1. Introduction
There has been a lively debate as of late concerning whether or not Kant thinks that non-conceptual representational content is possible. It is agreed on all sides that Kant accepts that there are representations that are not concepts themselves. Perhaps most notably, Kant recognizes that, besides concepts, there are ‘judgements (Urteile)’, ‘inferences (Schlüsse)’, ‘intuitions (Anschauungen)’ and ‘sensations (Empfindungen)’.Footnote 1 Since Kant explicitly says that judgements are composed of concepts (cf. B322) and inferences of judgements (cf. B359–60), there has been no serious debate about whether their content is conceptual. Sensations have also been left to one side, as there have been persistent worries about whether or not Kant takes sensations to possess any content, or even any intentionality, at all, conceptual or otherwise (cf. George Reference George1981). The debate has primarily focused, therefore, on whether the distinction between concepts and intuitions corresponds to a distinction in the kinds of contents of two sorts of representations.Footnote 2
Since these questions concern a distinction that lies at the very heart of Kant's system of theoretical philosophy (concepts vs intuitions), sorting out their answers is of much more than ‘merely’ interpretative significance, as it will set much of the course for how we should understand the rest of Kant's project in the first Critique. And since Kant's distinction between intuitions and concepts has shaped, and continues to shape, much of the discussion in contemporary philosophy of perception and cognitive semantics (cf. Hanna Reference Hanna2005, Reference Hanna2008), getting clearer on Kant's approach to non-conceptual content also promises to help clarify the broader debate over conceptualism itself.
What, then, is the shape of this debate? Robert Hanna, Lucy Allais, Peter Rohs and others have argued that the way Kant distinguishes intuitions from concepts in the early sections of the first Critique demonstrates that he thinks that the content of intuitions is non-conceptual (cf. Hanna Reference Hanna2005, Reference Hanna2011; Allais Reference Allais2009; Rohs Reference Rohs2001). Against these ‘non-conceptualist’ interpreters, ‘conceptualist’ interpreters like the neo-Kantian Paul Natorp, and more recently, Hannah Ginsborg, John McDowell, and others have argued that, however things might appear early on, Kant's strategy in the Transcendental Deduction and beyond shows he ultimately takes intuitions to involve concepts and to do so essentially (cf. Natorp Reference Natorp1910; McDowell Reference McDowell1991b, Reference McDowell2009; Ginsborg Reference Ginsborg2008).Footnote 3 The mistake of the non-conceptualist readers is, therefore, to take at face value Kant's first passes over certain distinctions, and to fail to appreciate the extent to which he eventually either ‘takes back’ (Pippin Reference Pippin1989: 30) or ‘corrects’ (Natorp Reference Natorp1910: 276) what had prompted the initial impression. Once such a corrected view of Kant's project has been achieved, it is argued, it becomes clear that his considered position requires that the content of intuitions be essentially conceptual.
While this debate has surely brought a good deal of light to many dimensions of Kant's thought, progress on the key issue itself has been hampered by a failure to address head-on a preliminary though very important question: what is the sense of ‘content’ that is at issue? Are we asking whether Kant accepts that intuitions have what might now be called a phenomenal character or raw feel, a ‘what it's like’ to be undergone, which is distinct in kind from that of conceiving? Or are we asking whether he accepts that intuitions represent objects that cannot also be represented by concepts? Or are we asking instead whether he accepts that the way or manner in which intuitions represent their objects is distinct in kind from that of concepts? Or are we asking about something else altogether? The near absence of discussion of the meaning of ‘content’ at issue is striking.Footnote 4
My hope here is to advance this debate by explicitly focusing on only one of these meanings of ‘content’, the third mentioned above – namely, an intuition's manner or way of representing its object. In other words, I will be focusing on something akin to what Frege calls an object's ‘mode of being given or presented (Art des Gegebenseins)’ to the mind, what Frege identifies as the ‘sense (Sinn)’ of linguistic expressions, as opposed to what he calls their ‘reference (Bedeutung)’. I will say more about this sense of content in section 2.
My main thesis will be that, at least with respect to ‘content’ understood in this way, Kant clearly accepts that the content of intuitions is non-conceptual. Demonstrating this will require, first of all, that we find something that plays the role of Fregean sense both in Kant's account of ‘cognition (Erkenntnis)’ in general and in his account of intuitions and concepts in particular, as the main species of cognition (cf. B376–7) under discussion here. What I will show in section 3 is that what Kant himself refers to as the ‘content (Inhalt)’ of a cognition closely parallels Fregean sense in key respects, most notably in picking out a cognition's representational ‘relation (Beziehung)’ to an object, rather than the object itself.
With this alignment in mind, we can then better appreciate an important consequence of the familiar ways in which Kant repeatedly characterizes the difference between intuitions and concepts. As I remind us in section 4, Kant famously claims that intuitions relate us to their objects immediately, in a way that depends on the presence and existence of their objects, a way that involves the object's ‘appearance (Erscheinung)’. Concepts, by contrast, can relate us to objects only mediately, in a way that does not depend either on the presence or even the existence of their objects. Because intuitions representationally relate us to their objects in a way that is different from the way that concepts do (since intuitions allow objects themselves to ‘appear’ immediately), and because the relation in question just is the content at issue (in this sense of ‘content’), I conclude that Kant would accept that the content of an intuition is non-conceptual.
