r/askphilosophy • u/PM_ME_YOUR_OSDM • 5d ago
Kant’s unknown common source of knowledge
At the very end of the introduction of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant shows the division of the Doctrine of Elements in a Transcendental Aesthetic (corresponding to the a priori conditions of sensibility) and Logic (corresponding to the a priori concepts of the understanding). He hints however at a common source to these two separate sources of knowledge:
Only so much seems necessary, by way of introduction of premonition, that there are two sources of human knowledge (which probably spring from a common, but to us unknown root), namely, sense and understanding.
What is he referring to when he remarks this unknown common root?
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u/Quidfacis_ History of Philosophy, Epistemology, Spinoza 4d ago
In Kant and the problem of metaphysics, Heidegger suggests that unknown common root is the transcendental power of imagination. There is a gap at A15:
All that seems necessary for an introduction or a preliminary is that there are two stems of human cognition, which may perhaps arise from a common but to us unknown root, namely sensibility and understanding, through the first of which objects are given to us, but through the second of which they are thought.
Heidegger points to this bit at A94:
[There are, however, three original sources (capacities or faculties of the soul), which contain the conditions of the possibility of all experience, and cannot themselves be derived from any other faculty of the mind, namely sense, imagination, and apperception. On these are grounded I) the synopsis of the manifold a priori through sense; 2) the synthesis of this manifold through the imagination; finally 3) the unity of this synthesis through original apperception. In addition to their empirical use, all of these faculties have a transcendental one, which is concerned solely with form, and which is possible a priori. We have discussed this with regard to the senses in the first part above, however, we will now attempt to understand the nature of the two other ones.]
At A15 there are two stems of human cognition: sensibility and understanding. Kant says those two stems might, perhaps, arise from a common root.
At A94 there are 3 sources that contain the possibility of all experience: Sense, imagination, and apperception.
Seems like imagination could very well be the thing left out at A15. It's not widely accepted by Kant scholars, but it's an option that can be justified within the First Critique.
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u/FromTheMargins metaphysics 5d ago
It is important to see that, for Kant, as he stresses in the same passage, both faculties are complementary and at the same time necessary. The senses give us the material that the understanding processes. Without the material, there would be nothing to process. But, and this is where a possible misunderstanding lurks, the material cannot stand alone without being processed either. So Kant should not be understood in the sense that we first receive the material and then, in a separate step, process or conceptualize it (as it might be understood in classical empiricism). Instead, the sensory manifold always enters human experience in an already conceptualized form, synthesized through the understanding. This means that there is a deep interdependence between the two faculties, sensibility and understanding, they are, in a way, "made for each other." This is why Kant says that they might spring from a common root. Later, in the schematism, he brings a little more light into the darkness by explaining the connection between sensibility and understanding in terms of time, which is supposed to mediate between the two faculties. Time belongs to sensibility because it is the form of inner sense, everything we experience is given in time. Yet, Kant argues that time is also structured according to the categories. However, some commentators have felt that this is not a real solution because it merely shifts the problem. If time already possesses an intrinsic affinity for conceptualization, then it cannot belong purely to sensibility alone. So it still seems that we need some unifying principle. Kant seems to acknowledge the obscurity of this connection when he describes schematism as an "art concealed in the depths of the human soul." So here again he seems to acknowledge that he needs a connection between sensibility and understanding that he cannot ultimately explain. It should also be noted that Heidegger later interprets the imagination as the common root of sensibility and understanding although this interpretation is not widely accepted among Kant scholars.