KANT AND THE NEGRO

Kant's account of judgement in the Critique of Pure Reason and its relation to his concept of "the Negro".

At the risk of arousing the resentment of my brothers of color, I shall say that the Black is not a human...The human is not just a possibility of reprise, of negation...The Black is a black man; that is to say that as the result of a series of aberrations of affect, [the black man] is established at the core of a universe from which he must be extricated...We propose nothing less than the liberation of the man of color from himself.We shall go very slowly, because there are two camps: the white and the black.Tenaciously, we shall interrogate the two metaphysics, and we shall see that they are frequently extremely solvent.[1] [[section]] Metaphysical Illusion consists in treating a presentation like a situation.The philosophy of the subject lends itself to this.(Lyotard, The Differend, 61) Today the proclamation that the black is not a human is not guaranteed to arouse resentment, even among "brothers of color," the way it might have thirty nine years ago when Fanon wrote these lines.This is due in some measure to the generally accepted perception of the black as essentially a victim of humanism.And that perception rests upon a particularly arrogant comfort about the ends /pp 5-6/ of humanism: the inevitability of the effects of humanity.This last statement should cause some consternation: how can I talk about comfort in the ends of humanism in the destabilizing wake of deconstruction and postmodernity?Is it not the case that if little else has been achieved by these intellectual movements, they have achieved a radical problematization of the very conception of the human subject?Perhaps, but for all of this, you see, the black remains a perception.There lies the rub, because the black victim is not a perception but rather a conception.The danger is in confusing the one for the other, hence the intervening epigraph taken from Lyotard.The persistence of this perception underscores the extent to which Lyotard also had postmodernity in mind when in noting the decay of confidence in the idea of progress he remarked that "the question of knowing which was the subject truly victimized by the lack of development ... [has] remained open during the 19th and 20th centuries".(Lyotard, "Defining the Postmodern", 8) Plainly stated, we really have no idea about what the black is for modernity, let alone postmodernity.So, to proclaim a project of liberating the black from himself that recognizes in the black man a series of aberrations of effect at the very heart of modernity indeed requires an exploration of metaphysics.The question is whether or not the exploration proposed is of two camps of metaphysics.
What I am engaging in here is not an outright critique of Fanon.On the contrary, I take seriously, very seriously, his proposed project.Accordingly, what this essay does is to probe the specific ways, the working procedures, by which metaphysical illusion occurs about the black.The most obvious target for this probe is a specific text of the master definer of the procedures of illusion, Kant, who was in no way silent about the presentation of the black, or as he would have it "the Negroes of Africa."That text is his 1764 Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (Observations on the Feelings of The Beautiful and Sublime).[2] /pp 6-7/ Kant makes two distinct allegations about blacks in Beobachtungen.Both occur in Section Four of the book, which is titled Of National Characteristics, so far as They Depend upon the Distinct Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime.The first one occurs at the beginning of Section Four and deals specifically with "the Negroes of Africa's" capacity for feeling.It reads: The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling (Die Negers von Afrika haben von der Natur kein Geföhl, welches über das Läppische stiege).[3] Mr. Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have even been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though among the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble, and through superior gifts earn respect in the world.So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color.(Beobachtungen, 296-97; Observations, 110-11) The second allegation occurs in the same Section when Kant recalls a report from a Father Labat, and deals with the defining /pp 7-8/ characteristics of "the Negroes of Africa:" blackness and stupidity.
Father Labat reports that a Negro carpenter, whom he reproached for haughty treatment towards his wives, answered: "You whites are indeed fools, for first you make great concessions to your wives, and afterward you complain when they drive you mad."And it might be that there were something in this which perhaps deserved to be considered; but in short, this fellow was very black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.(Beobachtungen,298;Observations,111) Both of these remarks of Kant's about "the Negroes of Africa" and Labat's Negro are explicitly presented as inductive observations (Beobachtungen, 282; Observations, 97).That is to say, it is not in the least apparent that they entail any metaphysical characteristics.However, there is something of the metaphysical involved in a particular clause in the Labat anecdote: "And it might be that there were something in this which perhaps deserved to be considered; but in short, this fellow was very black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid " (Observations,111).The German text of the line is: " es ist auch, als wenn heirin so etwas wäre, was vielleicht verdiente, in Überlegung gezogen zu werden, allein kurzum, dieser Kerl war vom Kopf bis auf die Füße ganz schwarz, ein deutlicher Beweis, was er sagte, dumm war" (Beobachtungen,298).Exploring this clause shall be the commencement of the probe into the working procedures of illusionary knowledge.
Kant draws an inferential relation between Labat's Negro's being "very black from head to foot" and the fact that "what he said was stupid."In fact, his blackness is an obvious Beweis of the stupidity in what he said.What is a Beweis ?Goldthwait translates it as a "proof," which tends to give it the sense of phenomenal evidence and substantiated demonstration, the sort of thing with which the carpenter can be convicted.Convicted of what?Not being stupid, but saying the stupid.Yet, when regarded in light of Kant's /pp 8-9/earlier assertion about the Negroes of Africa's natural mental deficiency, it is quite apparent that saying the stupid issues from an inherent stupidity, as opposed to a momentary lapse in judgment.So saying the stupid results from being stupid, and blackness is the proof (Beweis) of that.The relationship between metaphysics and the Negro is gained through this inference.
The essential question of metaphysics for Kant is the transformation of appearance (Erscheinung) into experience.(Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science,118) [G]eneral metaphysics in all cases where it requires examples [Beispiele] in order to provide meaning [Bedeutung] for pure concepts of the Understanding must always take them from [...] the form and principles of external intuition [ussere Anschauung]; and if these instances are not at hand in their entirety it gropes uncertain and trembling, among mere meaningless concepts[... .]And so a separate metaphysics of corporeal nature does excellent and indispensable service to general metaphysics, because the former provides examples [Beispiel] (cases in concreto) in which to realize the concepts and propositions of the latter (properly, transcendental philosophy), i.e., to give to a mere form of thought sense and meaning [Sinn und Bedeutung].(Kant, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaftt, 380) [4] It is my contention that what is met with in Kant's allegations about Labat's carpenter is a particular problem about, in Kant's terms, the discursivity of thought.In this regard, the key issue is not the problem of blackness' correlation with stupidity, but, rather, it is the problem of what Kant asserts about the Negro as /pp 9-10/ a class: "The Negro is inherently stupid."The question is: on what grounds can Kant make this assertion at all?The most apparent (and indeed correct) answer is on transcendental, or discursive grounds.
The Negro problem is a proper problem of and for the Transcendental Critique.It is the problem of how to think about the Negro, not as an appearance, or undetermined object of an empirical intuition, but as an intellectual concept whose origins are wholly in the Understanding, containing nothing whatsoever of empirical impression.Insofar as the Negro problem is thus a problem that involves categorical origins it is discursive; and any attempting to address this problem necessitates a critique of the categorical determination under which the conceptual Negro is thought: The Negro as a concept of Understanding, This, however, is saying a lot, in fact, a lot more than Kant himself was prepared to say.
The Negro problem calls for the very rigorous thinking about the dynamics of cognitive judgments--the principles of knowledge which are determinate of experience--that Kant undertook with his Transcendental Critique.Granted, Kant's Transcendental Critique was concerned with the Understanding that passes judgment on the nature of things experienced in the world, and even more particularly with the dynamics of the a priori knowledge by which the Understanding derives the principles of its judgment.Accordingly, Kant's Transcendental Critique is a propaedeutic to the system of pure reason that he calls Transcendental Philosophy, which is the idea of a science, for which the Critique has to lay down the complete architectonic plan.The only reason that the Critique is not the Transcendental Philosophy is that the latter would have to contain the whole of a priori human knowledge, whereas the Critique is concerned only with a priori synthetic knowledge.Nevertheless, insofar as the Transcendental Critique contains all that is essential in the Transcendental Philosophy, it is the complete idea of that science, although it is not equivalent.(Critique of Pure Reason, 61) The determination, then, of whether or not it can be claimed /pp 10-11/ that the clause from Observations makes any statement about physical and metaphysical characteristics requires our reading the architectonic of the Critique of Pure Reason in order to trace Kant's attempt to map the cognitive terrain wherein the transformation from appearance into experience is possible.Of course, to fully appreciate the challenge the category The Negro poses for Kant's Transcendental Critique, requires a careful inquiry into the whole of his architectonics.There is not enough space here however for such a rigorous inquiry.So, what I offer is an one that can only be an abbreviated and experimental exploration, in a somewhat arbitrary way, of particular moments in Kant's architectonic where it is obvious that the physical needs to be subordinated, in order to maintain the formal homogeneity of the metaphysical and transcendental principles of cognition.In this reading the Second Part of the "Transcendental Doctrine of Elements," the "Transcendental Analytic," is of particular significance.While the entire Second Part is significant for this reading, the focus will be principally on Book I, "Analytic Concepts," and then more specifically on Section 2 of Chapter II, "Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding."It is in this Section that Kant is most acutely concerned with determining the clarity and transparency of the metaphysical foundations of cognition.
The result of this abbreviated exploration is admittedly a refraction of the investment that Kant's Transcendental Critique has in the concept of The Negro.Still, even so, the exploration will sufficiently outline the magnitude of the stakes entailed in Kant's allegations that Labat's Negro is inherently stupid.The trajectory is plotted according to four specific parameters which follow the plan of the Critique of Pure Reason: (1)Labat's Negro is black, or Kant's aesthetic encounter; (2)The Negro's Transcendental Deduction; (3)The Negro is an Idea, or what Kant thinks about the Negro; and (4)The assertion, "The Negro is black and so necessarily stupid," is a product of Imagination, or why Kant can't even think he knows what he is talking about.