Having presented the core of my positive argument, I will then turn to the defence of my account against textual and systematic considerations that conceptualist interpreters have taken to point in the opposite direction. In section 5 I canvass what I see as the three most substantial challenges to non-conceptualist interpretations, challenges that my own account must address but that have also not yet been properly dealt with by previous non-conceptualist interpretations. These are (1) claims in the transcendental deduction about ‘the synthesis of apprehension in intuition’ that might seem to suggest that conceptual synthesis must be involved in the very having of intuitions, (2) remarks about what the transcendental deduction is to accomplish, which might seem to suggest that its success rests upon rejecting the non-conceptualist thesis, and (3) passages that can appear to suggest that the involvement of concepts is necessary for a representation to have any relation to an object whatsoever.
In section 6 I will argue that, in the passages at issue, Kant is not in fact meaning to spell out what is constitutive of an intuition or its relation to an object as such. Instead, he is concerned only with the conditions on an intuition's subsequently becoming an object of further kinds of representations, such as what Kant calls ‘perception’ and ‘experience’, representations in which we reflect upon an intuition. Yet while Kant clearly accepts that these further representations ‘determine (bestimmen)’ the content of intuitions, by explicitly representing their relation to an object as one that shows that the object should be represented as falling under one or another concept, this in no way entails that concepts are already involved in the mere having of an intuition in the first place.
2. Content as Fregean Sense (Mode of Presentation)
We can get a feel for the relevant notion of content by looking to Frege's writings and to the ways in which his analysis has been extended by others. In his early Begriffsschrift, Frege for the most part worked with the simple distinction between mental acts like thinking and judging and the ‘content (Inhalt)’ of such acts.Footnote 5 By the time of ‘On Sense and Reference’, however, Frege realized that he needed a more sophisticated treatment of the content of such acts, one which recognizes the difference between (a) the individual object or property or state of affairs referred to through such acts, or what Frege identifies with their reference (e.g. the planet Venus), and (b) the particular ‘mode’ or ‘manner’ in which such reference is ‘being given’ in such acts, its Art des Gegebenseins, or what Frege identifies with their sense (e.g. the presentation of the planet as morning star and evening star).Footnote 6
One of Frege's chief motivations for making this further distinction was his reflection on informative statements of identity. Because we can recognize an object when it is presented in one way, but fail to recognize it when it is presented in another way, we can learn something by assertions expressed by sentences of the form: ‘A = B’, because we can learn that it is the same thing x that is being presented in two different ways (via the distinct senses associated with ‘A’ and ‘B’). If the only thing we allowed to function as the content of an expression were the item to which it referred (i.e. object x itself), then we would not be able to make sense of how statements like ‘The morning star is identical to the evening star’ could be informative when we are already familiar with the relevant object (here: the planet) by way of one of these ways of its being presented.Footnote 7
Frege takes this to imply, first, that objects (and references more generally) form no proper ‘part’ of what is contained ‘in’ the sense (Sinn) through which they are given or presented to us.Footnote 8 Second, it is this way of being given an object – and hence, a sense – that is directly ‘grasped (erfaßt)’ in mental acts like thinking and judging, rather than their reference (Frege Reference Frege1984: 355–6). In other words, senses, rather than referents, are the ‘immediate object’ of mental acts such as thinking, despite the fact that this immediate object is itself a representational relation to something else, a ‘mode of being given’ some further object (the reference).Footnote 9
Frege himself uses the distinction between sense and reference primarily in the analysis of our discourse about the abstract objects of logic and arithmetic. Even so, those writing under the influence of Frege's theory of content have readily extended the analysis to comprise both references that are concrete objects and perceptual ways of being given or presented with such objects (cf. McDowell Reference McDowell1984, Reference McDowell1986, Reference McDowell1991a; more recently, Schellenberg Reference Schellenberg2011). Indeed, many of Frege's own examples suggest just such an extension: the planet Venus is surely a concrete object, and the distinction between the sense of ‘morning star’ and that of ‘evening star’ rests on the different times of day at which the planet can be perceived.Footnote 10
Continuing along these lines, it has also been argued that there is room in this broader Fregean account to single out certain kinds of sense that can be grasped only when the relevant reference is concrete (and existent) and stands in a certain relation to the mind. A sense grasped in veridical perception, for example, would be a strong candidate for such an ‘object-dependent’ sense (cf. McDowell Reference McDowell1986: 233). I cannot be veridically perceptually related to an object that is not there; nor can I grasp this particular relation if my mind is not, in fact, concretely connected to the relevant object.Footnote 11
To be sure, to remain broadly Fregean, even cases in which the sense at issue is object-dependent will still not be cases of object-involving or object-containing senses, since, for a Fregean, the object (referent) itself is never a part (‘constituent’) of the sense.Footnote 12 Nevertheless, due to its special relation to its reference, such a sense will be different in kind from both those grasped in purely conceptual reasoning as well as those grasped in fictional discourse.
