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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 543 experience itself was a response. So Kantian judgment, and therefore reason, is intrinsically involved in our passional responses, both to extrinsic states of affairs and to other passions themselves. Hume would not deny this. Baier seconds Hume's "excuse" for beginning his analysis with ideas rather than passions, which is that most passions depend on ideas, and "as it is by means of thought only that any thing operates upon our passions, and as these are the only ties of our thoughts, they are really to us the cement of the universe, and all the operations of the mind must, in a great measure, depend on them" (T 662). Baier interprets this passage as showing the primacy of practical reason that theoretical reason serves (MP 77). But this is not what Hume says here, nor what the passage implies. What Hume says is that passions presuppose the ideas to which they are responses, and that the order and association of ideas presuppose the passional responses that connect them. Passions respond to ideas, and ideas are associated by passions. What the passage implies, then, is that ideas and passions are mutually dependent. But if passions respond to or are caused by ideas, and actions respond to or are caused by passions, then by transitivity of causality actions respond to or are caused by ideas. So not only does this passage not claim the primacy of practical over theoretical reason. It implies just the opposite. Now Kant would not disagree that, so far as empirical experience is concerned, ideas, i.e. particular categorical indicative judgments, do, indeed, seem to be associated by passions or other contingencies. These are the empirical mental habits and customs to which Hume reduces reasoning. Kant would simply add that a necessary precondition for such empirical mental experience is the a priori connection of these ideas by the transcendental forms 15 of judgment he lists in the Table of Judgment in the first Critique. For Kant, these forms of judgment describe the ways in which genuine reasoning must occur; that is what makes them transcendental. And Kant tells us that reason in general, not just the categorical imperative, compels our respectful attention (Achtung), if not always our submission to its dictates. Baier's account of reflection, and particularly her description of our attempts to ascertain whether those mental habits and customs to which she and Hume reduce reason can "bear their own survey," illustrates the subordination of empirical mental activity to the transcendentally rational constraints on which Kant insists. As we have seen in Section 3, Baier describes this survey as itself administered by the passions, including socially dependent ones (MP 82). And she argues that we can do no more than repeat this operation at ever higher levels (MP 84). But if this were all there were to it, there would be no point in conducting the survey in the first place, since we 15 Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, herausg. Raymund Schmidt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1976), A 70/B 95. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
