A QUICK REPLY TO ENGLISH JERK

Before I continue with today's Part of Reading The Critique, let me respond to a question asked yesterday by English Jerk [I will never get used to these web handles.] Here is what he/she/they/it say/s: "Another question we might raise is the one Meillasoux opens his interesting book After Finitude with: If we accept that Kant has grounded the natural sciences, what happens when the natural sciences are capable of determining (through carbon-dating and the like) that specific spatio-temporal objects existed before the human species? If the world was timeless before there were people to impose temporal structure on it, how did we ever arrive at the moment in which such people could come into being?"



This is an interesting question, which reveals a fundamental but natural misunderstanding of what Kant is saying. Now, to pose the question, it is not necessary to invoke carbon-dating and other fancy stuff. Let me instead talk about the birth of my big sister, Barbara, which occurred on August 24th [I think], 1930, three and a half years before my own birth. How on earth can that event be dated if it took place before I was even alive? Well, you might reply, your mother was alive [and present at the event, after all.] But Kant does not begin his argument with the premise, "Mrs. Wolff can attach the 'I think" to any of her representations." He begins with the premise, "The 'I think" can attach to any of my representations." it is not someone's consciousness that exhibits a unity -- it is my consciousness that exhibits a unity. Kant's argument is essentially, ungetoverably first-personal [a fact that will cause monster problems for his ethical theory, although he seems not ever to have realized that.]



But then, how can I talk about my sister as having been born in 1930, and about my parents as having been married nine years before that, and of my father as having been born twenty-nine years before my sister, and so forth, never mind about the French Revolution and the Roman Empire and Plato and dinosaurs and all?



Well, think about it, Kant tells us [this he really did understand, and thought about, as did Hume, by the way.] Every judgment I make about things distant from me in time or in space [such as my Paris apartment or the Crab Nebula] is grounded in a present perception, from which I reason on the basis of scientific laws. Indeed, connection by laws to a present perception, Kant will tell us later on in the Critique, is the definition of what it is to be empirically real. So, my statements about Rome or Old Regime France or my sister's birth all start from some present perception -- a bit of old wall or a coin dug up in Italy, or a yellowed document in the Bibliotheque National, or a hand-written notebook apparently recording my mother's experiences of Barbara's first year. My statements about the formation and the evolution of the earth start with laboratory observations which I interpret as evidence of something that theories tell me is radioactive decay of unstable elements. All of it, all of it, starts with some present perception.



On the one hand, this is extraordinary. The entire spatio-temporal spread of the universe, from the Big Bang to the present, stands on a diversity of perceptions now present to my mind? But what else could it stand on, if it is ineluctably I who am asserting the propositions in question?



In this respect, Kant comes down entirely on the side of the Empiricists in the great Empiricist Rationalist debate. This is what it means to give up, once and for all, the claim that we can have knowledge of the independently real. "Scientific realism," ass a contrary position in the 20th century came to be called, is, according to Kant, wrong, indeed, wrong-headed. The doctrine known as Phenomenalism when I was a youth is, he tells us, the correct way of understanding our knowledge of the physical universe.



OK. Back to the Critique.

READING THE CRITIQUE PART FIFTEEN

And so, after a break of one day, we return to the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Attentive readers of what I have written thus far may have noticed a curious consequence that seems to flow from the position Kant has staked out. Strange as it may seem, Kant appears to have committed himself to the view that the laws of physics derive from the human mind, Surely that cannot be what he intended! Quite to the contrary, that is precisely what Kant intended, and in two striking passages near the end of the First Edition Deduction, he says so flat out. Here are the two crucial passages, the first at A125, the second at A 126:

"Thus the order and regularity in the appearances, which we entitle nature, we ourselves introduce. We could never find them in appearances, had we not ourselves, or the nature of our mind, originally set them there."

"Thus the understanding is something more than a power of formulating rules through comparison of appearances [as Hume, in a sense, had suggested - ed.]; it is itself the lawgiver of nature."