3. Kant on the Content of Cognitions in General and Intuitions in Particular
With this analysis of content-as-Fregean-sense in hand, we can now ask: is there something in Kant's account of cognitions in general, and intuitions in particular, that plays the role of content, so understood? What is striking – though this has gone largely unnoticed – is that we find just such an aspect of cognitions being referred to by Kant himself as ‘content (Inhalt)’. That is, Kant aligns the content of a cognition with the distinctive representational ‘relation (Beziehung)’ that it bears to its object, rather than with the object itself. At the outset of the Transcendental Analytic, for example, he does so no less than three times:
General logic abstracts from all content (Inhalt) of cognition, i.e., from any relation (Beziehung) of it to the object … (B79)
It is clear that, in the case of [a general criterion for truth], one abstracts from all content (Inhalt) of cognition (relation (Beziehung) to its object) … (B83)
No cognition can contradict [the Transcendental Analytic] without it at once losing all content (Inhalt), i.e., all relation (Beziehung) to an object. (B87)
This alignment is repeated elsewhere in Kant's writings as well.Footnote 13
As cognitions are species of ‘representation (Vorstellung)’ (cf. B376–7), the ‘relation’ that is at issue here is the relation of intentionality, the distinctive way it ‘stands or places (stellt)’ the object ‘before (vor)’ the mind.Footnote 14 And since, in general, the relation that something A bears to another B is distinct from both A and B themselves, the representational relation that a cognition bears to its object – that is, its content – should also be viewed as distinct from both the cognition qua act or mental state and the object itself. In both of these key respects, then, Kant's Inhalt parallels Frege's Sinn.Footnote 15
Turning now to intuitions in particular, we can see that Kant endorses the same view of their contents as well. Consider the following passage at the end of the Transcendental Aesthetic:
[O]uter sense can also contain (enthalten) in its representation only the relation (Verhältniß) of an object to the subject, and not that which is internal to the object in itself. It is exactly the same in the case of inner sense. (B67; my emphasis)
Here Kant claims explicitly that inner and outer intuition do not ‘contain’ the object they are representing or anything that is ‘internal’ to it. Instead, they have as their content the distinctive ‘relation’ between a subject and some object.Footnote 16
This account of the contents of intuitions receives further support once we incorporate Kant's doctrine of appearances into our analysis. For Kant, the particular way that an intuition representationally ‘relates’ us to its object consists in the intuition's allowing that object to ‘appear (erscheinen)’ to us. What is striking, for our purposes, is that he also identifies the appearance itself with what is ‘contained’ in an intuition:
The predicates of appearance can be attributed to the object itself in relation (Verhältniß) to our sense, e.g., the red color or fragrance to the rose … What is not to be encountered in the object in itself at all, but is always to be encountered in its relation to the subject and is inseparable from the representation of the object, is appearance. (B69–70n; my emphasis)
The representation of a body in intuition … contains (enthält) nothing at all that could pertain to an object in itself, but merely the appearance of something and the way [Art) in which we are affected by it. (B61; my emphasis)Footnote 17
Rather than the appearing object itself being ‘contained in’ the intuition, the intuition instead contains only the way this object appears, i.e. the appearance-relation.Footnote 18
Keeping in mind the fact that an appearance itself is a relation (i.e. one of appearing and, conversely, being appeared to) helps to make sense of Kant's description of appearances as ‘ways’ or ‘modes (Arten)’ of representing or perceiving objects, rather than as ‘things’ in their own right (cf. A372, B59; Prolegomena, 4: 293). It also helps to make sense of what Kant has in mind when he describes appearances themselves as ‘representations’ (cf. A104), and then claims that, as representations, appearances ‘in turn have their object’ (A109).Footnote 19 Indeed, this further object of an appearance – what might be called the ultimate reference of an intuition – is something that Kant says ‘cannot be further intuited by us’ and something (at times) he identifies with ‘the transcendental object = X’ for a given intuition (A109).
Now it must be acknowledged that at times Kant writes as if appearances are themselves the ‘objects’ of our empirical intuitions (B34), even going so far as to characterize them as the ‘only objects that can be given us immediately’ through intuitions (A108–9; my emphasis). How is this characterization of appearances to be made compatible with the foregoing? What could Kant mean by claiming that these relations, or ‘ways’ of perceiving – items which ‘have’ their own object – are nevertheless themselves the ‘objects’ that we are ‘acquainted with’ in intuition (B59)?
Here the analogy with Frege's distinction between sense and reference can be of further use. The relationship Kant ultimately takes to obtain between (a) the act of intuiting and (b) the appearance or way of perceiving that it involves, seems to be better modelled on the relationship between (a*) what we saw Frege calling the act of ‘grasping (erfassen)’ a sense and (b*) the sense itself that is grasped, rather than corresponding to the relationship between (a*) and (c*) the ultimate object (Fregean reference) represented by (or ‘given’ through) the sense grasped. An appearance would seem to be the ‘object’ of an intuition only in the same way that, for Frege, when we grasp a thought in an act of thinking, the thought itself might be described as the ‘immediate object’ of the thinking.Footnote 20 This is so, despite the fact that, on Frege's account as well, what is being grasped in this act is a relation to something else, a ‘mode of being given’ some further object. Similarly for Kant: in virtue of being what is ‘grasped’ in an intuition, an appearance can be considered as the immediate object of the intuiting. Yet in grasping this appearance, we are thereby representationally related to some further object (a ‘something = X’). Appearances, therefore, function as the ‘contents’ of intuitions, in Kant's own sense of the term.Footnote 21
4. The Non-Conceptuality of the Content of Intuitions
There is, of course, much more that would need to be said, both about intuitions and especially about the appearance-relation they contain, for the account we are developing to be comprehensive. Nevertheless, we have enough on the table for the purposes at hand. For what we must now determine is: with respect to this sense of content – i.e. with respect to the representational relations that they contain – does Kant think that intuitions have a content that is non-conceptual? Once we have been accustomed to associating a difference in representational relation with a difference in ‘content’ in this sense, the answer can be seen fairly directly from two well-known passages in which Kant distinguishes between intuitions and concepts:
Cognition (Erkenntniß) (cognitio) … is either intuition or concept (intuitus vel conceptus). The former is related immediately to the object and is singular, while the latter is related mediately, by means of a mark that can be common to several things. (B376–7; my emphasis)
Since no representation pertains to the object immediately (unmittelbar auf den Gegenstand geht) except intuition alone, a concept is thus never immediately related to an object (niemals auf einen Gegenstand unmittelbar bezogen), but is instead related to another representation of it (whether this be an intuition or itself already a concept). (B93; my emphasis)
As these texts, and many others besides, demonstrate (cf. B33, B41, A109, Prolegomena, §8 (4: 281), What Real Progress, 20: 266), the intuition/concept distinction is drawn by Kant precisely in terms of the difference in the type of ‘relation (Beziehung)’ that each type of act bears to its object. A concept ‘relates’ to its objects ‘by means of (vermittelst)’ the mark (general or common property) that the concept represents (cf. B377), whereas intuitions themselves do not take such an ‘indirect’ route, but simply ‘relate’ to their objects ‘straightaway (geradezu)’ (cf. B33). But since the content of a cognition (in the relevant sense) simply consists in this representational relation, it follows that Kant's distinction between immediate and mediate ways of relating to objects is at once a distinction in kind among cognitive contents, so understood. This shows that Kant accepts that an intuition has a content – indeed, in Kant's own sense of this term – that is distinct in kind from the content of concepts.