Labat's Negro is Black
Determining what Kant could possibly know about Labat's Negro might be achieved by following the legend for his mapping of the cognitive terrain where the transformation from appearance into experience is possible.In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant distinguishes between the two fundamental sources from which knowledge or cognition (Erkenntnis) springs, namely Sensibility and Understanding.Sensibility (Sinnlichkeit) entails the mind's capacity for receiving the representation of a particular object (Gegenstand) as an empirical intuition (empirische Anschauung).It is the mode by which (vermittelst) objects ( Gegenstände) are given, and it alone yields intuitions (Anschauungen), which are the given representations of sensibility.What Kant terms on empirical intuition (empirische Anschauungen) is that which is related to the object (Gegenstand) through sensation.Every empirical intuition of the particular has an appearance (Erscheinung), which is its undetermined object (unbestimmtes Gegenstand).
Kant's remark about Labat's carpenter's being black from head to foot obviously entails an empirical intuition, but, blackness as an intuited appearance has no significance (i.e., stupidity) in itself; it must be subsumed under a concept in order to acquire meaning.Blackness must be thought through the Understanding, according to its empirical concepts.
Every appearance has matter (Materie), which is what corresponds to sensation, and form (Form), which is what determines the manifold (Mannigfaltigkeit) of appearance, allowing it to be ordered in certain conceptual relations.The matter of all appearances is given only a posteriori, and the form of appearances must lie ready for the sensations a priori in the mind, and so must be considered apart from all sensation.The form of intuitions consists of the given representations of sensibility which are conceptually based: they are thought (gedacht) through the Understanding as concepts.These concepts (Begriffe) are independent from the matter of sensation; they arise from the Understanding as mere /pp 12-13/ determinations of the mind ("als bloße Bestimmung des Gemüts"), This is what is meant by concepts being a priori transcendental (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 74).In effect, then, the Understanding (die Verstand) is the faculty (Vermögen) of knowing an object through representations.For Kant, this means that it is the spontaneity of the knowable (Spontaneität der Erkenntniss), or the mind's power of producing representations from itself.Even when intuition is sensible, i.e., when giving a particular object, the Understanding is the faculty that enables us to think the given object of sensible intuition.Without sensibility no object could be given; without Understanding no object would be thought.
When intuition and concepts in tandem constitute the elements of all our knowledge in this way, then neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts can yield knowledge.Only through the union of the two powers or faculties (Vermögen oder Fähigkeiten) can knowledge arise.On this point Kant is explicitly clear in his dictate: "Thoughts without [perceptual] content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind [Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind ] ". (KrV, 80) As an empirical appearance, blackness cannot be a clear sign (ein Beweis) of stupidity, because stupidity is not an empirical concept of the Understanding.The carpenter's blackness, then, must signify something else, a concept that is not empirical.That is to say that the phenomenal appearance of blackness does not achieve the significance of stupidity until it is subsumed under a concept.And for Kant that concept is The Negro, which is the a priori principle of stupidity.
The allegations that Kant makes are not about blackness, per se, they are about The Negro.And there is nothing physical whatsoever entailed in Kant's judgment of this; a point easily underscored when sight is not lost of the fact that his judgment is purely discursive.What is predicated of The Negro is stupidity.Moreover, his assertion is made on the grounds of a reported /pp 13-14/ conversation: it does not contain anything at all in the way of an object of experience, through, for example, an empirical encounter with Labat's informant.
In simpler more direct language, Kant never met Labat's informant, and for that matter really has no sensible basis for knowing his color.This having been gained, it can be said at this point that Kant is not talking about Labat's Negro as something in the world, but The Negro as a concept.About this concept he offers two apodictic categorical judgments, or propositions: To be Negro is to be stupid; To be black is to be Negro.Because such a concept is not empirical, these judgments cannot be deduced on sensible grounds, rather they are completely transcendental, and so have their deduction (their genealogy or justification) in the "Transcendental Deduction" of the Critique of Pure Reason.Kant is exact as to what is meant here by the word transcendental: Not every kind of knowledge a priori should be called transcendental, but that only by which we know that--and how--certain representations (intuitions concepts) can be employed, or are possible purely a priori (i.e., the possibility of knowledge, or its employment a priori [d.i.die Möglichkeit der Erkenntnis oder der Gebrauch derselben a priori]) must be called transcendental.Neither space nor any a priori geometrical determination of it is a transcendental representation; what can alone be entitled transcendental is the knowledge that these representations are not of empirical origin, and the possibility that they can yet relate a priori to objects of experience [auf Gegenstände der Erfahrung].The employment of space to objects in general would likewise be transcendental, but, if restricted solely to objects of sense, it is empirical.The distinction between the transcendental and the empirical belongs only to the critique of knowledge; it does not concern the relation of that knowledge to its objects.
[Der Unterschied des Transzendentalen und Empirischen gehört also nur zu Kritik der Erkenntnisse und betrifft nicht die Beziehung derselben auf ihren Gegenstand.] (KrV, 98; CPR, 96) /pp 14-15/ The dyadic division of cognitive processes into heterogeneous fields of activity is perhaps the most salient formal aspect of Kant's architectonic.Hence, in the Critique of Pure Reason, where the field of knowledge being delineated is the theoretical, Kant distinguishes between the First One and Second Part of his "Transcendental Doctrine of Elements": "Transcendental AEsthetic" (Transzendental Ästhetik)--aesthetic in the sense of aesthemata kai nomata--which is the science (Wissenschaft) of the rules of all principles of a priori sensibility in general (space and time); and the "Transcendental Logic" (Transzendental Logik), which is the science of the rules of the Understanding in general."Transcendental Logic" contains solely the rules of the pure thought of an object (die Regeln des reinen Denkens eines Gegenstandes enthielte), excluding only those sorts of knowledge which have empirical content.Thus the "Transcendental Logic" deals with the science concerned with the acts and functions of the Understanding that involve only the form of the thought (die Form des Denkens) of an object in general, independently of and a priori to objects of intuition.A primary task of that science is to determine the origin, and the objective validity of the pure concepts or Categories (reinen Verstandesbegriffen oder Kategorien) of the Understanding.Because Kant's knowledge of The Negro is the sort of knowledge which has no empirical content, it is properly a concern of transcendental logic."Transcendental Logic" has two divisions: "Transcendental Analytic" and "Transcendental Dialectic."The First Division of these, "Transcendental Analytic," deals with the elements of the pure knowledge of Understanding, and the principles according to which any object must be thought.Its primary task is to investigate the very possibility of the Categories a priori, to attempt the "dissection of the faculty of the Understanding /pp 15-16/ itself" ("Zergliederung des verstandesvermögens selbts") [5] in order to trace the Categories of the Understanding to their genesis in the Understanding alone, and to exhibit them in their purity.[6]"TranscendentalDialectic," on the other hand, is concerned with the missapplication of the Understanding, the transcendent and transcendental employment of the Understanding.Kant terms this /pp 16-17/ dialectic, in the sense of a logic of illusion.In accordance with the movements exhibited by Kant in the "Transcendental Dialectic," both his assertion regarding Labat's informant and that regarding The Negro are instances of the sort of transcendental employment of the Understanding that results in a paralogism.It was such paralogisms that Kant sought to foreclose by delineating the necessary rules of discursive thought: i.e., by the Transcendental Critique.
Even before Labat's Negro poses a logical problem of judgment's misapplication of the order of the "Transcendental Dialectic," The Negro presents a problem of Categorical determination which is of the order of the "Transcendental Analytic," more precisely, the "Transcendental Deduction."Hence it is at these parts of the Critique of Pure Reason, the "Transcendental Analytic," "Dialectic," and "Deduction," that The Negro directs our exploration.As a deduction of the concept The Negro, that exploration is also one into the discursivity of thought, as Kant maps it.Accordingly, what I want to discover is not just what sort of concept The Negro is, but the relationship of that concept to the other concepts of the Understanding in order to determine how The Negro must be thought as negation.I begin with the "Transcendental Deduction."

The Negro's Transcendental Deduction
It has been fully argued elsewhere, by such competent Kant scholars as Dieter Henrich, that what Kant presents under the heading of "deduction" is not a well formed chain of syllogistic proof (Henrich, 47-68).It is instead an action or result of tracing out or setting forth of something in order to arrive at its source: a particular juridical process of methodological derivation, whereby the legal right (quid juris) of certain controversial claims is derived from a detailed narrative account of the genealogies of the claim's origins.There is no need for me, therefore, to recount the involved analysis of the formal structure of the "Transcendental Deduction."/pp 17-18/ It is sufficient to point out here that Kant is quite explicit about his usage of deduction in the sense of an accounting of the genealogy of the Categories of the Understanding, and that this accounting is in the manner and form of what came to be known by the eighteenth century as Deduktionschriften (deduction writing).
In tracing out the source of the Categories Kant is setting out to determine the ultimate basis of knowledge in experience.In the "Transcendental Deduction" he strives to establish that all experience contains underlying a priori concepts of objects in general, which constitute the a priori conditions of experience.The "Transcendental Deduction" has correctly been held to be the most critical chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason (Irwin, 31-56).It is also the most formally confused.That confusion is inextricably connected with its importance to the entire architectonic of Kant's Transcendental Critique.For in the pedantic and elaborate expositions of this chapter is found that which resisted Kant's project the most successfully: his own discourse.The confusing formulation of Kant's argument in "Transcendental Deduction" is the function of three factors, two of which are constant characteristics of Kant's writing, and the third of which is specific to the "Transcendental Deduction," although not peculiar to it.The first constant characteristic is the close rigor with which Kant engages in his project of critique; every argument is to be pursued to its utmost extremes, no matter what the apparent cost to systemic cohesion.This is not to suggest that there is no systemic integrity to the architectonic, indeed there is, but rather that Kant's self imposed prime directive was to work it all out in as full a fashion as possible.