The understanding is the lawgiver of nature. This is a simply extraordinary statement, and Kant means it to be. In the process of reproducing a diversity of sense contents in Imagination, thereby imposing on them a temporal order that is unified and necessary as a consequence of their being reproduced in accordance with a rule, I create nature. I can know a priori, with universality and necessity, that appearances, which is to say tables and chairs and planets and atoms, will obey the Law of Cause and Effect, precisely because I have myself imposed that Law upon them. It is the condition of the possibility of my being conscious, and of my consciousness having the unity that it in fact does.

Even before we move on to the completion of the argument in the Analogies of Experience, there is a great deal that needs to be said about Kant's dramatic claim. First of all, it is a radically subjective claim, in a certain sense. It is not we who are conscious -- it is I who am conscious. Cogito. Immediately, a question thrusts itself upon us, a question that in the eighteenth century was very far from the minds of even the most sophisticated philosophers: How do we know that everyone's mind has in it the same structure of Categories? Can we even ask such a question? Could the Categories of the Understanding be culturally variable, could they evolve historically, or could they be ideologically encoded, or racially encoded, or differ according to gender? Every one of these questions has been asked in the nineteenth century and subsequently, and every one of them has given rise to a literature. But these questions seem never to have so much as occurred to Kant, nor indeed did the corresponding questions occur to Hume, or to Locke, or to Descartes or Leibniz or Spinoza.

Second, a rather more interior question, if I may put it that way. Even if we accept without cavil the radically subjective, even solipsistic implication of Kant's argument, there is another question that ought to puzzle us. The Law of Cause and Effect asserts that all objects in space and all events in time are in thoroughgoing interaction with one another according to the laws of gravitation articulated by Newton. This can be so, on Kant's view, only if the mind, through the activity of synthesis, imposes the rules that are the Categories on a total manifold of sensibility, thereby producing the entire temporal run of events, past, present, and future. Now, I, as an empirical object, a being having a certain birth, life, and eventual death, occupy only one vanishingly small interval of the world-historical temporal sequence, and yet it is, according to Kant, my mind, my Understanding [it helps to put it in caps], that synthesizes the entire causally determined sequence of which my life is the merest proper part. Can Kant really mean that?

He pretty clearly did not put it to himself in quite that fashion. How could he have done so seriously? And yet, not only is this an immediately implication of the theory he has put forward, he actually, in a strange fashion, needs this extraordinary claim in order to carry out, later on, his planned resolution of the conflict between free will and determinism. We shall get to that in time [assuming that I do not totally lose all of you before then.]

Kant does address in one way this puzzle about my relation as a particular human being to the world order of causes and effects in space and time. His answer gave rise to what Erich Adickes called "the theory of double affection." It might be useful to say a few words about what that is all about. "Affection" is Kant's term for the impact of independent things on my sensibility. Now, in our ordinary thinking about the origins of our sense perceptions, we understand that physical objects interact with our sense organs, producing sensations. Air vibrating at certain pitches generates the sensation of tones, photons entering the eye strike the retinal cells and trigger electrochemical reactions that we experience as light. That sort of thing. All of these interactions take place in space and time, in what Kant calls the realm of appearance. But Kant also maintains that things in themselves affect our sensibility, producing the diversity or manifold of sensations that we reproduce in Imagination according to the rules of synthesis, thereby forming or constructing eyes and ears and brain cells and optic nerves and air and photons and everything else that is involved in ordinary empirical perception. What is the relation between these two processes?

Kant struggled with this question, which arises immediately out of the theory of the Deduction. One of his answers was to posit a full-scale doubling of "affektionen." To put it is simply and nakedly as I can, things in themselves affect our Sensibility, generation a manifold of pure intuition in space and time [not a manifold the pure form of which is space and time, but a separate pure manifold.] This pure manifold, which can, he says, be thought of as a manifold of relations, without sensory content, is actually the object of pure mathematical reasoning, giving rise to Geometry. It is also the subject of a priori synthesis, thereby producing a world of physical objects in space and tome which, sure enough as Newton claimed, have only such spatio-temporal properties as size, shape, density, and velocity. Among the many objects thus created by synthesis is the human body itself, with its sense organs. There is now a second affection of those sense organs by physical objects, which produces the sensory perceptions that we know ahs sights, sounds, etc. These perceptions do indeed obey the laws of association studied by Hume. But the tendency of this manifold of sense perceptions to exhibit such patterns of association, which Kant calls "the affinity of the manifold," is grounded in the (logically and epistemologically) prior pure synthesis of the pure manifold.