Kant's commitment to the non-conceptuality of the content of our intuitions becomes even more evident once we unpack two key aspects of the distinctive immediacy of our intuitions’ representational relations to their objects. The first is that they entail the existence of their objects. Our intuitions are ‘dependent (abhängig) on the existence (Dasein) of the object’ that we are intuiting because intuition ‘is possible only insofar as the representational capacity of the subject is affected by it’, i.e. by the object (B72; my emphasis). This is why Kant calls our type of intuition ‘sensible’ rather than ‘original (ursprünglich)’, as would be the intuition had by God (ibid.). This leads to the second key aspect of our intuition's immediacy – namely, that it entails the presence to mind of its object: ‘intuition is a representation of the sort that would depend (abhängen) immediately on the presence (Gegenwart) of the object’ to the mind (Prolegomena, §8, 4: 281; my emphasis).Footnote 22 This makes both the act of intuiting and the appearance that is its content ‘object-dependent’.Footnote 23 This is so, even if the appearance is not object-involving, since it does not ‘contain’ the intentional object to which the appearance ultimately relates us.Footnote 24
The content of a concept, by contrast, is something that Kant thinks is not uniformly dependent upon either the existence of its object or its presence to the mind. The independence from existence follows from the fact that we can form concepts of various kinds of ‘nothing (Nichts)’, some of which Kant describes as ‘mere invention (Erdichtung)’ and so ‘concepts without an object’ (B347–8; cf. A96).Footnote 25 Presence, therefore, is likewise (and a fortiori) not required. Indeed, Kant claims explicitly that at least some concepts – the ‘pure’ concepts or ‘categories’ of understanding – are the sort of representations that we can form and entertain ‘without our finding ourselves in an immediate relation (Verhältniß) to the object’ that is being represented (4: 282; my emphasis).
In fact, in the case of the pure concepts (‘ideas’) of reason, Kant thinks that we have concepts of objects that we know we cannot intuit and so know we cannot have present before the mind: ‘nothing congruent to [the idea] could ever be given in concreto’ (B384; cf. B393). Because these are cases where our concepts are, for us, ‘without intuition’, Kant thinks that these cognitions ‘remain completely empty (leer)’ for us, in the sense that, so far as we know, they ‘lack objects’ (B87). Even so, Kant thinks we can still analyse these concepts in order to become conscious of what is ‘contained in’ them – and so sort out what differentiates the thought of one supersensible object from the thought of another – despite the fact that all of this content ends up consisting solely in pure or ‘transcendental predicates’ (cf. B401).
To be sure, the difference in content does not exhaust the differences that Kant takes to hold between concepts and at least our human kind of intuitions. One often noted difference is the contrast that Kant draws between the quantity of the objects of intuitions and concepts: while all intuitions are ‘singular (einzelne)’ representations, Kant takes concepts to be ‘general (allgemeine)’ (cf. B376–7; JL, §1, 9: 91). A second difference lies in the metaphysical origin of the two kinds of acts: while all human intuitions depend upon our mind's being ‘affected’ in a certain way, Kant thinks that our mind can ‘bring about (hervorzubringen)’ concepts ‘of itself’, or ‘spontaneously’ – at the very least, it can do so with respect to the pure concepts that arise from the nature of understanding itself (B75; cf. B93). For our purposes, we can even grant that the differences in quantity of object and metaphysical origin might well be equally fundamental marks of the difference between the two kinds of cognitions. What is crucial for our purposes is simply that, in addition to these further differences, Kant also takes there to be a distinction in kind between their contents.
It is arguable, however, that the difference in content is not only as fundamental, for Kant, as either the difference in quantity of object or the metaphysical difference in origination, but is perhaps even more basic.Footnote 26 Furthermore, it is the difference in content that would seem to be ultimately decisive in Kant's rejection of the rationalist's account of the nature of our cognition in mathematics. Kant famously holds that the fundamental truths of arithmetic and geometry cannot be known through the analysis of the relevant concepts, but requires ‘hurrying immediately to intuition’ (B743). Part of Kant's point here is, of course, that we cannot know the truth of certain judgements simply on the basis of such analysis, but the deeper point is that we cannot even know what is meant by certain terms in mathematics except for our familiarity with the ways objects are given in intuition – i.e. familiarity with the contents distinctive of our intuitions. This would seem to be true of the terms ‘space’ and ‘time’ themselves (cf. B39 and B47–8), as well as what it means to be ‘oriented’ within such frameworks (cf. Orient Oneself in Thinking, 8: 134–5 and Prolegomena, §13, 4: 285–6; see Hanna Reference Hanna2008: 53–4). This intuition-dependence is further confirmed by Kant's account of the logical structure of conceptual contents themselves, since these simply do not allow for mathematical relations to objects to be represented (‘constructed’) through concepts alone (cf. Friedman Reference Friedman1992: chs 1–2; Anderson Reference Anderson2004).