The second constant is his profound honesty in pursuing intellectual activity; Kant's thinking is completely in his writing, so much so that when his line of thought (which for him is always argumentive, i.e., logical) produces aporia or contradiction he does not displace either, but tries to work them out.The result of such working out, however, is not clarity but a considerable degree of obfuscation in words.There is a denseness to the "Transcendental Deduction" that in large part is due to Kant's extraordinary knack for /pp 18-19/ generating terminology in the face of argumentive failure--failure always meant the premature closure of the argument, before arriving at the hoped for conclusion.This brings us to the third factor, which is specific to the "Deduction."The conclusion that Kant worked towards in his "Transcendental Deduction" was the discovery of the transcendental origin of perception in the Understanding, according to its Categories, as the determinate precondition for experience.While succeeding in representing the Understanding as determining the possibility of experience, he failed in establishing the Categories as the transcendental grounds for that determinacy.Instead he exposes a seemingly irresolvable, albeit highly productive, contentiousness between Understanding and Imagination; or more exactly, between the intellectual synthesis of the categories in Understanding and the figurative synthesis of productive Imagination.
The fact that both syntheses are transcendental and are thus situated in the domain of Understanding and not Sensibility indicates Kant's success in establishing that the very possibility of experience is subjectively predetermined.But the fact that every synthesis is a function of Imagination (even though Kant will contradict himself by claiming at an important moment that intellectual synthesis does not involve Imagination) indicates his failure to establish the Categories as the ultimate genesis of cognitive processes.At best he can claim Imagination's heteronomy: the somewhat uncertain subjection of Imagination's two processes of synthesis to the interests of Understanding.This tentative subjection marks the extent to which the discursivity of Imagination (its schemata) is not readily subsumable, not even in the interests of theoretical cognition.
The pertinence all this has for the concept The Negro is found in the incomprehensibility of Imagination's discursivity.Kant states plainly that it is impossible to discover the genesis or even the law of Imagination.According to his own mapping of the architectonic, this means that although Imagination operates in the same territory of experience as Understanding, Nature, it has no domain of knowledge./pp 19-20/ Of course, the concept of dominion and territory Kant takes up more fully in the two introductions to his Critique of Judgment.However, the introductions can be read as Kant's attempts, subsequent to the Critique of Pure Reason, to amend his presentation of Imagination in that text, and so resolve the problems that it poses for the architectonic.Outlining how this problem of dominion emerges in the "Transcendental Deduction" is indeed on the way to determining the logical necessity of The Negro's stupidity, insofar as what is key to both the "Deduction" and The Negro is Kant's account of the genealogy of experience.
There are two different accounts of the genealogy of experience presented in the "Transcendental Deduction.In the one account, the transcendental processes that determine the translating of appearance into experience are grounded ultimately in the domain of Understanding, which legislates through its Categories.In the other account, it is Imagination, through its syntheses, that determines both appearances, and the laws governing their translation into experience; in effect representing Imagination as the determinate faculty for the presentation of Categorical subsumption.In what follows I attempt to trace how these two accounts unfold in relation to two specific problems entailed in translating appearances into experience.Those problems are: (1)how the logical form of all judgments consists in the objective unity of the Apperception of the concepts they contain; and (2)the application of the categories to objects of the senses in general.

The Account of Imagination's Heteronomy: The Logical Form of all Judgments and the Objective Unity of Apperception
According to the "Transcendental Deduction," knowledge of phenomenal appearances is achieved through the logical employment of the Understanding (der logischen Verstandesgebrauche überhaupt).In more exact terms, knowledge is the logical function (der logischen Funktion) of the Understanding in judgments /pp 20-21/ ( Urteilen), where "function" is taken to be the unity of the act of bringing particular appearances under one common conceptual representation (KrV, 90; CPR, 105).This is what is meant when Kant writes: "Judgment is the ability to think the particular as contained in the universal... ([it is] the rule, principle, law)."The Understanding's concepts have a function, which is to provide the laws for judgment.Since concepts (insofar as they do not themselves contain representations of intuition) are never related immediately to any given object in itself, theoretical cognition is the mediated knowledge (mittelbare Erkenntnis) of an object (KrV, 91; CPR, 105).Futhermore, because in every judgment there is a concept that contains many varying representations, judgments are functions of unity among representations (der Einheit unter Vorstellungen) _(KrV, 91; CPR, 106).The only legitimate employment of the concepts of the Understanding in knowledge, then, is to those objects of experience which are only given in intuition as appearances (Erscheinungen).By this employment the objects are thought.
Because the Understanding is a faculty for thinking (ein Vermögen zu denken), and thought is knowledge by means of concepts, all acts of the Understanding are reducible to judgments.The Understanding is thereby represented as being a faculty for judging (ein Vermögen zu urteilen), i.e, logic.In this fashion the logical employment of the Understanding is discoverable when one can "exhaustively represent [ vollständig darstellen]" the functions (the grounding principles of rules) of the unity in judgments (KrV, 91; CPR, 107).It is in that representation that Kant provides his table of Judgments which represents the four functions, as principles, of thinking in judgment after all content of judgment (viz., representation) has been abstracted from it: Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Modality."The Negro is stupid" is a judgment.According to the table of the logical function of the Understanding in judgments, it is quantitatively universal, qualitatively affirmative, and with regard to relation, it is categorical.As to modality, it is apodictic.It should be readily apparent that the two concepts being considered in Kant's judgment of Labat's Negro in his Observations are, "The Negro " and "stupidity."Determining the logical necessity of these two concepts, however, requires the representation of their origin or status in cognition.This too is achieved by way of the "Transcendental Deduction." When the represented functions of unity in judgments are brought to bear on the manifold of a priori sensibility, space and time, which Kant presents in the "Transcendental aesthetic," it becomes possible to demonstrate that the Understanding (as the faculty of the spontaneity of thinking) knows this manifold only through an a priori synthesis.Synthesis means the act of combination in its most general sense: the act of putting appearances together under one transcendental representation in which what is the manifold of sensible intuition is "comprehended [zu begrifen]" under one representation, or appearance (KrV, 96; CPR, 111).
Before appearances can be analyzed they must first be given in an intuition in accordance with the manifold of pure sensibility.It is the synthesis of that heterogeneity in perception which first gives rise to knowledge (Erkenntnis) by gathering the elements for knowledge and uniting them to form a particular perception.Consequently, synthesis lies at the origin of the perception that determines knowledge.However, it is important to note that according to Kant synthesis in general does not originate in the Understanding but is the result of the activity of Imagination (Wirkung der Einbildungskraft).The Imagination is the faculty of cognition which provides the synthesis of the manifold of appearance, enabling perception to occur.Still it is the Understanding which provides the Imagination with its unity.
What Kant calls the Categories (Kategorien) of the Understanding is the function of the Understanding that provides gives unity for both the various representations in judgment and the pure synthesis of various appearances in a perception.His famous table of all the original Categories of synthesis that the Understanding contains is comparable to his table of judgments in its having four classes, each with three moments.[10]By means of the Categories, thought becomes knowledge when the Categories are combined either with each other or with the modes of pure sensibility.This combination is what gives issue to the a priori concepts.The latter are distinct from the Categories as concepts.because, although a priori, they are predicated on, or derivatives of, the Categories.Kant defines this distinction by calling such derivatives "predicable" concepts, and the Categories "pure" concepts.
Kant's explicit contrasting of his use of Categories from Aristotle's is of no small consequence.He reduces Aristotle's ten Categories (substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and affection) down to four on the grounds that five of these were actually modes of pure sensibility, (i.e., time, place, position, state, and substance), and that one, action, was an empirical concept.Of even greater consequence is the fact that whereas in Aristotle's classification of the Categories it is not clear whether the classification is ontological or discursive, Kant.by discovering Categories to be pure a priori representations of the faculty of propositions or judgment (that is the Understanding), establishes them to be wholly discursive.This make all the more significant his claiming that, insofar as the form of thought is concerned, the Categories' objective validity rests on the fact that it is only through them that experience becomes possible.Under these circumstances, the legitimate role of Imagination, as far as the Understanding is concerned, is to provide a priori synthesis in its purity: i.e., that which is based on a priori synthetic unity.This is what Kant calls "intellectual synthesis," which occurs according to the Categories and not representations.What does this mean for the function of Imagination's synthesis in representation?
In bringing the manifold of appearance into the form of a particular image (i.e., transcendental representation), the Imagination apprehends that image by reproducing appearances in a syntactic assemblage of perceptions.Imagination's function is to provide the work of assemblage, a sort of agencement.The French term remarks more readily the extent to which this function of assemblage operates as a kind of indeterminate ( zweitdeutig) agency.As will be seen presently, for Kant, Imagination, unlike Understanding and Reason, has no proper domain in which its rules are delineated.In any event, this activity of apprehension, this agencement, is the function of "reproductive Imagination."It is "reproductive," because it presupposes the impressions of appearance already being given through sensibility, making it wholly empirical (CPR, 144).In order for the architechtonic to succeed (where success means work logically for Understanding), the reproduction of representations cannot occur in any haphazard order.The manifold of phenomenal appearance cannot itself be an object of knowledge: it has no objective reality, because appearance is only in being known.So there must exist in conjunction with apprehension a subjective and empirical ground that, as a function of the Understanding, enables the mind to reinstate (re-present) a preceding perception alongside of another current perception sequentially, generating a series or syntactic relationships of perceptions.Kant calls that subjective/empirical grounding "the association of representations," which is the function of the Understanding according to which a representation connects in the Imagination with one representation in preference to another.That is to say, the apprehension of appearance's heterogeneity in a particular form through Imagination's synthesis cannot in itself produce an image or an assemblage of perception, but must conform to a law of Understanding.