This, as clearly as I can state it, is Kant's attempt to sort out what he has committed himself to, and it is pretty clearly rather iffy. That is one reason for his oddly ambivalent statement in the Preface of the First Edition, quoted above.

Ok, enough for one day. Tomorrow we shall tackle the Second Analogy and see how Kant brings his argument to completion.

JESUITS AND JANSENISTS

I am a regular reader of Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Daily Dish. It is lively, well-written, and gives me insight into thinking on the right. Sullivan is an English Catholic HIV-positive gay conservative man, and each of these aspects of his being plays an important role in his blog. [He also has a beard, and makes a big deal about beards, but that, I am afraid, leaves me cold.]

Sullivan is extremely critical of those whom he calls Christianists -- the fundamentalist young earth end times creationist rabidly anti-gay born-again Protestants who seem to have captured the Republican Party. I am fascinated by this animus toward people who might, from a suitable distance, be mistaken for his co-religionists, because it echoes a tension in Christianity that is literally two millennia old.

I have always associated the tension with the feud between the Jansenists and Jesuits in France -- the Jesuits, worldly, educated, flexible, intellectual, the Jansenists rigid, unyielding, narrow in their view of the world. More recently, I saw a version of this old struggle when Zeno Vendler, a Jesuit priest fleeing from Stalinist Hungary, arrived in Boston to study Philosophy at Harvard. The Boston Irish clergy [Jesuits, to be sure], were narrow and rigid in their rejection of anything more modern philosophically than late St. Thomas, and Zeno, in despair, left the church, married a nice Catholic girl named Helen Hennessey [who went on to become, as Helen Vendler, a famous literary critic], and had a fine career as an American philosopher. I have always thought that if Zeno had come to a city dominated by French Catholics, he might have remained a priest.

The split in the Republican Party between old fashioned flacks for capital and the new-fangled crazies is of course currently center stage in presidential politics, What makes Sullivan's version of it interesting is the connection in his world view to the split in Christianity.

Take a look at the blog. It is worth a read.

A BRIEF PAUSE

I have just read through what I have written thus far on Kant, and I cannot believe how much I have said so quickly. I very much fear I am writing it faster than my faithful coterie of readers can absorb it. So I think I will take a break for one day to let the dust settle, before pressing forward with the completion of the central argument of the Critique.



Meanwhile, Michele Bachmann has edged out perennial State Fair and Straw Poll favorite Ron Paul, thereby causing Tim Pawlenty to drop out of the race. I should imagine Gingrich, Santorum, Cain and other minor candidates will either officially or unofficially throw in the towel pretty quickly. The big news, if you follow that sort of thing, is the entry of Rick Perry of Texas into the race. Perry appears to be a dumb, charmless, inflexible, Christian fanatic version of George W. Bush, if you can imagine such an animal. The coming street fight between him and Bachmann should be great fun to watch. My money is on Bachmann, because she is, if anything, crazier than Perry, and this is the season for crazy in the Republican world.



Perry has just wrapped up his much touted but lightly attended prayer meeting in Texas. The cast of preachers invited to take part in the festivities includes some truly mesmerizing characters. It is hard to pick a favorite -- the chap who identified Oprah as the Harlot, The Whore of Babylon? or maybe the one who warned that the Statue of Liberty is a demon foisted on us by French Masons? My choice for winner is the earnest preacher who informed his congregation one day that the Japanese emperor had sexual intercourse with the Sun Goddess, whereupon the Japanese stock market went down and has never recovered. [No, I am not making any of this up.]



I think we must face the fact that we live in a country perhaps thirty percent or so of whose citizens are, by any reasonable criterion, certifiably insane. I have a secret dream, which I shall reveal here [thereby making it no longer secret, of course.] I would like Bachmann to beat back the challenge of Perry and emerge as the sole alternative to Romney in the Republican primaries. I would like to see the two of them approach the Convention with large blocs of delegates, Romney in the lead, but with neither able to put together a majority. At the Convention, I would like to see the powers behind the throne pull some strings to make sure Bachmann does not win, driving her and her rabid supporters to bolt the party and form a new American Christian Freedom Party, thereupon ensuring Democratic victories in November 2012.