5. Objections to Non-Conceptualist Interpretations
Having presented the direct positive textual and systematic support for my interpretation, let me now defuse the three most substantial challenges made to previous versions of non-conceptualist interpretations. The first concerns what might be called the ontology of intuitions, insofar as it consists in an argument that the involvement of concepts is required for the mere ‘having’ of an intuition. The second, more systematic, challenge concerns the crucial role that this thesis of the necessary dependence of intuitions on concepts is thought to play in the transcendental deduction. The third concerns the semantics of intuitions more directly, as it consists in an argument that concepts must be involved for intuitions to enjoy any representational relation to objects whatsoever. In this section I will present the core of these challenges; in the next I will show how they can be overcome. This will also let me further differentiate my own account from previous non-conceptualist interpretations.
5.1 The Ontology of Intuitions
Conceptualist interpreters place considerable weight on certain claims in both versions of the transcendental deduction that seem to suggest that the very having of intuitions is not possible, but for certain acts of synthesis or ‘combination (Verbindung)’. This is taken to point toward conceptualism about intuitions because Kant claims that ‘all combination is an action of the understanding’ (B130; my emphasis; cf. B134–5). Insofar as the understanding itself is defined by Kant to be primarily the capacity for thinking, understood as ‘cognition through concepts’ (B94), its combination would seem to involve concepts as well – at least the pure concepts or categories (cf. B105). If intuiting necessarily involved such combination, it would be constituted, in part, by concepts, and then the candidate ‘vehicle’ of the non-conceptual content would be shown to be a vehicle for conceptual content after all (cf. Ginsborg Reference Ginsborg2008: 66 and 69; Griffith Reference Griffith2010: §5, 9; Engstrom Reference Engstrom2006: 17).
That Kant thinks synthesis or combination is required for intuition is thought to follow from Kant's discussion in both editions of the Transcendental Deduction of what he calls the ‘synthesis of apprehension in intuition’ (cf. A98–9 and B160–1). In the A-Deduction Kant describes this synthesis as follows:
Every intuition contains a manifold in itself … Now in order for unity to come from this manifold … first the running through (Durchlaufen) and then the taking together (Zusammennehmung) of this manifold is necessary, which action I call the synthesis of apprehension, since it is aimed directly at the intuition, which, to be sure, provides a manifold, but which can never effect this as such, and indeed as contained in one representation, without the occurrence of such a synthesis. (A99)
Here Kant can seem to be claiming that, in order to have an intuition – i.e. in order to have something that has the unity that a single intuition has – a synthesis is required.
Kant's description of this same synthesis in §26 of the B-Deduction can seem to make all the more evident his commitment to the dependence of our having an intuition upon this synthesis – and, dependence, in particular, upon the involvement of the pure concepts or categories.Footnote 27 And if we add to these passages Kant's often-cited claim in the Leitfaden passage that it is ‘the pure concept of understanding’ that both ‘gives unity to the different representations in a judgment’ but also ‘gives unity to the mere synthesis of different representations in an intuition’ (B105), Kant's commitment to the involvement of concepts in the having of intuitions might seem to be demonstrated beyond doubt.
5.2. The Transcendental Deduction
The second main objection to the non-conceptualist interpretation points to the specific context of the previous set of claims – namely, to the fact that they arise at key points in Kant's ‘transcendental deduction’ of the objective validity of the pure concepts. If Kant were a non-conceptualist, it is suggested, his strategy in the transcendental deduction would not only have no hope of succeeding, but would make no sense whatsoever (cf. Ginsborg Reference Ginsborg2008: 68–9; Griffith Reference Griffith2010: §4, 8).
The conclusion Kant is aiming at in the Deduction is often taken to be expressed in §26 of the B-edition:
[E]verything that may ever come before our senses must stand under the laws that arise apriori from the understanding alone. … Now since all possible perception depends (abhängt) on the synthesis of apprehension … all possible perceptions, hence everything that can ever reach empirical consciousness, i.e., all appearances of nature, as far as their combination (Verbindung) is concerned, stand under the categories … (B164–5)
As the conceptualist interpreters see it, in order to reach this conclusion, Kant's strategy is to show that the very ‘unity’ of what is given through the senses – i.e. the unity of an intuition itself – is something for which the understanding is responsible via the synthesis of apprehension. Indeed, they urge, it is precisely this that is the larger point of the claims about apprehension presented above. It is only because Kant can show that the very being, as it were, of an intuition is constituted by understanding – so the argument goes – that he can remove the worry that the understanding's concepts might not be valid of what is given in intuition, i.e. that appearances might not ‘stand under’ the categories.
If, by contrast, the non-conceptualist were right to think that Kant's considered view was that it is not of the essence of intuitions and appearances themselves to involve (and ‘depend on’) concepts, then Kant could not conclude a priori that they do and must ‘stand under’ the categories. In effect, the second objection is that, if the first objection fails, then so too must the Deduction itself. If the non-conceptualist interpretation is correct, then Kant's strategy in the transcendental deduction is hopelessly confused.
