang of representations. (In Longuenesse's own view, this stress also sets her interpretation apart because it so emphasizes the "reflective" relation between the sensible and the intellectual, a way of understanding how the sensibly given is "brought up" into an intellectual form, rather than "determined" "from above" by the understanding, as in standard accounts. It thus also leads her to characterize Kant's position on universals in a surprisingly realistic way (see 143).)

Secondly, according to Longuenesse, Kant wants to show that the forms of any such logical relations must play a necessary role in an original "synthesis" of elements suitable for, finally the contents of, such analysis. ("It must therefore be shown that these forms are not only conditions of the subordination of concepts according to logical use, but conditions of the verw presentation of appearances in sensible intuition, a presentation that generates for these appearances objects reflected under concepts" (16).)

The most important parts of the book are an attempt to explain and defend this last claim. I have space for only a couple of general remarks about the attempt.

Formulations like this one and several others raise questions about the version of idealism required by this account, and so the right characterizaiion of the nature of the "objects" of human knowledge. There is no particular reason that Longuenesse's position should necessarily be committed to the claim that the content of knowledge must be ontologically mental sensory states, say, somehow "pre- formed" for objective claims by some figurative synthesis so as to be able to function as the objects (= unified sensations) of empirical claims but her formulations are ambiguous. There is no direct commitment to such phenomenalism, but when she mentions early on that the relation between representation and object had been "in- ternalized" after section 14 of the Critique, so that there is "no longer...any direct reiation to an object outside representation [ex- terieur a la representation]" (9), it is not clear exactly what this leaves us with. One possible account of what it means to say there can be nothing available to us cognitively "outside" human representation is: to represent an object, and so for Kant simply to be con- scious of objects, is to be making a judgment with a certain sort of normative force or implicit claim to justification, an entitlarnent that cannot be said to derive from anything that merely "happens" to the




subject ("from the outside"), but must derive that force from other sorts of appropriate uses or justifications involved in making such a claim. The object can only be that in the concept of which the manifold is united" and so the appropnate use of the concept cannot be any direct appeal to an (outside) object. But Longuenesse's language here of mental making, generating, forming, imprinting, and inside" suggests an account of some more literally ontological rather than such a normative inside" and so a phenomenalist direc- tion and a so-called "two-worlds" idealism. (See the discussion in chapter nine on logic, ontology, and the crucial role of the synthesis speciosaagain (379).)

The second question concerns Longuenesse's attempt to answer the heart of that clue" problem: What does it mean to say the functions of unity in the understanding give unity" in an intuition"? In Kant's second-edition language, this question concerns what it could mean to say that the understanding "determines sensibility inwardly" and this is a much more radical question than the question of how the understanding organizes and connects an already determinate sensory manifold. Some such inward determination," involved just in the "original" consciousness of a manifold, our way of apprehend- ing it, itself apparently forms a critical component of the deduction's argument that there could never be any lack of fit" between the formal requirements of judgment and the (at least to some extent) in- dependently given manifold. Enter the poetically named synthesis speciosa. According to Longuenesse, after the second half of the B deduction, Kant had "radicalized" his deductive procedure far more than has been realized, completely reinterpreting the manner in which things are given to us" (235), and so had engineered a major reconstruction of the "Transcendental Aesthetic" itself (as Kant seems to imply in several famous footnotes.)

Any such claim about an intellectual generation" (242) of space and time "and thereby the form of appearances" and so forth must be presented very carefully. It threatens to collapse the understanding-sensibility distinction at the heart of Kant's critique of rational- ism (showing that the content of any manifold must be susceptible to our forms of judgment cannot ever amphibolously" confuse what is required for judgment with what must come to us independent of judgment, else the central pillar, or twin pillars, on which the Crz- tique stands would fall), and, as G. W. F. Hegel immediately realized in his early Glauben und Wissen (Faith and Knowledge), any blurring or relativization of such a distinction immediately opens the door to J. G. Fichte and a very different idealism, wherein the question of what



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constrains our organization of experience is itself the result of a "positing" or a conceptual determination, one wherein "thought" is ultimately "selfMetermining. "

Longuenesse is well aware of such problems (and of their history both in German Idealism and, especially, in neo-Kantianism) and she works very hard to avoid either a rationalist amphibology or a Fichtean/Hegelian "collapse" (that is, some claim that the original "rendering susceptible" here in question is some sort of conceptual determination). It is not, according to her, because one must read Kant's claims about the role of the understanding in such an original, nonobjective, precategorial synthesis, as only a reference to the capacity to judge. It is only this capacity to form a judgment that can be said to "affect sensibility," generating the pure intuitions of space and time, the intuitive counterparts to our discursive capacity to form and use universal concepts, as determined by categories (cf. 247-53). This and frequent other references to a subject-constituted "tendency" toward judgment and objectivity in apprehension, or claims that time is the form that inner sense "imprints on what is represented in itn (266), while they might help a reader avoid a number of misleading implications of Kant's statements, are them- selves still highly metaphorical. The idea that some "tendance au juge- ment" could "aJ§fecte le sens interne" (272), that a tendency or Vermogen could be the sort of thing that could "affect" inner sense, remains, I think, elusive.

This is not to say that a good deal of help is not provided, especially in the book's concluding chapters on the aPrinciples," which contain some of the most interesting textual analyses, and where the above formulations continue to "guide" especially the account of our capacity both to apprehend and to determine time relations. (So, for example, "according to Kant our own synthesizing acts introduce [importons] into intuition the forms of combination we shall eventu- allyreflectin quantitative concepts" (308).) Such claims about the figurative synthesis ground an ambitious argument denying that the general problem of the "Analogies" is, as often assumed, the conditions for objective time determination. Longuenesse argues that that case concerns the possibility of any time determination at all and therewith, subsequently, the reflection of perceived orders in univerZ sal concepts and laws. Moreover, her approach also makes possible a distinctive way of understanding what Kant could have thought disjunctive judgments could have to do with reciprocal causality and the community of substances in the world, all in a way not illuminated without the synthesis speciosa.




We are all familiar by now with "austere" approaches to the Crz- tique's basic argument, some reconstruction wherein the issue is only what sorts of distinctions experience must allow us to make in order that some incontrovertible claim or capacity be possible. The motiva- tion for such interpretations has often been suspicion about Kant's mentalist language, and that suspicion is often based on a number of questionable interpretive assumptions. There has been room (and a need) for some time now for a thorough reconsideration of the historical Kant's theory of mental activity, of judging (or his theory of how we make" such distinctions possible), and one which avoids the temptation to read that theory simply in the light of contemporary "cognitive psychology," that is, one which still takes quite seriously his concern with the problem of how we might know a priori that the content of experience must be susceptible, necessarily conforms to, any such mental processing. Such a synthetic claim might not finally be defensible, but such a thorough reconsideration, animated by Kant's greatest philosophical ambitions, and informed by the best erudition and textual fidelity, has now been written.

ROBERT B. PIPPIN

University of Chicago



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