Meanwhile, the rest of us can work our butts off trying to elect as many progressives to local, state, and national office as possible.



Well, so much for idle speculation. Tomorrow, on to the Analogies of Experience.

READING THE CRITIQUE PART FOURTEEN

What I have been laying before you thus far is the merest sketch of Kant's argument, a full-scale analysis of which, in many stages of development, can be found in Kant's Theory of Mental Activity. Before turning to the question of the nature and role of the Categories, it might be well to try to sum up what I have said thus far in a form easy to grasp. Here is the argument in what I call its Fourth Stage -- quite obviously, I have simply skipped over the three preceding stages in this exposition. One more terminological item -- Kant's use of the word "law." At A113, at the end of the Subjective Deduction, Kant writes: "The representation of a universal condition according to which a certain manifold can be posited in uniform fashion is called a rule, and, when it must be so posited, a law.

With that small clarification, here is the argument as it has evolved thus far in the Critique, laid out in something resembling logical form, with my comments in parentheses.

To Prove: All appearances stand in thoroughgoing connection according to necessary laws. [This is Kant's version of the so-called Law of Cause and Effect, which, in his understanding, is the fundamental principle of all natural science, to be distinguished from the mere fact of subjective association of resembling instances about which Hume writes at such length.]

Proof

1. All the contents of my consciousness are bound up in a unity. [This is the premise of the Unity of Consciousness, the assumption Hume cannot consistently deny, in my imaginary debate between Hume and Kant.]

2. The only way to introduce synthetic unity into a manifold of contents of consciousness is by reproducing them in imagination according to a rule. [Recall the analysis of rule-governed activities, and the analysis of the nature of the power of Imagination.]

3. The Categories, taken as a whole, constitute the most general a priori rules of synthesis. [This is the step that has not yet really been demonstrated by Kant, despite his ad hoc invocation of the two Tables. We shall get to it.]

4. If all the contents of my consciousness are bound up in a unity, then they must have been synthesized according to the Categories. [steps 2, 3, and logic.]

5. But, by steps 1, 4, and modus ponens: The manifold of contents of my consciousness must have been synthesized according to the Categories, which is to say:

6. The manifold of contents of my consciousness must have been posited in uniform fashion according to a rule. [steps 5 and 3]

7. But the representation of a universal condition according to which a certain manifold must be posited in uniform fashion is a law. [A113]

8. Therefore, by steps 6 and 7: All appearances [contents of consciousness] stand in thoroughgoing connection according to necessary laws. Q. E. D.

Thus Kant refutes Hume.

As I indicated in my parenthetical comment to step 3, the gap in the argument is anything really connecting up particular Categories with the rest of the analysis. Contrary to what Kant would have us believe, that desideratum appears nowhere in the chapter entitled Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding, but it does appear, brilliantly, in the later chapter entitled The Analogies of Experience, and most particularly in the Second Analogy.

The argument laid out above nowhere appears in that form anywhere in Kant's writings. It is my reconstruction of his argument, based on passages scattered through the first part of the Critique.

And now, I am going to pause to blow my own horn. I offer two excuses for this appalling breach of academic etiquette. First of all, I am old, and ought to be allowed the sort of leeway that tribes have traditionally granted to the old folks sitting around the fire telling stories of their youth. Second, this is a blog, and blogs are quintessentially narcissistic, self-referential, and subjective. So: Kant published the Critique in 1781. I published Kant's Theory of Mental Activity in 1963. In the intervening 182 years, no philosophical text was more studied, puzzled over, anatomized, argued with, refuted, and defended than the Critique. Everyone knew that Kant was trying to "answer" Hume, but no one -- I repeat, no one -- was able actually to present an explicit statement of the argument by which Kant was supposed to have carried out that answer, starting with a clear, simple comprehensible premise and proceeding by logical steps to a conclusion that was recognizably an answer to Hume, whether one thought that it was a successful answer or not. The great German commentators Hans Vaihinger and Erich Adickes did not produce such an argument. The great South African commentator H. J. de Vleeschauwer did not produce such an argument. The great English commentators, Norman Kemp Smith, H. J. Paton, and T. D. Weldon did not produce such an argument. And my old professor, Clarence Irving Lewis, a great logician and the deepest student of Kant in American academic philosophy, never produced such an argument in his immortal course on the First Critique.

