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It's a bit surprising that one of the most noted contributors to Modern thinking about thinking, Immanuel Kant, failed to make his thinking about the mind absolutely clear. Commentators nevertheless view his general contribution as revolutionary, of course, citing two things. The first is his nostrum that it is the mind that spins out of the inchoate deliverances of sense our conception of ourselves as individuals situated in an objective world which has for example the features of time and space. The second, his bringing into centre stage judgements in the place of ideas.
The second point first. Kant makes central use of the notion of a judgment, where earlier writers had used 'idea' [See Barry Stroud, Hume, p.232. (Kant also gives a central role to 'concept', but the only role of concepts is in making judegments. (A68/B93; Strawson, BoS, p.74.)) A judgment is a thought - a thought that such and such is true. Even the recognition of an object involves a judgment. It involves the thought that a certain proposition is true. (Strawson, BoS, p.74.)
In making judgments central, Kant is seen by commentators as emphasising the mind as an agency, where earlier writers had emphasised its passivity. Locke's image of the mind as a cupboard certainly conveys passivity, in spite of the fact that he maintains that ideas shift their relationships one to another within its confines, sometimes with the mind playing an initiatory role in such rearrangements. Sometimes indeed for Locke the mind creates new ideas, as when it forms general ideas. Writers after Kant, belonging to Romanticism proper, were to insist on the alleged creativity of the mind as of the last importance, and they exagerated when they condemned their predessors for denying it entirely.
But more significant as a shift was the way in which the centrality Kant gave to judgment opened the way for a much finer-grained analysis of the nature of thought. Stroud says this:
[Hume] does not see that without an account of how ideas combine to make a judgment or a complete thought he can never explain the different roles or functions various fundamental ideas perform in the multifarious judgements we make, or in what might be called the 'propositional' thoughts we have." (Stroud, Hume, p.232.)
(Stroud adds: 'Consequently, he does not arrive at even the beginnings of a realistic decription of what 'having' the idea of causality actually consists in. And that is an indispensable first step in his naturalistic science of man." p.232. From this I think it follows that the first step is one we have yet to make! We certainly don't know yet what 'having the idea of causality consists in' and the idea that Kant helps us towards such an understanding is of course not yet demonstrated. It is only philosophers, not scientists, who find what Kant had to say helpful.)
(In fact however the most important postKantian development in logic made a point about syllogistic patterns, showing them mapped onto two-valued arithmetic and making no use of the Kantian innovation. It came from a mathematician, George Boole, whose Laws of Thought was published in 1854.)
In developing the first point, Kant works with a distinction between 'representations' which are 'partly' caused by objects on the one hand and, on the other, 'knowledge of objects', knowledge which is the result of 'the activity of our understanding' in comparing such representations and 'by combining or separating them' in working up such 'raw material' into what we call 'experience'. (Kant CPR B1 Kemp-Smith abridged, p. 25.)
The 'understanding' is thus thought of as a 'faculty' - or as Kant also puts it, a 'capacity' or 'power' (A51 B75 p.61) - a faculty whose activity is involved in everything that counts as experience. "The faculty ... which enables us to think the object of sensible intuition is the understanding." (A 51 B75, p.61)
A first encounter with the Critique suggests strongly that Kant conceived of a faculty as an agent or agency - a piece of quasi-mechanism which does something. In the case of the faculty of understanding, Kant's text suggests that what it does is to receive receive input - 'impressions of sense' in the quotation below - from the sense organs and having worked on these (by ordering them in some way -"bringing them under concepts" - ) produces experience as we know it.
I am deliberately putting the picture in explicitly quasi-mechanistic terms, because if this is a fair picture of how Kant thinks of the understanding - as some kind of quasi-mechanical processor of alterations registered by the sense organs - I think there is reason to conclude that he is indeed committed to something other than a dynamic conception of mind.
On Kant's commitment to the view that the mind 'processes' mental content there is a substantial literature (usefully mapped by Gary Hatfield). If he is so committed it would seem to follow that the task of studying the mind's 'processing' falls to empirical psychology, and the literature deals at length with Kant's evaluation of psychology's ambitions to be scientific. But it is clear that Kant sees his own project in the Critique as non-empirical, and emphatically not therefore part of psychology. There is then the question of how therefore it is to be understood, and much thought has been directed thither.
It will be enough for our purposes however if we can establish that Kant, whatever else he might have thought, did indeed maintain that as an empirical matter the mind was to be thought of as 'processing' mental content, because this would be enough to support the claim that for him the mind was to be understood other than dynamically.