5.3. The Semantics of Intuitions
The third challenge is perhaps the most direct one, as it specifically targets the nature of the content of intuitions. This arises from texts that seem to suggest that, regardless of whether Kant thinks that concepts must be involved in intuitions, Kant thinks that intuitions – indeed, representations of any sort – do not acquire any ‘relation to an object’ at all until synthesis through concepts has given them such a relation. Since, on my account, the particular representational relation to an object that a representation bears just is its content, this would imply that a representation simply does not have any content – really, any intentionality – until concepts introduce the requisite relation. This third challenge, therefore, poses the following dilemma: either intuitions without concepts simply do not have a content in the relevant sense – they are ‘empty’, as it were – or, if it is constitutive of intuitions to have a content (as it seems to be), then intuitions themselves, and their contents, must be constituted by concepts (cf. Willaschek Reference Willaschek1997: 560; Griffith Reference Griffith2010: §5, 9 and §10.4, 22; Engstrom Reference Engstrom2006: 18–19).Footnote 28
This theme is also thought to flow throughout both versions of the Deduction. In the A-Deduction, for example, when Kant asks: ‘what does it mean if one speaks of an object corresponding to and therefore also distinct from the cognition?’, he answers as follows:
[O]ur thought of the relation (Beziehung) of all cognition to its object carries something of necessity with it … since insofar as they are to relate to an object, our cognitions must also necessarily agree with each other in their relation to it, i.e., they must have that unity that constitutes the concept of an object. (A104–5; my emphasis)
This might be taken to imply that the very having of a relation to an object requires involvement of ‘the concept of an object’.Footnote 29
A similar claim can seem to be found in the B-Deduction as well. In §17, for example, Kant writes as if ‘an object’ just is ‘that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united’ (B137; my emphasis). He then goes on to claim that ‘the unity of consciousness’ that pertains to such ‘uniting’ according to a concept is ultimately ‘that which alone constitutes (ausmacht) the relation of representations to an object’ (B137; my emphasis). And still other texts from the first Critique might be taken to point towards a similar conclusion (cf. B242–4, A250, B304, and 1789 letter to Herz, 11: 52).
6. Replies to Objections
Let me now reply to each of these objections in turn.
6.1
Before we look again at the particular texts at issue in section 5.1, the first thing to note is that even if conceptualist interpreters are right in their claim that Kant thinks that synthesis and concepts are essentially involved in every intuition, this would not, by itself, necessarily show that Kant must think that the content of intuitions is thereby conceptual.Footnote 30 At the very least, determining how exactly this first objection supports the conceptualist interpretation will have to wait until more is said about how they mean ‘content’ to be understood in these circumstances.
For the sake of argument, however, let us assume that there is a valid inference somewhere nearabouts. At this point, the most common strategy adopted by non-conceptualist interpreters so far has been to try to find a way to break the link between synthesis, on the one hand, and understanding and concepts, on the other.Footnote 31 As their critics have been quick to point out, however, this strategy faces a straightforwardly uphill battle if it hopes to ever accommodate the sequence of texts we have cited above (cf. Ginsborg Reference Ginsborg2008: 68–9, Griffith Reference Griffith2010: §10.2, 19–20). In particular, it is hard to see how this sort of approach will ever be able to square with Kant's explicit claim (cited above) that ‘all combination’ is an act of understanding.Footnote 32 These passages, and others besides, seem to stifle any hope for carving out space for a kind of synthesis that does not involve concepts. We would do well, therefore, to look for another way around this objection.
Such an alternate route opens up if we take a closer look at the passages cited in section 5.1. What this reveals is not that Kant thinks that intuitions involve some non-conceptual synthesis, but rather that they do not involve any synthesis at all – contrary to the way these passages have been read by the partisans on both sides. What is at issue in these passages is not what is required for the mere having of an intuition, but rather what is involved in the reflective representing of an intuition as being constituted in a certain way, as providing us with a certain determinate relation to an object.
We can begin to see that it is the representation of intuitions, and not intuitions themselves (per se), that is Kant's true topic in these passages by first filling in a key ellipsis from the A-Deduction quotation above:
Every intuition contains a manifold in itself, which however would not be represented as such [my emphasis] if the mind did not distinguish (unterschiede) the time in the succession of impressions on one another; for as contained in one moment, no representation can ever by anything other than absolute unity. (A99)
Here Kant signals that he means for there to be a clear distinction between (a) an intuition's being a unity, and containing a manifold, and (b) that intuition's being represented as a unity, or as containing a manifold. Kant also makes clear that the former two features of an intuition (being a unity, containing a manifold) belong to it per se, prior to and independent of any further acts of mind. That some unity pertains to an intuition per se follows from Kant's claim that a single intuition ‘as contained in one moment’ has ‘an absolute unity’ (A99; my emphasis). What is more, Kant's use of ‘absolute’ here points to the fact that this unity is one that has no further ground whatsoever, let alone one in any act of synthesis.Footnote 33 That containing a manifold also pertains to an intuition per se follows from Kant's claim that this manifold is already there to be ‘distinguished by the mind’ and subsequently ‘represented as manifold’, prior to these acts actually coming about.Footnote 34
With this distinction in mind, it also becomes quite clear which unity it is that Kant is taking to be dependent on the ‘synthesis of apprehension in intuition’ in the remainder of the passage: it is precisely the unity that ‘comes from’ the manifold ‘being run through’ and ‘taken together’, due to a synthesis that is ‘aimed at the intuition’ – i.e. our (b) above and not our (a), not the ‘absolute unity’ that already pertains to the intuition simply as ‘providing the manifold’. Kant's point here is thus that the synthesis of apprehension is required only if we wish to ‘apprehend’ an intuition as containing a particular, determinate manifold – that is, only if we wish to have consciousness of a particular manifold as ‘contained in one representation’. In other words, while the synthesis of apprehension ‘in intuition’ is surely a synthesis that is ‘aimed at intuition’, it is not at all one that makes up or puts together an intuition, or puts something ‘in’ intuition, in the first place.