I did. You may disagree with my interpretation. You may think the argument as I have reconstructed it is inherently incredible. You may think that Hume actually wins the debate, or even that the entire enterprise is misconceived, as many subsequent philosophers have claimed. But until I published Kant's Theory of Mental Activity, nobody could answer the simple question, "What is Kant's answer to Hume?" This is not what I will be remembered for, if indeed anyone remembers me after I die. That honor will go to the 82 page tract I wrote in 1965 and published in 1970, In Defense of Anarchism. But of all the books I have written since 1963, of none am I more proud than my Commentary on the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason.

READING THE CRITIQUE PART THIRTEEN

At this point in Kant's story, something rather surprising and very important happens. In a word, Time steps forward and takes pride of place over Space. This shift is wrapped up with Kant's very difficult but crucially important theory of Inner Sense. Until now, as I have tried to make clear, Kant's focus has been on the mind-dependent form of Space that is imposed on sensations as they are produced in the mind by the effects of things in themselves on us. In the Dissertation, where his primary concern is with the status of Geometry, space is placed center stage, and time is added almost as an afterthought. The same relative importance is accorded to them in the first major section of the Critique, the Transcendental Aesthetic. Now, however, we find that in the Deduction, Kant's discussion is all about time consciousness, and space does not figure significantly at all in the argument. There are two reasons for this switch, and each of them is of the very greatest importance. At the risk of causing your eyes to glaze over, I am going to discuss each of these reasons at some length. [I warned you that Kant is hard. Keep in mind that we are still only discussing the first 20% of the text!]

Descartes' expository tactic in the Meditations was to raise doubts about all of the knowledge claims handed down to us by his predecessors, until, in the Second Meditation, he comes to one that he cannot doubt: I am, I exist. He then undertakes, rapidly and with rather flimsy arguments, to reinstate the received wisdom -- the existence of God, the existence of a world of substances in causal interaction with one another, and so forth. Since the Cogito argument seems indubitable, whereas everything following it is a bit iffy, the effect of Descartes' tactic is to create an extremely unbalanced relation between self-knowledge and knowledge of independent reality. I can be absolutely certain, Descartes tells us, of my own existence as a real substance, a "thing that thinks," in Descartes' famous phrase, whereas I cannot be quite so certain of the reality and existence of anything else. To use a phrase that became popular in Anglo-American philosophy back when I was a boy, the mind, Descartes is telling us, has "privileged access" to its own being and nature.

Now, Kant rejects this view entirely. He has given up the claim that we can have knowledge of the existence and nature of independent reality, and that includes any knowledge of the self as well as of God or Leibnizean monads. To paraphrase Kant [or perhaps quote him -- these phrases is burned into my mind], the self knows [even] itself not as it is in itself but only as it appears to itself. You can see why this would be important to Kant. If he accepts Descartes' account of the privileged access of the mind to its own existence and nature as a thing in itself, then he will be forced to acknowledge that all the rest of our knowledge claims -- those of science -- are. as Hume so powerfully argues, unwarranted. If he is to establish Newtonian Physics as genuine knowledge, albeit of Appearances, he must insist that self-knowledge is no better, epistemologically, than knowledge of objects. [For those of you who are real philosophy buffs, it is interesting to note that in this argument, Kant is siding with Spinoza rather than with Descartes. I am not sure he knew that, however.]

According to Kant, the mind knows itself in just the same way as it knows objects -- through the affection of its sensibility and the generation thereby of a manifold of intuition. The difference is that it is the Inner Sense that is affected, not the Outer Sense, and the manifold of intuition thus generated has imposed upon it the form of time rather than the form of space.

What is the story Kant tells us about this complex process? Here it is in as simple and comprehensible a form as I can manage.

(1) Things in themselves in some way affect my sensibility, with the result that there is generated a diversity of sense contents on which a spatial form has been imposed. [This sounds very much like a causal statement, but of course it cannot be, according to Kant, because the concept of cause and effect is one of the mind dependent categories, and hence only applies to things as they appear to us. Kant really should simply begin with the given fact of a diversity of sense contents, but he reveals here the lingering effects on him of his pre-Critical beliefs.] This is the Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition.