One passage is unusually clear. He says:
"Meanwhile, with respect to these conceptions [the conceptions of space and time, and the categories as pure conceptions of the understanding], as with respect to all our cognition, we certainly may discover in experience, if not the principle of their possibility, yet the occasioning causes of their production. It will be found that the impressions of sense give the first occasion for bringing into action the whole faculty of cognition, and for the production of experience, which contains two very dissimilar elements, namely, a matter for cognition, given by the senses, and a certain form for the arrangement of this matter, arising out of the inner fountain of pure intuition and thought; and these, on occasion given by sensuous impressions, are called into exercise and produce conceptions. Such an investigation into the first efforts of our faculty of cognition to mount from particular perceptions to general conceptions is undoubtedly of great utility; and we have to thank the celebrated Locke for having first opened the way for this inquiry."(Kant CPR, A 86-7)
Here I think it is clear that Kant thought of the mind as a 'processor', operating as a quasi-mechanism, brought into action by the stimulation of impressions of sense, and then producing by its exercise experience, by in some way uniting the two elements of 'a matter for cognition' and 'a certain form for the arrangment of this matter'. His thoughts about the nature of the task of the Critique, which certainly he sharply distinguished from the empirical project of enquiring into the workings of the mind, may be difficult to understand in the light of this commitment, but the commitment is clear nonethless.
However, when the dynamic view of the liver displaced what I am calling the structural conception, the existence of the liver, and its function were not denied. It was just that the liver began to be thought of as having the appearance only of a single enduring physical thing: in fact, it began to be thought, the liver was a flux - the appearance of an enduring object created by a complicated programme of chemical reactions, each one of which consisted in a continuous exchange of minute particles of matter.
The parallel in the sphere of attempting to understand the workings of the mind would be then not the denial of structure, but the realization that a particular mental structure - the faculty of understanding, say - was not a temporally enduring mental thing but again a flux, a continuous exchange now not of physical items but of mental ones.
When the dynamic view of the mind took shape, as it did in the 19th Century, the innovation was to see thoughts as the things that came and went, and in their coming and going as constituting the mind. Cannot we think of Kant as maintaining that kind of picture? There is I think nothing to suggest that he did, but let us take a step further and ask if this is a picture he could conceivably have had in his mind, without telling his readers about it? Might he not have thought of a mental faculty for example as simply a bit of thinking? When the understanding 'brings representations under a concept' can we not take this to be simply a process of thought? Can we not understand Kant as thinking of the mind in its entirety as a programme of ongoing thinking? That is the conception that is to take shape in the 19th Century.
But Kant cannot be interpreted as anticipating it. His whole project is to set out what the mind must be doing if a person is to have a thought. He can hardly be understood as maintaining that what is necessary for there to be a thought is a for there to be a whole programme of thoughts. At least, that would be a radically incomplete account.
Might there then (for Kant) be mental processes that fall short of being thoughts, such that he might be conceiving of the mind as consisting of thinking? This is of course an issue that has been much discussed.
I think Kant's position is best expressed at A108: that if there are such uncognised mental processes they would necessarily be 'nothing to us'.
"The I think must be capable of accompanying all my presentations; otherwise something would be presented to me which could not be thought at all, which means no less than: the presentation would be either impossible, or at least nothing to me ... " Pu R. 108, B 131.
Perhaps in the light of this we have to leave open the possibility that Kant thought of each faculty as an ongoing 'mental' process taking place beyond the reach of consciousness. This would be what I am calling a 'dynamic' as contrasted with a structural conception. It would be interesting to see an argument attributing this way of thinking to Kant.
In the meanitime I myself conclude that the conception of the mind Kant is promulgating is not what I am calling a 'dynamic' one: and that in one respect at least Kant belonged squarely to the 18th Century.
It seems strange that Kant, having drawn the distinction in the paragraph above leaves alone the question of how the 'faculty of cognition' might be thought of as working. It would be seem to modern eyes to be of the greatest interest. But Kant is of course at liberty to pursue the other question he distinguishes - the question which I take to be, following Strawson, what has to be true conceptually if experience as we know it is to be enjoyed.
Unfortunately, the position he develops along his preferred topic makes it really difficult for us to understand what could be meant, within his system, by the claim that the faculty of cognition is a kind of mechanism, or quasi-mechanism. This is because he arrives at the conclusion that it is the faculty of cognition that endows our world with causality - the faculty the operation of which results in our thinking of the world as subject to causality. - Kant's acknowledgement of the Humean point, and his resolution of it. Causality is not an empirical concept. Putting these two things together we have the uncomfortable conclusion that the faculty which 'creates' causality operates according to it.
Just how uncomfortable is this?
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Created 08:06:05 Prepared by VP Home Page of Web Presentation: Conceptions of the Human Being in the West
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