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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 65 content into those representations - again, a necessary condition for the analytical unity of concepts and hence of judgments. There can be no serious question as to how closely committed Kant is to the notion of transcendental content in this passage, because on the previous page (1C, A 77 - A 78/B 103), Kant has declared that representations must first be given in order for us to analyze them; and that the content of concepts therefore cannot arise through analysis. Kant has then gone on to describe synthesis of a manifold, whether pure or empirical, as that which collects the elements [Elemente] into a cognition and unifies them into a particular content [zu einem gewissen Inhalte vereinigt]. Similarly, Kant has identified the content of knowledge with its matter at 1C, A 6/B 9 and 1C, A 59/B 83; and at 1C, A 143/B 182 in the Schematism goes on to declare that what in the object corresponds to sensation in the subject is "the transcendental matter of all objects as things in themselves (thinghood, reality)." 8 Thus Kant's explanation of conceptual content runs as follows. Through the process of directly intuiting objects in themselves, we receive unmediated representations from them in inner sense. We then synthesize these intuitional representations according to a certain kind of conceptual function that organizes and unifies them. By thus unifying them conceptually, we give them content. This "transcendental content" - i.e. content generated by objects to which we have no unmediated conceptual access - is the unified analytical content of the pure concepts of the understanding, i.e. those which conjointly determine how we conceive objects. This analytical conceptual content in turn provides the logical form of judgments we make about them. Now I suppose it would be possible to quibble about the distinction between transcendental content, conceptual content, and semantic content. But I do not think this would be worthwhile, because it would not obscure the most important point, that judgment is not the fundamental unit of awareness for Kant; intuitional representations are. Moreover, judgment is not even the fundamental unit of cognition for Kant; pure concepts are (Kant distinguishes between awareness and cognition throughout the Paralogisms, but see especially 1C, A 360 and B 414 fn.). Kant in passage (C') then goes on to add that it is because of their transcendental content that such representations are called pure concepts of understanding that apply a priori to objects (C'.6), which general logic cannot do (C'.7). That is, the concepts that necessarily apply to all objects of experience do so because they gather and organize a manifold of unmediated intuitive 8 My account is compatible with Béatrice Longuenesse's more detailed and scholarly treatment in her Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Charles T. Wolfe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). See especially Chapters 1 and 2. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