Experience cannot be anything else but the association of the heterogeneity of representations given in the intuition (whether empirical or pure intuition), which is a function of the Understanding as the faculty of knowledge.Yet, because the unity of association is the representation of the synthetic unity of the manifold of phenomenal appearance, the representation of that unity cannot come out of the combination itself, but requires a consciousness of perceptions and their association.Perception is appearance combined with consciousness.Otherwise appearances would only accidentally fit with a connected whole of human knowledge.This would mean that the architectonic would be arbitrary and not necessarily harmonious.In which case, even though there was an association of perceptions, it would be entirely indeterminate: perceptions would only be accidentally associable.Should association not occur, which is possible under indeterminacy, this may very well occasion a heterogeneity of perception in which empirical consciousness would arise, but only in a state of fragmentation or separation without belonging to even a figurative apperception.[11] However, that is not where Kant takes it, because he is, in fact, commited to a logical harmony of the archetectonic.Because the consciousness of perceptions, their apprehension and association are possible only as objects of knowledge, they are, therefore, necessarily ascribed to an original consciousness.Thething is to discover the principle of affinity that grounds consciousness in its unity which is in the Understanding, a priori to the activity of Imagination as far as empirical representations are concerned.And it is affinity, precisely, that is this a priori grounding of consciousness.Affinity designates that "law which constrains us to regard all appearances as sense data that must be associable in themselves and subject to a universal law of assemblage in their reproduction"(CPR 144).The very concept of affinity is made possible by synthetic unity's being added to the representation of the manifold.In this way the capacity to think the unity of diverse concepts in judgment (as Categories) is a necessary condition of association.This means that it is impossible for appearances to be apprehended by Imagination except under the condition of an a priori synthetic unity: the "original synthetic unity of apperception," or the "I think," which is the necessary correlate of all the representations of the heterogeneity of intuition.
The "I think" is an act of spontaneity, and hence is of the Understanding and not Sensibility, prompting Kant to call it pure apperception, and its unity the transcendental unity of apperception (die transszendentale Einheit der Apperzeption).This, of course is also what he designates as a representation of self-consciousness, in order to indicate that it is from the original unity of apperception that the possibility of a priori knowledge arises: "The transcendental unity of apperception is that unity through which all the manifold given in an intuition is united in a concept" (KrV, 119; CPR, 157).It is that unity which, as the necessary correlation of every and all experience, enables synthesis through the concept of the object in general as the correlate of the "I think."The unity of self-consciousness is, thus, implied in the synthesis of representations.The tendency at this moment to read selfconsciousness as a correlate to the Understanding, must be resisted.That is not the case at all.The unity of the "I think" is the Understanding itself, which employs a priori (Categories) that are both representations of the unity of consciousness, and, as such, predicates of the object in general.Thus the Categories provide the unity of the synthesis of the Imagination.For the identity of the subject as the unity of pure apperception does not come about merely through the accompaniment of "I think" with each representation, rather it comes about only insofar as I conjoin the representations, and am conscious of the synthesis of them.Only insofar, therefore, as I can unite a manifold of given representations in one consciousness, is it possible for me to represent to myself the identity of the consciousness throughout these representations (CPR, 153).[12] Accordingly, the objective unity of all empirical consciousness in original apperception is the necessary condition of all possible perception, making the affinity of all appearances a necessary consequence of a synthesis in Imagination, However, that synthesis is not reproductive, it is not determined through empirical representations.The synthesis of Imagination involved with the representation of self-consciousness is a priori; so Imagination in this instance productive.Productive Imagination (produktive Einbildungskraft) is distinct from reproductive Imagination in its not being subject to empirical association.Instead, it aims at nothing except the necessary unity in the synthesis of appearance's heterogeneity, making it the "transcendental function of Imagination"( CPR, 145-56).The affinity of appearances, their association and reproduction according to laws of Understanding, as well as experience itself, are only possible by means of the transcendental function of the productive Imagination.At this juncture Kant is compelled by the movement of his account of Imagination's synthesis in the representation "I think" to seek discovery of Imagination's heteronomy in the interests of Understanding through the account of how productive Imagination works.

The Account of Productive Imagination: The Application of the Categories to Objects of the Senses in General
According to this account, the transcendental function of Imagination contains the pure form of intuition without the synthetic combination of the heterogeneity of appearances (a combination whose source is in the transcendental synthetic unity of apperception).Through the transcendental function of productive Imagination, concepts and intuited objects together make up a unitary experience: viz., the sum total of all possible experience, or the object in general.The heterogeneous processes of Understanding and Sensibility are necessarily connected by the mediation of the transcendental function of the productive Imagination.Empirical experience is constituted by apprehension, reproduction, and recognition of appearances that are representations of sensual intuitions.The movement here is towards exhibiting Nature as the sum of the object in general.Because Kant considers Nature to be the general assemblage and regularity of appearances, he can claim that Nature, as such, is subjectively given: "We ourselves introduce [it] as a concept" (CPR, 144).The unity of Nature is thus a necessary synthetic unity, established a priori in accordance with the Understanding which is both the faculty of thought and rules.The Understanding generates rules, i.e., the Categories, which, when they are objective (dependent upon knowledge of the object), Kant calls laws.These laws determine the submission of appearances to the synthetic unity of Imagination.That is to say that the logical form of all judgments consists in the transcendental unity of the apperception.For a judgment is nothing but the way in which given modes of knowledge are brought to the objective unity of apperception.This is how it can be said that all sensible intuitions are subject to the Categories as conditions under which their heterogeneous appearances can come together in one consciousness (KrV, 121; CPR, 160).Inasmuch as Understanding is conceived of as being this faculty for thinking in which the logical employment of judgments through the Categories gives us the concept of objects in general,[13] Kant logically maintains that the supreme principle of possibility (der oberste Grundsatz der Möglichkeit) of the Understanding is that all the manifold of intuition should be subject to conditions of the original synthetic unity of apperception (KrV, 117).In other words, the heterogeneity of Nature can become an object of knowledge only through the Categories of the Understanding.Thus, Nature as an object of knowledge is only possible in the unity of apperception which is the "transcendental ground of the necessary conforming to the laws of all appearances in one experience" ( CPR, 148).
Hence, Kant can assert that the Categories have no other possible employment than the empirical.Yet in this restricted employment they are not the grounds but the occasion for exhibiting that unity of Nature as having its source in the transcendental unity of apperception.By this, the Categories serve to subsume appearances in intuition to the universal laws of synthesis (KrV, 147; CPR, 186).All human knowledge, then, falls within the bounds of and in the universal relation to possible experience; which is where Kant locates "that transcendental truth that precedes all empirical truth and makes it possible" (KrV, 147; CPR, 186).If all human knowledge must have objective reality and must fall within the limits of possible experience, then it is the possibility of experience determined by the transcendental function of Imagination which gives objective significance to all a priori modes of knowledge.The Categories of the Understanding are mere forms of thinking which cannot on their own yield knowledge of any determinate object.Synthesis of the heterogeneity of appearances in the Categories refers only to the formal unity of apperception.This synthesis is both transcendental and purely figurative (figürlich).
There are, then, two transcendental syntheses with respect to intuition's heterogeneity: the one just mentioned, which is figurative synthesis (synthesis speciosa); and the association of appearances, or intellectual synthesis (synthesis intellectualis).Both are transcendental as the a priori conditions of knowledge.However, figurative synthesis when aimed solely at the transcendental unity of apperception becomes the transcendental synthesis of Imagination (die transzendental Synthesis der Einbildungskraft).
In its figurative capacity, Imagination represents in intuition an object that is not itself present, which is how figurative synthesis comes to be viewed as being an expression of the spontaneity of thought, and therefore determines the form of sense a priori in accordance with the unity of apperception.
Imagination can do this because it is wholly discursive, which means that it is the purely formal assemblage of apprehended appearances according to a transcendental grammar of cognition.In Kant's terms, These latter are the a priori rules of the Categories of Understanding.This is why he also calls Understanding the faculty of rules and judgments (CPR, 147).
The Categories of Understanding, as the transcendental rules of cognition, are the legitimate transcendental grounds for cognition.The way in which they are so can be summarized in the following manner.It is the Categories that determine experience by prescribing laws a priori to the sum total of all appearances, or nature (natura materialiter spectata).The laws of appearance in Nature are held to be in agreement with the Understanding's a priori combination of the manifold as the object in general--viz., the a priori sensible intuitions of space and time.As appearances are themselves necessarily subsumed under these laws in order for there to be perception and experience, it follows that appearances too necessarily agree with the Understanding's a priori combination.Appearances do not exist in themselves but exist only in relation to subjectivity (they appear for some consciousness).So too, the laws of appearance in Nature exist only in relation to subjectivity (and not in appearance).This subjectivity is constituted as the original unity of apperception.Consequently, the original unity of apperception is the determinate grounds for both appearances and the laws of appearance in Nature.The original unity of apperception is only figuratively constituted through the transcendental function of Imagination.
In keeping with all of this, Kant wants to be able to say with regard to appearances in Nature that all possible perception is dependent upon synthesis of apprehension which, as an empirical synthesis, is dependent upon the transcendental synthesis determined by the Categories of Understanding.By which he asserts that all that can come to empirical consciousness, i.e., all appearances of Nature, insofar as concerns their assemblage, is subject to the Categories.Nature then is a predicable concept determined by the Categories.As much as Kant may want to say this, however, he cannot, precisely because of the way that he represents synthesis as being solely a product of Imagination.
