by Robert Wicks
A further upshot of the First Analogy is a useful distinction between ‘change’ and ‘alteration’. A change occurs when one thing or quality goes out of existence and is replaced by another. An alternation occurs when a thing persists, but undergoes a change of quality. For example, with respect to a leaf’s transition in colour from green to brown, one would say that the leaf’s qualities change from green to brown, whereas the leaf itself undergoes an alteration of colour. In the broadest comprehension of sensory experience, Kant maintains that the projection of the category of substance onto experience as a whole entails that ultimately, there are only changes of sensory quality, and no changes in substance. To express this with greater profundity, he mentions the Latin phrase, gigni de nihilo nihil, in nihilum nil posse reverti, which translates as ‘nothing comes from nothing, and nothing returns to nothing’.
Key idea: First analogy
This is Kant’s main discussion of how the category of ‘substance’ provides a structure to our experience. The structure is that of a stable, underlying object in which changing qualities inhere.
Spotlight: ‘Nothing comes from nothing’
Kant’s Latin phrase, gigni de nihilo nihil, in nihilum nil posse reverti, is from the Roman poet and satirist Aulus Persius Flaccus (34–62), in his third Satire. A century before, the philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus (99–55 BCE) wrote similarly in The Nature of Things that Nil posse creari De nihilo, neque quod genitum est ad nihil revocari, which translates as ‘Nothing can be produced from nothing, and whatever has been made cannot be brought back to nothing’. The thought traces back to the ancient Greek philosophers writing before Socrates. Aristotle tells us in his book, De caelo that ‘there are philosophers such as Melissus, and Parmenides, who deny any kind of generation and corruption. They say that nothing is really born or corrupted – it only appears to us to be so’ (De caelo, iii, I 298b15–18). The idea is that the world is eternal, stretching forever into the past and forever into the future, and that insofar as we have always been a part of this eternal being, and will always remain so, death is only a surface phenomenon. The principle seems obvious, but it does contradict the theistic idea that God created the world ‘out of nothing’.
The Second Analogy concerns the application of the category of causality to all alterations in our experience of the external world. In the background is Hume’s sceptical account of causality, against which Kant is reacting, which holds that since we can perceive no necessary connections between events, all events are loose and separate from one another, like a hand full of marbles. The Humean implication is that as far as we can know, anything can happen at any time. The boiling water on the stove could change into a dry Halloween mask, and the mask itself could change the next moment into an alarm clock, and so on. Since there is no causality as necessary connection, all experience could in principle be a complete and incomprehensible chaos. Kant aims in the Second Analogy to show, contrary to Hume, why this sort of chaos is not even a possibility for human experience.
Kant’s argument is that certain features of our experience can be explained only if we assume the prior application of the category of causality. He agrees with Hume that the sensory manifold in its initial aggregation into perceivable items does not contain any necessity in its sequencing. We must, however, look further into ourselves to account for necessary conditions that experience might contain, for causality is not an empirical concept derived from experience.
To show that the concept of causality must be presupposed in our experience, imagine two different situations. First, consider that one is walking back and forth along a dock, following the length of a large ship. One walks along the ship’s side from its front to its back, and then returns the same way to its front.
As one walks, the ship moves along within one’s field of vision, with each of its sections passing by in sequence. The sequence of what one sees is reversible, since the sequence is only a function of how one initially chooses to walk.
Suppose further, though, that while one is walking along the dock, the ship sounds its horn and begins to pull out of the dock. The ship is again moving within one’s visual field, but this time, the sequence of movements is not reversible. How it moves within the visual field is no longer subject to one’s will. The ship is now moving independently, quite unlike how it moves when one’s changes direction walking along the dock, or when one shakes one’s head back and forth.
Kant asks how this difference in the sequencings is even possible. One sequence is subjective and one sequence is objective. His answer is that the difference between the two can appear in our experience, only if it is supposed that we are projecting a rule that allows us to assert, not of our subjective sequencing of experiences, but of the experiences insofar as they coalesce objectively in an object, that for any alteration, there is a preceding alteration from which a succeeding alteration necessarily follows. We must, that is, assume the projection of the category of causality, if we are to experience any objectively comprehended events or happenings. This causal rule applies to all events, and it precipitates a set of deterministic relationships between everything that happens objectively in space and time.
In saying that we must project the category of causality to experience any objectively comprehended events or happenings, Kant is asserting that the recognition of objects in causal relationships is a fundamental quality of our experience. It is so fundamental, that we need to presuppose its presence before we can account for any subjective sequence of experiences. We need to suppose that the ship is objectively at the dock to begin with, before we can decide to survey it by walking up and down the dock, or before we move it around in our visual field by shaking our heads back and forth when looking at it.
