The Sourhern Journal of Philosophy (i986) Vol. XXV, Supplement

COMMENTS ON PAUL GUYER’S

James Van Cleve Brown University I. How I See the B Deduction

H.J. Paton compared the task of mastering the twistings and turnings of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction to crossing the Great Arabian Desert, but it is more aptly compared to hacking one’s way through the Amazonian jungle: the interpreter’s main challenge is to clear away the dense undergrowth that obscures the main path of argument. My own efforts have exposed an argument consisting of three premises and a conclusion:

1. The Unity Premise: All representations of which I am conscious enjoy unity of apperception. 2. The Synthesis Premise: Representations can enjoy such unity only if they have been synthesized. 3. The Category Premise: Synthesis requires the application of categories. 4. Conclusion: Categories apply to all representations of which I am conscious.

I have discussed these premises at length in an unpublished paper, “Thick and Thin Experience in Kant’s Transcendental Deduction.”

11. How Guyer Sees the B Deduction

My reading of the B Deduction differs from Guyer’s in three main ways. First, Guyer takes the main connection between synthesis and unity of apperception to run in the direction synthesis - unity, whereas in my view the important direction is the reverse of this. Second, Guyer discerns already in section 15 an argument for the category premise (or at any rate for the claim that synthesis must be guided by a priori concepts), whereas I can find there no such argument. Third, Guyer thinks that Kant has given no argument in B that does not depend essentially on the notion of “knowledge of objects,” whereas I think the argument set forth above isjust such an argument. I will discuss each of these points in turn.

1. The main point Guyer extracts from section 16 is this: “One cannot synthesize a manifold of representations unless one can severally recognize its members as one’s own.”’ Thus unity of apperception is necessary fo r synthesis, f rom which it follows tha t “ the

“THE FAILURE O F THE B-DEDUCTION”

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conditions of belonging to self-consciousness must be satisfied by any synthesis whatever.”

Now I agree with Guyer that Kant asserts the implication synthesis - unity of apperception. But 1 think Kant asserts this only because he believes synthesis produces such unity-not because (as Guyer would have it) synthesis has unity as an antecedent condition. In other words: according to Guyer, unity is prior t o synthesis as its logical pre- condition, whereas according to me, synthesis is prior to unity as its only possible cause. Moreover, in my view, it is the converse implication (from unity to synthesis) that is fundamental t o Kant’s argument. His strategy is t o elicit the necessary conditions of unity by eliciting those of synthesis, rather than (as Guyer would have it) the other way around.

2. Why does Kant think that synthesis requires the application of categories? His only argument for this, so far as I can see, rests on two claims: (i) that synthesis involves judging, and (ii) that all judging requires the use of categories. If I a m right about this, the B Deduction by itself cannot achieve Kant’s end, since claim (ii) gets its only support in the Cririque from the Metaphysical Deduction.

According t o Guyer, however, there is an argument linking synthesis with a priori concepts (if not Kant’s categories in particular) in section 15, a t the very outset of the B Deduction. The argument is said to be “opaque”in 15, yet to represent the most basic level of Kant’s thought. 1 agree that the point is basic to Kant’s thought, but I cannot find it argued for, even opaquely, in section 15.

Let us look carefully a t Kant’s words: “The concept of combination includes, besides the concept of the manifold and of its synthesis, also the concept of the unity of the manifold”(B130). This says that three factors are requisite for achieving the representation of combination, or of a variety of things together: I ) a manifold, 2) the synthesis of it, and 3) a concept of the unity of the manifold.* It does not say that the third of these factors is necessary for the second. It may well be Kant’s belief that concepts of unity are needed in order to perform syntheses, but I cannot find this belief asserted in section 15. So it is no cause for complaint that nothing in section 15 “explains this inference”(i.e., from synthesis t o a concept of unity), for the inference is simply not drawn.

3. I come now to Guyer’s main criticism of the B Deduction and to my main criticism of Guyer. Guyer distinguishes two possible strategies for a Transcendental Deduction. In the first, the starting point is “knowledge of objects;” in the second, it is that aspect of self- consciousness that Kant entitles the unity of apperception. In either case, the goal is to show that the objective validity of Kant’s categories is a necessary condition of the starting point. Guyer points out that since the nature and even the existence of “knowledge of objects” is controversial, the sounder strategy is t o have the Deduction begin with the fact of self-consciousness. His complaint is that although Kant hints that a n argument of the second sort is in the offing, he never gives it.

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Instead, he “collapses the second strategy into the first” by simply equating self-consciousness with knowledge of objects.

In my opinion, this criticism does not do Kant justice. Kant does indeed make the “equation” Guyer complains of, but he does so in addition to arguing from unity of apperception to the applicability of the categories. He does not offer the argument from knowledge of objects to categories instead of an argument from self-consciousness to categories; he offers it simply as an alternative route. Nor is any detour through knowledge of objects an essential part of what I regard as Kant’s main argumentative route. In confirmation of this point, 1 would draw the reader’s attention to the argument I sketched at the beginning of my remarks.

111. What’s Wrong with the B Deduction

In summary, I find the B Deduction innocent of Guyer’s main charge against it. I wish 1 could add that I have discovered in Kant’s pages a compelling argument against either skepticism or empiricism, but, unfortunately, this is not the case. My own misgivings about the Transcendental Deduction are raised in the paper cited above.

NOTES

I Again: “Any conditions which have to be satisfied for the consciousness of individual representations as such as one’s own will have to be included among the conditions of synthesis”.

2 Compare A78-79, where the same three ingredients are listed, only this time as ingredients in “knowledge of an object.”

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