The problem with Imagination is twofold.First, there is the problem of Imagination's being a faculty of cognition which is heterogeneous from Understanding.As a consequence, because Understanding has no inherent capacity for synthesis, it is required to make use of that capacity found in Imagination.Then, there is the problem of the exhibition of the transcendental unity of apperception.The pure unity of apperception is exhibited through (an affect of) the transcendental figurative synthesis of Imagination.This is problematical, because the Categories of Understanding have their source in the transcendental unity of apperception.Taking this into account, Nature, as a predicable concept, is a figurative representation.That is to say, Nature as a predicable may be derivative of the Categories, but it is not definitively determined by the Categories.It is in Imagination that the transcendental synthesis enabling experience occurs, and Kant's description of Imagination's subjection to the Understanding's rules in its application of synthesis to appearances (i.e., intellectual synthesis), the heteronomy of Imagination, is tentative at best.This is a point which is well remarked by the indeterminate origin of Imagination, something which I will take up presently in discussing schemata.
In any event, Kant himself proclaimed the outcome of the "Transcendental Deduction" to be the remarking of the complete heterogeneity of thought and knowledge."We cannot think an object except through Categories; we cannot know an object except through intuitions corresponding to the Categories."It is Imagination facilitating that correspondence.This notwithstanding, what Kant's "Transcendental Deduction" makes plain, in spite of its complexity in form, is that the transcendental origin of cognition is irresolvably heterogeneous.There is nothing terribly provocative in this observation.In fact, it recalls Kant's own notion of a common sense of the cognitive faculties manifested in their heteronomous relations.The question is: How is heteronomy achieved?

The Negro is an Idea, or what Kant thinks about the Negro
By the account in the "Transcendental Deduction" of Imagination's heteronomy, the sole employment of the Categories in knowledge is to the objects of experience which are only given in intuition; by this employment the objects are thought.That, of course, is achieved through the subsumption of the objects under the predicable concepts.Kant tells us that in all subsumptions of an object under a predicable concept of Understanding, the appearance (i.e., representation) of that object must be homogeneous with the concept under which it is subsumed: "This in fact is what is meant by the expression, 'an object is contained under a concept' "(KrV, 137; CPR, 180).
Yet, by that same account the Categories of the Understanding are heterogeneous from all sensible intuitions.Because Sensibility and Understanding are heterogeneous from each other, the Categories cannot occur in intuition, nor can empirical intuition (involving the matter of sensation) occur in the Categories.How then is the subsumption of intuition under Categories (i.e., the application of a Category to an appearance) possible?
The only way in which Categories can be applied to appearances is through a mediating process of thought, hence a pure transcendental representation, which is homogeneous with both the Categories and appearances.Kant gives no account of this mediation in the "Transcendental Deduction."That account is found in Book II of the "Transcendental Analytic," "Analytic of Principles" (Analytik der Grundsätze), also entitled "The Transcendental Doctrine of Judgment" (der transszendental Doktrin der Urteilskraft).[14] The "Transcendental Doctrine of Judgment" offers an intermediate representation which, on the one hand is intellectual (void of empirical content), and so homogeneous with the Categories; and, on the other hand, it is sensible, and so homogeneous with appearances.Kant call this mediating representation the transcendental schema (transszendental Schema), designating the formal and pure condition of Sensibility to which the employment of predicable concepts is restricted.In order to function as a mediation between Sensibility and Understanding, the transcendental schema necessarily entails two formally identical but objectively distinct schemata.One is the schemata of those predicable concepts of Understanding (das Schema dieses Verstandesbegriffs) in their application to appearances as products of reproductive Imagination (empirical association).The other schemata is that whose object is not appearances but the Categories of Understanding, according to which thought is constituted.Being determined by a rule of apperception (that unity to which the Categories give expression), the schemata of the Categories are merely pure synthesis (KrV, 143-44; CPR, 182-83).This is not difficult to grasp when we recall that for Kant, "Schemata of the Categories are the true and sole conditions under which the concepts obtain relation to objects and so posses significance [sind die Schemate der reinen Verstandesbegriffe die wahren und einzigen Bedingungen, diesen eine Beziehung auf Objekte, mithin Bedeutung zu verschaffen]" (KrV, 146; my translation).This procedure of Understanding in the schemata is the schematism of pure Understanding (das Schematismus des reinen Verstandes).The schemata of the Categories are transcendental products of Imagination that entail the determination of the pure form of the inner sense (der innerer Sinn) as time.Insofar as a given experience is based on the synthetic unity of appearances according to concepts of an object in general in correlation with the original unity of apperception, then that experience necessarily depends on some a priori principle of form whose objective reality as a necessary condition of experience can always be shown in experience.That experience depends upon universal rules governing the unity of appearances' synthesis which, like the Categories, must be related to objects.The schemata are thus the a priori determination of time in accordance with the rules of the Understanding, divorced from objective appearance.
Because experience is constituted in this way, all experience is determined by the pure inner intuition of association and assemblage, i.e. the schemata of Imagination, in correlation with pure original apperception ("The abiding and unchanging 'I' [das Stehende und bleibend Ich].The schemata are thus nothing but a priori determinations of time in accordance with rules.These rules relate in the order of the categories to the time-series, the timecontent, the time-order, and lastly the scope of time in respect of all possible objects.It is evident, therefore that what the schematism of Understanding effects by means of the transcendental synthesis of Imagination is simply the unity of the manifold of intuition in inner sense, and so indirectly the unity of apperception which as a function corresponds to the receptivity of inner sense (KrV, 146; CPR, 185).
Inner sense is wholly temporal, the a priori sensibility that determines the assemblage of appearance.In this sense, it is discursive; and, insofar as it is temporality that underlies all thinking (viz., the a priori determination for possible cognition), thinking is also discursive.
As a consequence of his analysis of the schemata of pure Understanding, Kant reiterates that the Categories have no other possible employment than the empirical.He does this by restricting the schemata to phenomena.Thus, although the schemata of Sensibility first realize the Categories, they at the same time restrict them, that is, limit them to conditions which lie outside the Understanding, and are due to Sensibility.The schema is, properly, only the phenomenon, or sensible concept, of an object in agreement with the Category.
Ostensibly, this restricting is done so as to limit the Categories to sensible appearances and thus prevent the production of empty concepts which have no sensible condition, and are empty of knowledge.However, Kant's own discourse betrays this, for he writes that the schemata both realize the Categories and limit them at the same time.And it is in time that the purely logical signification of the Categories can be represented.
All that is represented as being restricted, then, is Imagination and the predicable sensible concepts.The latter is restricted to having meaning only when put in relation to appearances; and the former is restricted to the activity of providing the a priori conditions for those appearances in the interests of Understanding.It is in this manner that Understanding is to be realized in time and yet at the same time freed from it: "The Categories, therefore, without schemata are merely functions of the Understanding for concepts; and represent no object."That freedom is highly tentative, becoming jeopardized whenever the Understanding engages empty concepts.Kant will attempt to shore it up with a systematic exposition of all the principles that the Understanding achieves a priori, differentiating between analytic judgments of Understanding (those judgments that relate only to categorical relations and so are merely logical and a priori, and whose governing principle is the principle of contradiction) and synthetic judgments of the Understanding.[15]The greatest danger of the Categories producing empty judgments comes principally from the employment of synthetic judgments.Hence the greatest amount of time spent in the exhibition of the principles of Pure Understanding is spent on synthetic judgments.
The possibility for synthetic judgments lies in the relation between inner sense, Imagination, and apperception.In this relation synthetic a priori judgments are possible, precisely because such judgments require an object in which the synthetic unity can exhibit the objective reality of its concepts.Since only empirical synthesis (i.e., experience) can give objective reality to a priori transcendental synthesis, the latter can only achieve knowledge (i.e., agreement with an object) when it contains only what is necessary for the synthetic unity of experience in general.The conditions of the possibility of experience in general are the conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience.This is why the highest principle of all synthetic judgments is that "every object stands under the necessary conditions of synthetic unity of the manifold of intuition in a possible experience" (CPR, 194).[16]In agreement with this, the a priori principles of form are the laws for the objective employment of the Categories (KrV, 153; CPR, 194).Kant represents these principles in a four headed table : 1)Axioms of intuition, 2)Anticipations of perceptions, 3)Analogies of experience, 4)Postulates of empirical thought in general.[17] In this table, there are three postulates of empirical thought in general: (1)That which agrees with formal conditions of experience, i.e., with the conditions of intuition and concepts is possible; (2)That which is bound up with material conditions of experience, sensation, is actual; and (3)That which is determined in accordance with universal conditions of experience in its connection to the actual is necessary ( KrV, 156; CPR, 196).By Kant's account of things, a concept of the Understanding is empty if it contains a synthesis which does not belong to experience, either as an empirical concept, or as an a priori condition on which experience in general is based.The possibility of a thing cannot be determined from the Category alone, there must always be an intuition in order to exhibit the objective reality of the pure concept.[18]All principles of the pure Understanding are nothing more than a priori principles of the possibility of experience.One of the conclusions Kant draws from "The Transcendental Doctrine of Judgment" is that the proper employment of the Understanding is only to appearances.He terms this its "empirical employment."In that employment, the possibility of all a priori synthetic propositions is based on their being in relation to experience (KrV, 294; CPR, 256).
Relating this to the judgment, "The Negro is stupid," the concept The Negro (which is the subject of the judgment) has no empirical content: The Negro, per se, has no extensive and no intensive magnitude so it does not involve experience.Neither is it subject to any of the three postulates of empirical thought in general.As such, The Negro is an empty concept, a purely formal invention of the mind.That is, it is a concept "the possibility of which is altogether groundless, as [it] cannot be based on experience and its known laws; and without such confirmation [it is an] arbitrary combination of thoughts, which ... can make no claim to objective reality" (KrV, 197; CPR, 241).Plainly put, The Negro is not an objective possibility, there is no way of knowing whether it is objectively real or not.This makes it a problematic concept which can only be thought; it is an effect of discursivity.The question is, how did Kant think about The Negro ?