Consider how someone else at the other end of the dock, also surveying the ship, would have a different sequencing of his or her subjective experience of it. These differences would obtain for everyone who happened to be walking around on and within the ship, which stands substantially as the common object for everyone involved. In this respect, Kant states that we must ‘derive the subjective succession of apprehension from the objective succession of appearances’ (A193/B238).
Key idea: Second Analogy
This is Kant’s main discussion of how the category of ‘causality’ provides a structure to our experience. The structure is that of a necessary connection between events, which renders all scientific inquiry intellectually legitimate.
Kant turns next to the Third Analogy and the application to experience of the category of reciprocity, developing an observation from the Second Analogy. As we have seen, the Second Analogy focuses on the category of causality in connection with how certain sequences of our perceptions are not reversible. In this context, Kant reflects upon those sequences that are reversible, as when we walk up and down the dock viewing a ship, as opposed to watching the ship pull out of the dock. The Third Analogy develops the significance of our having reversible series of perceptions, and associates this feature of our experience with the application of the category of reciprocity.
The Third Analogy’s main observation is that if we are able to reverse our series of perceptions – ‘I can direct my perception first to the moon and then to the earth, or in reverse, first to the earth and then to the moon’ (A211/B257) – then the perceptual objects involved must exist at the same time and be connected with one another. They must ‘coexist’, as Kant phrases it. For the possibility of such a reversible sequence of perceptions, there needs to be some spatial continuity and connection between the objects of perception, so that we can shift our attention between them as we will. Kant characterizes this continuity and connection as a ‘community’ between all objects in space that coexist, for ‘without community each perception of an appearance in space is broken off from every other’ (A214/B260) – a situation that would render the continuity of experience impossible.
Taken as a whole, the three analogies of experience explain how the temporalize
d categories of substance, causality and reciprocity, when applied to the manifold of sensations work to ‘make nature possible’ (A216/B263). They organize the sensory manifold into a unity, structuring it according to rules of necessary connection. The result is an experience determined by a hard structure of interconnected perceptual objects.
To complete the analytic of principles, Kant explains in the ‘postulates of empirical thought’ how the last three categories of modality – possibility, actuality, necessity – apply to the sensory manifold. In one aspect, his exposition is uncomplicated, constituted as it is by the direct translations of these three categories into the language of his theory of knowledge. Specifically, he characterizes what is ‘possible’ as whatever agrees generally with the conditions for having any intuitions at all. This provides a narrow sense of possibility, the import of which is that if an object cannot be given in experience or connected with it, then it is not possible. Here, ‘possible’ means ‘within the sphere of possible experience’. Kant maintains similarly that what is ‘actual’ are those possibilities that are objectively bound up with sensation, and that consequently appear in experience. What is ‘necessary’ are those actualities that are considered as determined by the universal conditions for experience, in particular, causality.
In the course of these discussions Kant makes a claim about these modal concepts – possibility, actuality (or existence) and necessity – that reappears some chapters ahead when he addresses one of the traditional arguments for God’s existence, the ontological argument. In our present section, he states that ‘the categories of modality are distinctive insofar as in determining an object, they do not in the least augment the concept to which they are attached as predicates’ (A219/B266). In reference to the category of actuality, for instance, Kant maintains that ‘in the mere concept of a thing, there is to be found no mark of the thing’s existence’ (A225/B272). This precludes any arguments that start with a definition, or concept of some thing and go on to conclude from the concept alone that the thing exists. In Chapter 9, we will revisit this style of argument as it applies to the ontological argument for God’s existence, which Kant accordingly criticizes.
In characterizing ‘actuality’, Kant states that what is given in perception is actual, along with anything that can be inferred from that perception according to the laws of causality. The possibility of drawing any such inferences supposes to begin with, that we have before us a world of things in space and time, objectively determined by laws of causality.
Aiming to reaffirm the presence of this world, Kant adds in the second edition a section entitled the ‘Refutation of Idealism’ that draws from the First Analogy’s treatment of the category of substance, along with some additional concluding remarks. His purpose is briefly to refute Descartes’ sceptical view that the existence of the external world is either ‘doubtful and indemonstrable’ or ‘false and impossible’ (B274). He is also responding to the inherent problem in the British empiricist view that the immediate objects of awareness are our ideas. If the latter were true, we could never be sure of what our ideas objectively represent, if we cannot step beyond the confines of our consciousness.