(2) The mind, in an attempt to bring the diversity or manifold of sense contents to consciousness, does something to them. It synthesizes them. More precisely, it reproduces them, using its capacity for recalling in imagination what has been presented in sense. In the act of so doing, the mind affects itself, or more precisely affects its Inner Sense, and the result is that the sense contents thus recalled are recalled in a temporal order, according to the rule that is being invoked by the mind. This is the Synthesis of Reproduction in Imagination.

(3) Having thus reproduced its spatially organized sense contents in a temporal order according to a rule, the mind now reflects on what it has done and recognizes that the order in which it has recalled its sense contents is actually in conformity with a concept, which, you will recall, is always "something universal which serves as a rule." This is the Synthesis of Recognition in a Concept.

Kant actually gives an example of this process [something he does not often do! When he does, grateful readers fall on it like thirsty desert wanderers coming upon an oasis. Another example of course is the Four Examples of the Categorical Imperative in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.] The example is counting. When I count a group of objects, he notes, I do not simply count "one, two, three, ..." Instead, to put it crudely and explicitly, I count: This is one, and this a second, which I am counting after having labeled the first one "one," and this is a third, which I am counting after I have labeled the first one "one" and the second one "two," and so forth. In short, in the process of counting [reproducing each item in imagination], I am also conscious of carrying out this activity in conformity with the rule for counting [Recognition in a Concept]. The result is the imposition of a unity on the multiplicity of objects -- a unity that they possess not in their own right, as it were, but as a consequence of having been ordered according to a rule. I thus achieve a unity of my consciousness of the several objects.

Sometimes, of course, I do not follow the rule. Little children, who have learned the names of the numbers but not yet the rule for counting, can sometimes be heard saying "one, seven, two, five, three, four, twenty-eleven, etc." And when I am counting, say, a pack of cards, if I get distracted, I lose count -- that is, I lose my unifying awareness of having carried out an iterated process in accordance with a rule. When I take my morning four mile walk, for example, I sometimes count steps, as a way of dealing with the boredom of the walk, but if I pass another person and say hello, as I usually do, I may lose count, and no longer know whether I am up to three hundred seventy or three hundred eighty.

So, what is synthesis? It is reproduction in imagination according to a rule. The Unity of Consciousness that is, according to Kant, the fundamental starting point of all philosophical reasoning, is the product of this activity of reproduction in imagination of a diversity of given sense contents. I can know, a priori, that the categories will find application within the sphere of experience because they are the rules in accordance with which that experience is produced through the unifying rule governed activity of synthesis.

What then are the categories? [In this entire complicated account, Kant has not so much as mentioned any of the twelve Categories in his Table by name.] As you might by now expect, the answer is complicated. We shall tackle it tomorrow.

READING THE CRITIQUE PART TWELVE

What is synthesis? It is, Kant says, a "running through and holding together" of a manifold of sensuous intuition in one concept. But what on earth does it mean to run through and hold together a manifold of intuition? How does that running through and holding together create the unity of consciousness which, Kant claims, is the starting point of all philosophical analysis? And what is the connection between the bringing into being of a unity of consciousness and the applicability a prior to experience of the Law of Cause and Effect on which the distinction between the empirically real and the empirically ideal is grounded?

These were the questions with which I wrestled in the summer of 1956 when, as a twenty-two year old graduate student, I worked to finish writing my doctoral dissertation. My dissertation was a comparative study of the role of something I called "mental activity" in Hume's Treatise of Human Nature and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and oddly enough, inasmuch as Kant's great work is generally understood as an answer to Hume, my success in answering the questions about synthesis and reconstructing Kant's answer to Hume was due in part to ideas I found in Hume's text itself.

This is a very long story, one that I have unfolded in detail in Kant's Theory of Mental Activity, so I am going to cut to the chase in this Introduction and recount my conclusions, without relating the complex process I went through to arrive at them. I cannot urge you too strongly first to read Kant's text itself, and then to read my Commentary, if you really want to understand what is going on in the Critique.