In asking how Kant thinks about The Negro, we must keep in mind that for Kant thought and knowledge are unquestionably not the same thing.Knowledge entails both the Category through which an object in general is thought, and the intuition through which it is given.As far as thought is concerned, even without any given intuition corresponding to the Category, the Category would still be formally thought.In that case there would simply be no possible knowledge of anything empirical.
The correlation of blackness and The Negro does not provide a positive cognition, because blackness is a phenomenal appearance that is subsumed under empirical concepts, and The Negro is not an empirical concept.The correlation between the two can only be symbolic, i.e., we act as if the concept The Negro was objectively represented in blackness.Yet, this concept will have only a negative value, because no positive cognition of the concept is possible.This is where the conceptual Negro and the Negro who is Labat's informant meet.In order to denigrate Labat's informant, in accordance with the concept The Negro, Kant employs the a priori concept stupidity as though it were capable of being applied to a phenomenal appearance: the blackness of Labat's Negro.According to his own "Transcendental logic," such an employment is illegitimate; it is a transcendental employment.
Transcendental employment is one of the two illegitimate employments of the Understanding which Kant explicates in the Second Division of the "Transcendental Logic," "Transcendental Dialectic."It is in the "Transcendental Dialectic" that he first invokes the third faculty of cognition, Reason, in order to provide a critique of logic's misapplication beyond the limits of experience.[19] We termed Dialectic in general a logic of Appearance [Schein].This does not signify a doctrine of probability [Wahrscheinlichkeit]; for probability is truth, known however on insufficient grounds, and though the information it gives us is imperfect, it is not therefore deceitful.Hence it must not be separated from the analytical part of logic.Still less must phenomenon [Erscheinung] and appearance be held to be identical.For truth or illusory appearance does not reside in the object, in so far as it is intuited, but in the judgement upon the object, in so far as it is thought.It is therefore quite correct to say that the senses do not err ... because they do not judge at all.Hence truth and error, consequently also, illusory appearance as the cause of error, are only to be found in a judgement, that is in the relation of an object to our Understanding ( KrV, 244; CPR, 297).
In defining "Transcendental Dialect" as "a logic of illusionary appearance [Schein]," Kant is describing something altogether distinct from phenomenal appearance [Erscheinung].Illusory appearance does not reside in the intuited object, but in the judgment thought about the object.Here, Kant substitutes philosophy's traditional (ontological) concept of error, as a product in the mind of an external determinism, with that of (logically) false problems and internal illusions.Error is thus defined by Kant as the illusions of thought, as opposed to the failure of sensible apprehension: "the senses do not err... because they do not judge at all."The distinction between phenomenal and illusory appearances is crucial to cognition's form.And here is where Reason plays its part.
Illusionary appearances are an unavoidable effects of cognition, resulting from Reason's continual striving to immediately determine phenomenal materiality.
Up until this point, the exposition of theoretical cognition has focused on only two of the cognitive faculties: Imagination, and Understanding.The former of which schematizes with its synthesis, in order to provide the conditions under which the latter makes judgments with its Categories.Schematism represents the process of Imagination's heteronomy: it provides schemata in the theoretical interests of Understanding.Reason comes into the picture also in terms of its heteronomy: its subjection to the interests of Understanding.In its heteronomy to Understanding, Reason has as its sole object the Understanding and its effective application.Reason arrives at knowledge by means of acts of the Understanding that constitute a series of conditions.
If Categories are applicable to all objects of possible experience, via the synthesis of Imagination, in order for Reason to find a middle term that makes possible the attribution of an a priori Category to all objects, it can no longer look to another Category (not even an a priori one), but must form Ideas that gobeyond the possibility of experience.These Ideas represent the totality of the conditions under which a Category of relation may be attributed to the objects of possible experience, and therefore represent something unconditioned.Reason performs this task both subjectively and objectively.Subjectively, the Ideas of Reason refer to the Categories of Understanding, conferring on them a maximum of both systematic unity and extension.In this way Reason constitutes an ideal foci outside of the phenomenal world towards which the Categories converge.Objectively, Reason introduces a harmony, or finality between the content of phenomena and the Ideas of Reason.That is to say, the content of phenomena correspond to or symbolize the Ideas.Without such symbolism "We should not even have the concept of genus, or indeed any other universal concept, and the Understanding itself which has to do solely with such concepts would be non-existent" (KrV, 447; CPR, 539).
However, the harmony between phenomena and Idea is not necessary, either in the sense of radical empiricism, according to which phenomenal experience determines Ideas; or in the sense of radical Idealism, according to which Ideas determine phenomenal experience.Instead, Kant holds this harmony to be merely postulated or declared.Rather than defining in totality the possibilities of Nature by making Ideas the ultimate source of all knowledge, Kant's Reason presupposes a systematic unity of Nature--which is posed either as a problem or limit--in order to base its moves on this postulated limit at infinity.For Kant, "Everything happens as if."The totality and unity of conditions are not given objectively, but it is objects that allow us to tend towards systematic unity as the highest degree of our knowledge.There is no necessary and determined subjection (of either the content to the Idea or the Idea to the content), we have instead only a correspondence, an indeterminate accord.The object of the Idea is itself indeterminate and problematic.
Accordingly, the Ideas of Reason have three crucial aspects: (1)they are indeterminate in their object; (2)determinable by analogy with the objects of experience; and (3)they bear the ideal of an infinite determination in relation to the Categories of the Understanding.[20] The Ideas of Reason provide us with Categorical classes.The resulting relationship between the three faculties of cognition in the Critique of Pure Reason is such that the role of Understanding is to legislate and judge syntheses and schemata (in accordance with the Categories), the role of Imagination is to synthesize and provide schemata, and the role of Reason is to reason and symbolize in such a way that knowledge has a maximum of systematic unity.This relation constitutes the famous sensus communis logicus, or the common sense of the faculties in the theoretical interests of Reason.
Illusion occurs when Understanding or Reason are illegitimately employed.In the instance of transcendental employment, Understanding presupposes that it abstracts itself from its relation to the Imagination: it seeks to circumvent Imagination's synthesis and gain direct access to things-inthemselves.It does this however due to Reason's Idea of unity.Reason provokes Understanding to this presupposition because the Idea of unity occasions an illusion of a positive domain to conquer outside experience.This latter illusion constitutes the transcendent employment of Reason.In the transcendent illusion, instead of applying itself to the Categories of the Understanding (which is its "immanent or regulative employment"), Reason claims to be directly applicable to objects, and seeks to legislate in the domain of knowledge.Reason tries to have determinate knowledge of something by determining an object rather than a Category.It remains to be determined how it is that the judgment, "The Negro is stupid " is a transcendental illusion.

"The Negro is Black and so Necessarily Stupid": Why Kant can't even Think He Knows What He is Talking About.
In light of the preceding account of the "Transcendental Analytic," Kant is fully capable of holding the conceptual Negro as representing that which is inherently unintelligent, semi-human and beast like, etc. Provided that when he expresses this concept with the designation, "Negro" (Neger), that designation is not a class term (as this would invalidate all class terms, something Kant does not do), but rather a deduction from the class term "Humanity," and thus equally constructed as a class.This he does with his designation of "the Negroes of Africa" (Die Negers von Afrika ), who are a derivative class of Humanity.
How does Kant discursively designate the conceptual Negro as a positive given class, "Negro," which is subsumable to the empirical concepts of cognition, when the concept Negro can only be a negative representation?Kant has a class idea: "Humanity [as an idea] in its complete perfection contains [...] all the essential qualities which belong to human nature and our concept of it [and] everything [...] required for the complete determination of the idea [of perfect humanity]" (CPR, 485-6).[21] The essential qualities that Kant lists are that humans are both phenomenal appearances, and purely intellectual beings: Man ... who knows all the rest of nature solely through the senses knows himself also through mere [bloße] apperception; ... Thus, he is to himself, on the one hand, phenomenon; and, on the other hand, with respect to [the faculties of Understanding and Reason] ... which cannot be ascribed to the receptivity of sensibility, [he is] merely [bloß] an intelligible object.(KrV, 382; my translation) Humanity as the class of intelligible beings is noumenal, and hence colorless.Now, for Kant the designation, "Negro," is a human designation, which is why it appears in the Observations as an example of how the feelings of the beautiful and sublime vary according to national characteristics.Thus, as a concept The Negro is determined by the Idea of "Humanity" which, as far as its phenomenal traits are concerned, is colorless.But as a designated class of humans, "Negro," as far as phenomenal traits are concerned, is the class of colorless men with color added.As far as being intelligible objects, "Negro" is the class of stupid men.This distinction is what makes Negro, as a class, thinkable by synthesis of conceptual traits (phenomenal men + evil + souls).It is also what makes Negro, as a class, a transcendental illusion of the order of the djin of Ras-Sem.Kant writes on these djin in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View: The offenses (vitia) of Imagination consist in inventions that are either merely unbridled or downright lawless ( effrenis aut perversa).Lawless inventions are the worst fault.Unbridled inventions could still find their place in a possible world (the world of fable); but lawless inventions have no place in any world at all, because they are self-contradictory.Images of the first kind--that is, of unbridled Imagination--explain the dread with which Arabs regard the stone figures of humans and animals that are often found in the Libyan desert of Ras-sem.They think these figures are men petrified by a curse.But these same Arabs' belief that on the day of universal resurrection these statutes of animals will growl at the artist, and reproach him for having made them without being able to give them souls, is a contradiction.Unbridled fantasy can always be bent [to the artist's end... .]But lawless fantasy comes close to madness (Kant, APPV, 56).[22] Put more syllogistically, Kant has a concept of the universal class of Man whose essential traits are being both phenomenal and intelligible.As an intelligible object Man is unknowable to himself except as the correlate of all conceptions in general, including transcendental conceptions.This correlate is self-consciousness or "I think" which designates nothing more than the transcendental unity of apperception or self-consciousness (der transzendentale Einheit der Apperzeption) that makes all transcendental conceptions possible.