The First Analogy claims that for experience to be possible, our perceptual experience needs to have some stability. This is provided by the projection of the category of substance, which organizes the perceptual field into a set of objects in which sensory qualities inhere. Descartes argued that since he could not trust his senses, he was certain only of his own subjective existence, and that the existence of the external world was uncertain. In reply, Kant observes that Descartes’ (and everyone else’s) self-awareness has the quality of enduring through time, and he asks how this kind of enduring intuition of oneself as persisting through time, is possible. Kant’s view is that one’s own sense of permanence can only be a reflection of the permanence that we apprehend in the external objects we perceive. The transcendental unity of consciousness – a unity which we do not experience in its purity – expresses itself as the category of substance, which when applied to the sensory manifold generates a field of stable objects with qualities (e.g., tables and chairs). The perception of those objects provides the permanence that organizes our own self-perception in time, since all experience in time is determined by the category of substance. Thus, ‘the consciousness of my own existence is simultaneously an immediate consciousness of the existence of other things outside me’ (B276). We need to perceive the stable external objects at the outset, for us to have any self-knowledge, since the empty categories and the empty transcendental unity of consciousness within us cannot supply that knowledge by themselves. As Kant states, ‘the categories are not knowledge, but mere forms of thought, by which given intuitions are turned into knowledge’ (B288).
Kant’s concluding remarks to the postulates of empirical thought, also added in the second edition, reinforce this refutation of idealism by introducing into consideration, the form of space as well. He adds that for any of the categories to express objective reality, we need intuitions that are ‘in all cases outer intuitions’ (B291). In reference to the category of substance in particular, he states that we require an intuition in space, ‘for space alone can determine anything as permanent, while time, and therefore everything that exists in the internal sense, is in a constant flux’ (B291). Once again, Kant’s point is that if one has an intuition of oneself as permanent, then the permanence involved needs to derive from the apprehension of objects in space, and hence, from the external world.
Key idea: Refutation of idealism
This is the principal location for Kant’s argument that in order to have an explicit awareness of oneself as such, one needs to presuppose the existence of objects in an external world.
At this point in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant believes that he has described in sufficient detail how our faculties of knowledge work together at various levels to establish the possibility and basic structure of human experience. To conclude the ‘Transcendental Analytic’, which was constituted by the ‘Analytic of Concepts’ and the ‘Analytic of Principles’ which we have just surveyed, Kant summarizes his results and adds some reflections to foreshadow the discussions that will occupy him for the rest of the Critique. These concern the implications of his analysis of our faculty of knowledge with respect to the perennial question of securing metaphysical knowledge, or knowledge of things in themselves.
He speaks here repeatedly of ‘two worlds’: the ‘sensory world’ of appearances, or ‘phenomena’, whose objects we can know, and the ‘intelligible world’ of ultimate reality, things in themselves, or ‘noumena’, whose objects we can never know. Underlying his discussion of phenomena and noumena is the central tenet of his theory of knowledge, that ‘for us, understanding and sensibility can determine objects only in conjunction’ (A258/B314). This reiterates what he said earlier in the Critique, that ‘thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind’ (A51/B75).
The mistake of previous philosophers, Kant states in ‘The Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection’, is to regard sensations and concepts as reducible to one another, as if they had essentially of the same kind of being. To him, it is a philosophical dead end to maintain in principle, either that one can clarify all sensations into a set of precise concepts, as rationalistic philosophy aims to do, or to explain all concepts as derivatives from sensation, as empiricism attempts. The key to understanding Kant’s outlook and criticism of philosophers such as Leibniz and Locke, is his firm recognition of a distinction in kind between sensations and concepts, or between individual entities and universal entities. We need to be given intuitions to render our concepts meaningful, and if the only intuitions we have are sensory, then our knowledge is clearly limited.
Dig Deeper
Henry Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense, Part Three and Part Four, Section 14 (Yale University Press, 1983)
Gerd Buchdahl, Kant and the Dynamics o
f Reason: Essays on the Structure of Kant’s Philosophy, Chapter 9 (Blackwell, 1992)
Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge, Sections 8–14 (Cambridge University Press, 1987)
Arthur Melnick, Kant’s Analogies of Experience (University of Chicago Press, 1973)
Eva Shaper and Wilhelm Vossenkuhl (eds.), Reading Kant: New Perspectives on Transcendental Arguments and Critical Philosophy (Blackwell, 1989)
Robert Stern, Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism: Answering the Question of Justification (Oxford University Press, 2000)
Study questions
1 Why is the parallelism between ‘concepts, judgements, and inferences’ and ‘understanding, judgement, and reason’ useful for understanding Kant’s philosophy?
2 Why is it necessary to ‘schematize’ or ‘temporalize’ the categories of the understanding?
3 What are the four sections into which Kant organizes his discussion of the ‘synthetic principles of pure understanding’, and which categories are considered in each section?