The very same distinction can be found in the B-Deduction. Kant here also distinguishes ‘the manifold of representations’ that ‘can be given in an intuition’, on the one hand, from, on the other hand, ‘the combination of the manifold in general’ as something that ‘can never come to us through the senses’ (B129). Kant goes on to clarify, however, that what he means by ‘combination’ or ‘synthesis’, as ‘an act of understanding’, concerns again our ability to ‘represent something as combined (als verbunden vorstellen)’ (B130; my emphasis).Footnote 35 But then, just as in the A-Deduction, Kant need not be seen as claiming that synthesis or combination by our understanding is necessary for us to have representations that are unities of a manifold. Rather, synthesis is only necessary for us to consciously represent (‘apprehend’) these representations as unities, as giving us something that contains a manifold, as containing this or that determinate manifold that is unified in this particular way rather than that.
As Kant frames the issue in §17, what he is concerned with are the conditions under which intuitions must stand ‘in order to become an object for me’ (B138; my emphasis) – i.e. in order for the intuitions themselves (and their content (appearances)) to become the objects of further representations. This, however, is a concern distinct from the conditions that intuitions must meet in order to themselves already represent or relate to an object. The kind of representation at issue here in the B-Deduction is therefore distinct from any intuition itself; it is, rather, something over and above intuitions, since it is a representation that has an intuition (or several) as its object.
This is made explicit again in §26, where Kant contrasts the mere having of an intuition with a separate ‘empirical consciousness’ of the intuition itself, something he calls ‘perception’. What is more, Kant here also explicitly describes the ‘synthesis of apprehension’ as that through which this special kind of awareness of a manifold becomes possible: this synthesis is that ‘through which perception, i.e., the empirical consciousness of [the manifold] (as appearance), becomes possible’ (B160; my emphasis). This fits quite naturally with our above analysis of the A-Deduction's description of apprehension: a certain act of understanding (here, ‘composition (Zusammensetzung)’) is necessary for a special kind of consciousness – namely, ‘perception’, or the consciousness of the manifold as manifold, or as this or that appearance. In fact, we can now see that Kant already makes use of this terminological distinction in the A-Deduction itself: ‘the first thing that is given to us is appearance, which, if it is combined with consciousness, is called perception’ (A120; my emphasis). Indeed, in §26 as well, we find Kant describing only what transpires ‘if I make the empirical intuition of a house into a perception through apprehension of its manifold’, again explicitly distinguishing what pertains to intuition per se, and what pertains instead to the ‘synthesis of apprehension, i.e., perception’, as what ‘makes’ something else out of the original intuition (B162; my emphasis). In fact, once we are sensitive to Kant's intention to draw a distinction between intuition (appearance) and perception as the ‘apprehension’ of an intuition in a further representation, it becomes apparent that this is a distinction that Kant returns to again and again throughout the rest of the Transcendental Analytic.Footnote 36 We can also see it at work elsewhere in the Critical writings, and anticipated in pre-Critical writings as well.Footnote 37
Yet once this terminological distinction is recognized, we can see that it does not follow from any of Kant's remarks about apprehension ‘in intuition’ (as that which yields perception) that such activity is also required for the mere having of an intuition per se, or the being given an appearance per se. What follows, therefore, from Kant's discussion of the synthesis of apprehension in the Deduction (and elsewhere) is only that synthetic acts of understanding are necessarily involved in a kind of representation that pertains to intuitions. All of the passages under discussion are therefore compatible with, and some even directly suggestive of, an account of intuitions in which our being given an appearance does not need any synthesis whatsoever to take place.Footnote 38 Hence, even if the taking of an intuition as an object in its own right might very well require what might be called a ‘reflective’ consciousness of our intuitions and their contents, this would not entail that the original intuiting itself requires anything more than the conscious ‘living through’, as it were, of a case of being immediately related to some object.Footnote 39
6.2
With this distinction in hand, we can disarm the second objection in quicker fashion. For we can now see that the summary of one of Kant's aims in the Deduction at the end of §26 (cited in section 5.2) is quite specific in its characterization of its subject matter. It is only ‘perception’ in the sense spelled out above – i.e. only something that involves the conscious ‘apprehension’ of an intuition as an object, by way of acts of distinguishing and comparing – that the Deduction aims to show is ‘made possible’ by synthesis, and consequently ‘stands under’ the categories (B164–5).Footnote 40 Some other evidence, therefore, would be required to show that Kant's aim for the Deduction is what the conceptualist interpreters claim it to be: that simply being given an appearance in an intuition is already an act that also ‘stands under’, and is only ‘made possible’ by, the categories.
In fact, when we look at what Kant himself identifies as the ‘principle toward which the entire investigation must be directed’, in the Transition to the Deduction (in what should have been numbered ‘§14’), what we find is that he does not put forward a thesis concerning the necessary concept-dependence of intuitions or appearances at all, but instead only one concerning the concept-dependence of ‘experience (Erfahrung)’: ‘the transcendental deduction of all a priori concepts has a principle … namely: that [pure concepts] must be recognized as a priori conditions of the possibility of experiences’ (B126; my emphasis). What is more, immediately prior to this, Kant spells out a distinction between merely being an intuition and being an experience, one that he takes to be marked by nothing other than the involvement of concepts: ‘all experience contains (enthält), in addition to the intuition of the senses, through which something is given, a concept of an object that is given in intuition or appears’ (B126).
Indeed, Kant's remark here about the ‘addition’ of concepts would make little sense if intuitions already contained concepts. It fits quite well, by contrast, with other remarks that have been rightly emphasized by previous non-conceptualist interpreters: Kant's explicit assertions of the concept-independence of intuition and appearance at the very outset of the Deduction (in §13). Most notably, Kant there claims that ‘the categories of understanding … do not at all represent to us the conditions under which objects are given in intuition’ (B122; my emphasis), and that ‘intuition by no means requires the functions of thinking’ (B123). Kant also claims explicitly in this passage that ‘objects can indeed appear to us without necessarily having to be related to functions of understanding, and therefore without the understanding containing their a priori conditions’ (B122; my emphasis).