The proposition "I think" is understood therefore to be problematic.Not because it contains a perception of an existence (like the Cartesian Cogito, ergo sum), but because of the impossibility of discovering objectively any of the properties that may be inferred from the proposition and predicated of its syntactic subject: "I."If it were otherwise, if at the foundation of our pure rational cognition of thinking beings there lay more than the mere apperception, something which could be represented as a phenomenal appearance, then Kant would have been compelled to accept an empirical psychology.Which in his case would be a kind of behavioralist explication of the internal sense.
The analysis, then, of consciousness of "I " in thought in general [im Denken überhaupt] yields nothing whatsoever towards a synthetic judgment or knowledge of "I."When it is claimed that consciousness of "I " does in fact support such a judgment or yield such a knowledge, then the logical exposition of thought in general [Die logische Erörterung des Denkes überhaupt ] has been mistaken for an object's metaphysical determination.That is the expression of a paralogism.Kant is quite specific on this point.
It would then follow that a priori synthetic propositions are possible and admissible, not only, as we have asserted, in relation to objects of possible experience, and indeed as principles of the possibility of this experience, but that they are applicable to things in general and to things in themselves--a result that would make an end of our whole critique, and would constrain us to acquiesce in the old-time procedure (CPR, 370-71 ).[23] Nothing more is represented by the "I ", "He," or "It" who or which thinks than a transcendental subject of thought=x.Consciousness in itself is not so much a representation distinguishing a particular object, as a form of representation in general.Nor can any representation of a thinking being be achieved through example, i.e., by means of external experience.It can only be achieved through self-consciousness; which is why Kant maintains that the apodictic judgment, "everything which thinks is constituted as the voice of my consciousness declares it to be, that is, as a self-conscious being," is founded on analogy and not an empirical judgment.
Analogy involves using the form of transcendental judgment, in this instance the judgment of apperception, to provide a judgment of something that is beyond experience and so cannot be validated: it cannot be known, per se.To assert judgments about other cogitating beings, whether the judgment is positive or negative, is in the fact nothing more than the a priori transference of the properties which constitute the conditions under which "I" cogitates to other beings, thereby achieving a representation by analogy.To assert, therefore, a synthetic judgment of "I," to wit, "I am essentially stupid," is a paralogism.And by analogy so is the apodictic judgment, " The Negro is stupid."This in itself is not problematical, being no more than an instance of what Kant terms the offense (vitia ) of unbridled Imagination, which is when Imagination, much like Understanding in Transcendental Illusion, exceeds its limits in its schemata.
It follows, then, that "The Negro is stupid" is an a priori synthetic judgment, relying wholly on the Imagination's capacity for transcendental schemata.While this makes it a problematic judgment according to the table of judgments, it does not in itself make it problematical for the architectonic.
What is problematical lies in the difference between the inventions of unbridled Imagination and lawless Imagination (effrenis aut perversa ).It is one thing for the Libyans to fear the stones of Ras-Sem because of imagined djin.It is altogether something else to convince themselves that these djin are in fact in the world.Kant finds the latter to be the most dangerous because Imagination's lawless inventions are self-contradictory.Kant's second apodictic judgment regarding Labat's carpenter, "blackness is a clear proof of stupidity," is of this order.
The contradiction lies in the relation between the concept The Negro and blackness.It is already established that the designation "Negro" is deduced from the class of Man as being both phenomenal and intelligible; and that as an intelligible object Man is colorless or white.We have also seen that Kant commits a paralogism when he gives a synthetic judgment of the intelligible.These are straight forward judgments that adhere to the discursive logic of Kant's critique.But they do not yield, according to the laws of Understanding, the judgment "blackness is a clear proof of stupidity."How then does Kant gain this assertion?
Recall that Kant equates stupidity with blackness, and blackness with the designation "Negro."And he does so in an apodeictic way: There are stupid men, all stupid men form a class, that class is black and called "Negro."Kant has deduced from that universal class of colorless Man a class of men with color.In so doing he has convinced himself that the Negro is a class of men in the world.The definitive feature of the Negro, then, is that they are men who are black and stupid.Here is where the conceptual Negro, the Negro who is Labat's informant, and the class "Negro" meet.And in that meeting they constitute just the sort of sophism masquerading as knowledge which Kant sought to expose.
Of the three kinds of sophisms that Kant traces to the illusions of Reason in the "Transcendental Dialectic," the one that has the greatest pertinence for the assertion, "blackness is a clear proof of stupidity," is the transcendental paralogism.Kant's assertion about Labat's Negro indeed results from Reason's striving to immediately determine phenomenal materiality, and consequently driving the Understanding to take a concept, The Negro, which in fact has no determinate object (i.e., no objective reality), as being objectively verifiable.To compound matters, in the judgment of Negroes being by nature trifling, the Understanding claims to know objectively precisely what it can never know in this way: the thinking of others.To claim.therefore, predicable knowledge of both the conceptual Negro and the thinking of the Negro as a class of men is to engage in illusionary knowledge.This is how the Negro problem is a paralogism.
The Transcendental Critique as a whole aims to exorcise the adverse effects of such illusions as this on the possibilities of knowledge; but, because they inevitably result from the very nature of Reason, their formulation in the process of theoretical knowledge cannot be prevented.On this Kant writes: Now the transcendental (subjective) reality at least of the categories of Reason rests upon the fact that we are lead to such ideas by a necessary procedure of reason.There must therefore be syllogisms which contain no empirical premises, and by means of which we conclude from something that we do know, to something of which we do not even possess a conception, to which we, nevertheless, by an unavoidable illusion, ascribe objective reality.Such arguments are, as regards their result, rather to be termed sophisms than syllogisms, although indeed, as regards their origin, they are very well entitled to the latter name, inasmuch as they are not fictions or accidental products of reason, but are necessitated by its very nature.They are sophisms, not of men, but of pure reason herself, from which the wisest cannot free himself (KrV, 287; CPR, 327).
Inasmuch as Kant's definition of illusion concerns questions of exterior referentiality, it provides examples through which transcendental philosophy can realize its concepts and judgments.And, insofar as the latter gives the form of thought--i.e., the field of possibility which gives sense and meaning to those representations--their relation, one to the other, is the enabling condition for the translating of appearances into experience.This is where the Negro takes Kant, and us along with him, to this relation which amounts to the correlation of apperception with the object in general; and that correlation amounts to no /more than the synthesis of the reflective operation of Transcendental Critique.Reality is thought and experienced spontaneously, but the two operations are so heterogeneous to each other that a determinate heteronomy of Imagination is foreclosed by the persistence of Imagination's indeterminate genealogy, its lawlessness.Kant seeks to resolve this indeterminacy through its proper designation.

Designating Indeterminacy
In " The Transcendental Doctrine of Judgment" Kant calls the procedure of Understanding in the schemata the schematism of pure Understanding (das Schematismus des reinen Verstandes).This designation is of considerable significance, occurring at the close of a rather abruptly introduced description of how the transcendental schema mediates between the Categories and appearances.The particular device of that description, time, is more than merely heuristic, it is the very pure condition of sensibility that is designated as schema.On the basis of the account given in the "Transcendental Deduction," Kant asserts that, Time, as the formal condition of the manifold of inner sense, and therefore of the connection [assemblage] of all representations, contains an a priori manifold in pure intuition.Now a transcendental determination of time is so far homogeneous with the Category, which constitutes its unity, in that it is universal and rests upon an a priori rule.But on the other hand, it is so far homogeneous with appearance, in that time is contained in every empirical representation of the manifold.Thus an application of the Category to appearances becomes possible by means of the transcendental determination of time, which as the schema of the concepts of Understanding, mediates the subsumption of the appearances under the Category (KrV, 142; CPR, 181).
Kant further recalls the "Transcendental Deduction's" account of how a priori concepts only have meaning in conjunction with intuition, which can only be presented as appearances, and that the former of the two necessarily contains the formal conditions of inner sense, i.e., time.So when he states that it is the formal conditions of the inner sense which constitutes "the universal condition under which alone the Category can be applied to any object," which is the schema, he is saying that the schema is time.Kant disabuses us in short order of any illusion that this schema resolves the problem of the "Transcendental Deduction" by proclaiming that: "The schema is in itself always a product of Imagination" (KrV, 143; CPR, 182).And there can be no doubt that it is productive Imagination, because the schema is distinct from the appearances, which are also arrived at through Imagination's synthesis being aimed at the unity in the determination of sensibility.
Appearances are products of reproductive Imagination (empirical association); schema of sensible concepts, on the other hand, are products of transcendental, productive Imagination.
It is through the schemata, as the representations of the universal procedure of Imagination, that an appearance is provided for a concept.It is also by way of them that the appearances are subsumed under the Categories.Indeed, Kant claims that "it is schemata, not appearances, which underlie our pure sensible concepts" (KrV, 143; CPR, 182).Because appearances in themselves cannot be immediately adequate even to predicable sensible concepts, what the latter is in immediate relation to, "as a rule for the determination of our intuition," is the schema of Imagination.