The key to the answer to the question What is synthesis? turns out to be a single sentence in the so-called Subjective Deduction. "All knowledge demands a concept," Kant writes, though that concept may, indeed, be quite imperfect or obscure." Then he continues:

"But a concept is always, as regards its form, something universal which serves as a rule." [A 106. Notice that there is no corresponding passage in B, since Kant completely deleted the entire Subjective Deduction from the Second Edition.]

A concept is always, as regards its form, something universal which serves as a rule. What is it about the notion of a rule that is the key to an understanding of synthesis, and through that understanding, of the entire Critique? Perhaps, it occurred to me fifty-five years ago, if I unpack the notion of a rule, I will be able to reconstruct Kant's central argument.

Now, a rule is a set of instructions for doing something [or for making something]. What are the distinctive characteristics of a rule-guided or rule-governed activity of any sort? [Never mind for the moment about the obscure mental activity called synthesis. We shall return to it soon enough.] Let us choose a simple example of a rule-guided activity, and see whether we can tease out its significant features. As an homage to my older son, Patrick, the chess Grandmaster, let me choose the activity of playing chess.

Suppose you are showing a friend around the local rec center, and he wants to know what is happening. You tell him that there is a chess tournament in progress. He has no idea what chess is, and asks you a series of questions in an attempt to understand what he is looking at. "Are all of these people playing?" he asks [there are fifteen people in the room.] "No," you reply, "only those two sitting at the table over there." "So the other people are not part of this thing called 'chess"?" "No, they are just watching the game." 'That young woman sitting at the table just drank some water from a glass. Is that part of chess?" "No, she is simply thirsty." "The man sitting there with her just scratched his nose. Is that part of chess?"

And so it goes. As a proud father who spent many long hours attending chess tournaments at which my prodigy son played, I can tell you that quite a long time can go by before either of the people "playing chess" does something that is actually part of the game. The point, of course, is that in order to sort out everything one observes into "events or objects that are part of chess" and "everything else," you need to know the rules of the game. Those rules tell you three things, all of which are essential to our understanding of the role of the Categories in synthesis.

First, the rules of chess tell us just which events or objects belong to the game of chess. Now, these events and objects are a disparate collection -- some small pieces of wood or ivory or plastic, shaped and colored in certain ways; a square piece of wood or cardboard or plastic with an array of different colored squares on one side; perhaps a little double clock, controlled by two plungers on its top side; the activity of picking up one of the little shaped pieces and moving it from one of the squares to another; and even, in some cases, the utterance of certain words, in certain special circumstances, such as "check" or "mate." Each of these objects or activities can be considered as a unity, and all of them together constitute a considerable number. And as Hume so elegantly points out, "betwixt unity and number there can be no medium." But this number, or multiplicity, or diversity, or manifold of unitary events and objects acquire a unity by virtue of their common relationship to a single rule, namely the rule that defines the game of chess.

The rules of chess also tell us which moves are in accord with those rules and which are not, which objects are a part of the game and which are not. As every parent knows, it is a major moment in the development of the child when she first grasps the concept of a game. Until that moment, there is no point in saying, "No, no. You can't put that piece there." She simply will not understand what it means for a something to be, or not to be, in accordance with the rules of the game. Notice that, for our purposes, we are not here interested in the distinction between a good and a bad move, but simply in the distinction between a move that is in conformity with the rules and an action that is not so in conformity, and hence is not, in the strict sense, a move at all. [Irrelevant aside: Herein lies the core of the debate between H. L. A. Hart and Lon Fuller about the nature of law.]

Finally, a rule tells you when an activity starts and when it has been completed. To change the example, at big tennis tournaments, the two players usually come out and hit the ball back and forth, warming up, before the match begins. If you do not know the rules of tennis, you may mistakenly think that those volleys are part of the game, since each of them may in fact look exactly like a volley that, as we say, "counts." Similarly, at tournaments like Forest Hills and Wimbledon, the winner often will bat a ball into the stands after the last point has been played, but those of us who understand the rules know that that is not a an errant swing that costs the player a point.

By now, you will perhaps have begun to suspect that the categories are going to be rules for conducting the activity of synthesis. Tomorrow, we shall find out just what this act of synthesis is, and in precisely what way it is guided by the rules that Kant calls Categories.