The main strategy of the conceptualist interpreter has been to claim that Kant cannot really be asserting here what he otherwise seems to be clearly asserting.Footnote 41 My interpretation, by contrast, provides us with sufficient textual and systematic support to allow us to take Kant's claims at face value. It also allows for the same straightforward approach to the many other passages that assert the independence of intuitions and appearances from the involvement of concepts (e.g. an intuition is a representation that ‘can precede any act of thinking’ (B67) and ‘can be given prior to all thinking’ (B132)).Footnote 42
6.3
To deal with the final objection, let me now show how this initial distinction between merely having an intuition, on the one hand, and this intuition's being apprehended by, or belonging to, further acts of consciousness (such as perception or experience), on the other, allows us to introduce a parallel distinction between two kinds of consciousness of the intuition's relation to its object as well, i.e. two kinds of consciousness of its content. This latter distinction, in turn, will open up room for us to see that Kant does not mean to claim that concepts play a necessary role in introducing all intentional relations to an object, but only a certain kind of consciousness of this relation – namely, one in which this relation itself is made ‘determinate (bestimmt)’ for consciousness itself.
We can see this if we look at the context of the passages cited in section 5.3. In the A-Deduction, for example, Kant explicitly describes the role of concepts in relation to the manifold in intuition as precisely that of ‘determining (bestimmen)’ this manifold according to a ‘rule’ (A105; my emphasis). This ‘determining’ according to rule, however, consists in ‘representing the necessary reproduction of the manifold of given intuitions’ – i.e. representing these intuitions themselves and their manifolds as needing to be ordered in a certain way, whenever they are re-represented in the future (A106; my emphasis). This need not imply that it is involved in the original bringing about or producing of the intuitions in the first place.
The same thought arises in the B-Deduction. In §17 Kant describes our understanding as the faculty for the ‘determinate relation of given representations to an object’ (B137; my emphasis). In fact, Kant introduces the concept of an object, as ‘that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united’ (B137), precisely to spell out what is required in order make the relation that is contained in a given representation a ‘determinate’ relation for our consciousness. The particular way in which the given manifold is ‘united’ in a concept is therefore what determines, for consciousness, what is given in intuition as something related to this object rather than that one. This act does not, however, institute this relation itself; rather, it makes us reflectively aware of the relation (makes the relation ‘determinate’ for consciousness). And Kant returns to this same point throughout the first Critique and in other writings.Footnote 43
Hence, while understanding is necessary for the transformation of our consciousness of an object by its appearance in an intuition into a consciousness of that object as one that is appearing in this and other intuitions – i.e. a consciousness of this object as an object of experience – no such act is necessary for intuiting itself. It is only the constitution of experience out of intuitions, through the comparison and synthesis of appearances with one another in reflection, that requires acts of understanding and hence concepts, not the intuiting itself.Footnote 44
To be sure, without such acts of understanding, ‘without concepts’, Kant clearly thinks that we are, in an important sense, ‘blind’ as to what it is that we are intuiting, as the oft-cited passage has it (B75). Its crucial corollary, however, is that the absence of either these synthetic acts or the resulting ‘empirical consciousness’ need not remove or eliminate the original content of the intuition itself (cf. Hanna Reference Hanna2005: 257). Not only does Kant not claim that intuitions without concepts become ‘nothing’ at all, he does not even claim that they become ‘empty’ or without content, which is what we would expect, were the conceptualist interpretation to be true. Rather, Kant says of such cases that we are ‘blind’ because we are not conscious of something that is there – namely, the particular features of the relation to an object that we already enjoy in the intuition. In the mere having of an intuition, we are simply conscious of some object by way of grasping its appearance. We are not, however, also conscious of this appearance-relation itself. For this latter sort of reflective consciousness, a further representation is required, one in which we no longer simply live through the intuiting but instead take it as an object of consciousness in its own right.Footnote 45
7. Conclusion
I have argued that, if we understand by ‘content’ something on the order of Fregean ‘sense’ – where this consists in a representation's particular relation to an object (its ‘mode of presenting’ this object) – then it is clear that we should conclude that Kant accepts non-conceptual content. This is because Kant accepts that intuitions put us in a representational relation to objects that is distinct in kind from the relation that pertains to concepts. I argued, furthermore, that this is the meaning that Kant himself assigns to the term ‘content’. We should conclude, then, that Kant himself could assert, in his own voice, that intuitions have a non-conceptual content. In addition, I have undertaken to defuse what I take to be the most pressing objections from the side of the conceptualist interpreters. Conceptualists are surely right to emphasize that Kant thinks that intuition without synthesis cannot give us a certain kind of consciousness (perception, experience) of the relation to an object that an intuition provides. As we have seen, without such synthesis (in reflection), we are ‘blind’ to the content of the intuition, in the sense that it will not be grasped ‘as appearance’, let alone as the appearance of any particular object. Conceptualists are wrong, however, to infer from this that Kant also thinks that intuition on its own cannot already put us into some immediate representational relation through which we are thereby conscious of an object.
Even if I have succeeded on both these positive and defensive fronts, the account I have developed is, of course, provisional in many respects, as must be any brief discussion of the nature of appearances or of the Deduction. What is more, because Kant's accounts of intuition and appearance lie at the very heart of his transcendental idealism as a whole, there is good reason to think that the complete resolution of the present debate will have to be a part of a more comprehensive proposal for interpreting transcendental idealism in general. Even so, my hope is to have brought to the fore new systematic considerations on behalf of the non-conceptualist reading of Kant, while also helping to bring more sharply into focus certain neglected features of Kant's texts, and so, in this way, have helped to move this interpretative debate at least a few steps forward.Footnote 46