Here again, Kant strives to give the Understanding the upper hand in its relationship with Imagination, by representing the Categories of Understanding, from which predicable concepts derive, as the source for the determinate laws of theoretical cognition.Nonetheless he is frustrated in this effort by the diligence of his own argument.For not only are schemata temporal determinations which immediately correspond to the Categories everywhere and at all times, but, in its application to appearances and their mere form (the synthesis of Imagination) is "an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to open to our gaze."[24] All we can assert is that: the appearance is a product of the empirical faculty of reproductive Imagination; the schema of sensible concepts ... is a product and, as it were, a monogram [ein Monogramm], of pure a priori Imagination, in accordance with which appearances themselves first become possible (KrV, 143-44; CPR, 183).This uncharacteristic outburst on Kant's part might be excused in light of the almost palpable degree of frustration reached after literally hundreds of pages of rigorous effort and close argumentation.Not only does the problem of Imagination's indeterminacy seem hopelessly irresolvable, but it becomes intractable, firmly situating itself at the base of theoretical cognition.Even this it does not do in any exact and clear cut way that might be totally comprehensible to Understanding.Instead, it is as an enigmatic sketch, a monogram.The appeal to Nature is indeed figurative; Imagination, like Nature, cannot in itself be positively represented.This has severe repercussions for the architectonic, which seems to flounder on this enigma.Kant's capacity for marshalling terminology to engage even the most intractable of enigmas is superb.In calling Imagination a monogram he can justifiably bracket the problem of its indeterminacy by acknowledging it; yet in that acknowledgment he does not bind the transcendental project over to Imagination.The German Monogramm, like the English monogram, derives from the late Latin, monogramma, which is irregularly formed after the late Greek monogrammon, a conflation of monos=single + gramma= letter.Both the late Latin and Greek referred to the signature of the Byzantine emperors.In this sense Imagination is grammatic representation.
It is not this sense of monogram however that justifies the bracketing of Imagination.In addition to the late Latin monogramma, there is a classical Latin adjectival form, monogrammus, which is the translation of the Greek adjective monogrammos, a conflation of monos=single + grammé=line.Cicero attributed this term to Epicurus, who used it to mean "unsubstantial" as a description of the gods.Subsequently, Lucilius used it to mean a thin colorless person, or a mere shadow.And Nonius took it in this fashion to indicate a line picture or sketch which is done without any color.
Kant uses monogram both in the sense of monogramma and monogrammus to mean an enigmatic unsubstantial outline sketch of the formal (grammatic) principles by which Imagination determines experience.
Of course a glance at the text will make it plain that grammatically his usage leans heaviest towards monogramma.But there is still another sense in which he employs grammatic, an employment so obvious that its not being readily grasped is perhaps best attributed to our over investment in the philosophical theory of language which requires that the graphic medium of exhibition (i.e., writing) be transparently clear so as not to obfuscate the argument and overburden the reader.
However, when reading Kant we constantly stumble upon such obfuscation, due to the density of his narrative style and his predilection for terminological coinage and syntactic complexity.That is exactly the other sense in which he employs monogram; the enigma of Imagination's schemata is narrative, it is the syntactic principles for the assemblage of appearance, the very conditions for a priori sensibility which is designated by schema as the inner sense.Still, while it is possible to positively represent the Categories of Understanding as the source for the laws that determine empirical synthesis (i.e., experience), the laws by which that representation is itself possible (the transcendental synthesis of Imagination's schemata) remain indeterminate, "lost in the depths of the human soul."What is discovered in the genealogy of theoretical cognition is not the uncontested legislation of Understanding, with Imagination's attendant heteronomy, but rather a contentious relationship between Understanding and Imagination; and that contention is insoluble because the domain of Imagination's principles cannot be determined by Understanding.
At stake in the enigma of Imagination is not so much a theory of language as a theory of discursivity.Entailed in Kant's implicit theory of discursivity is a concept that the origins of discourse's grammatics cannot be determined and cannot be subsumed under a subjective consciousness.Nor can they be discovered in a positive teleology of Nature; the latter, as Kant himself points out in his Critique of Judgment, is also an effect of a contentious relationship, this time between Imagination and Reason.Kant's apodictic judgment about Labat's Negro draws our attention to precisely how Imagination's lawlessness focuses on the inability of thought's discursive processes to make language refer either objectively or subjectively to the there and then of a "given state of Affairs."This discursivity, theoretical or speculative thinking, in its turn, would explicate by presenting representation as the inaugural act of reference in which all other forms of reference are grounded.The explicit task of theoretical thinking is to emancipate thought from the obscuring effects of dogma, by becoming itself an aesthetic moment grounded in the possibilities of representation.
However, it is a task for which theory is not adequate, because of The Imagination's seemingly willful indeterminacy.It is the appearance of a willfulness whose source is not in Understanding that leads Kant to recognize Imagination's heteronomy to be not in the interests of Understanding but those of Reason.At this point Kant discovers that there is an immense gulf between the domain of the concept of Nature (i.e., theoretical cognition, whose legislating faculty is Understanding) and the domain of the concept of Freedom, (i.e., practical cognition, whose legislating faculty is Reason).Yet, while theory cannot influence or determine Freedom, the sensible the supersensible, Freedom does influence and determine theory: "[T]he concept of Freedom is to actualize in the world of sense the purpose enjoined by its laws."The question is what is the basis for this uniting of the supersensible with the sensible?How are the Ideas of Reason realized when they have no attendant object of intuition?As a rule, English language Kant scholarship has located the address of these issues, which emerge from the Critique of Pure Reason, in the Critique of Judgment, albeit they are more often than not discussed in terms of Kant's need to determine a substance basis for morality.In this regard, Kant's third Critique is looked to as the mediating moment, the mittelglied, between theoretical thinking about phenomena (espoused in the Critique of Pure Reason), and the supersensible, or noumena of apperception whose unity is found in the ideas of Reason (Critique of Practical Reason).It is the text where the negativity of the supersensible field of Nature occasions the exhibition of the act through which the relationship of the particular to the universal is established: the examination of judgment in its pure disinterested operation.Kant himself suggests this regard when he proposes the Critique of Judgment as the Verbindungsmittel, "the mediating connection," between not only the two domains of philosophy, theoretical and practical cognition, but also between phenomena and noumena, the sensible and supersensible (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 244; Critique of Judgment, 15).[25] The paramount question of the Critique of Judgment is thus held to be: What is the nature of judgment's rational exhibition?In Kant's formulation: How are a priori aesthetic judgments possible?
In order to address this question, Kant distinguishes between two forms of synthetic judgment: determinative and reflective.If the universal under which the particular is to be subsumed is already known, as the a priori condition under which the subsumption of the particular is possible, then it is determinative.If the particular is given without the universal under which it is to be subsumed as being known, then the judgment is reflective.
Determinative judgment is always subsuming and theoretical, operating according to already designated a priori laws dealing with the possibility of Nature as an object of sense.Yet determinative judgment is confronted constantly with a problem of field: in the face of Nature's vast heterogeneity, determinative judgment has limits.Nature's heterogeneity means that there are possibilities of Nature that are undetermined by the designated a priori laws.This is a critical problem if we, like Kant, maintain that the laws of theory are empirical and thus contingent and define law as that which entails a necessity grounded in a principle of unity.In other words, judgment is based on the very homogeneity of function which Imagination's indeterminacy foreclosed on.So when determinative judgment confronts a particular (appearance) of Nature which is not subsumable under any of its already designated a priori principles (i.e., the concept of Nature and the concept of Freedom), it has met a resistance that it cannot overcome theoretically.A particular portion of the legitimate territory of its domain resists its dominion.
Kant strives to overcome this resistance through reflective judgment which, in moving from the particular towards the universal, requires a transcendental principle or law that cannot be gotten from experience, precisely because it is to be the basis of the unity of experience.It is reflective judgment's capacity to exhibit this transcendental law only to itself, while not prescribing it to Nature, that makes it reflective, because reflection on the laws of Nature is prompted by the negativity of Nature as supersensible.If the law were derived from nature as a positive experience (i.e., empirical representation) then the judgment would be determinative, because such representation requires the universal principle's already being known.
Reflective judgment overcomes resistance by exhibiting for reflection the very conditions of conceptualization.The essential condition for conceptualization is that the concept entails the basis for the object's objective actuality (the object's having significance), which Kant calls the object's purpose.
Accordingly, judgment's principle concerning the form that things of nature have in terms of empirical laws in general is the purposiveness of nature in its heterogeneity[... T]hrough this concept we represent nature as if an Understanding contained the basis of the unity of that which is heterogeneous in nature's empirical laws ( KU, 249; CJ, 20).
What Kant calls here the purposiveness of the object's form is exactly what he called schemata of Imagination in the Critique of Pure Reason.So he is talking about Imagination when he goes on to say that the formal purposiveness of Nature as the a priori concept that functions as the law of reflective judgment is a transcendental and not a physical principle because it has its origins solely in reflective judgment itself, and has no objective or theoretical purposiveness.It is Imagination that is not a metaphysical principle, because it is not concerned with thinking the a priori conditions under which an object (the concept of which must be empirically given) is determined a priori by way of example.Thinking metaphysical principles requires empirical concepts.The concept of the formal purposiveness of Nature, on the other hand, is concerned with objects only in terms of the pure concept of the possible objects of cognition in general, and contains no empirical representation at all.Thus, the formal purposiveness of Nature is a transcendental principle found only in the reflective judgment's movement from particular towards universal, and is deduced from Imaginations' lawlessness.Reflective judgment must only exhibit this movement from towards; were it to achieve the universal under which the particular could then be subsumed it would become determinative.
The focus of the Critique of Judgment is on this movement as the exhibition of judgment's acting without any theoretical or practical knowledge.For Kant, it is with those judgments dealing with the feelings of pain and pleasure, aesthetic judgments, that this exhibition is found in its pure form.This is because the experience of the Beauty and the Sublime has no objective purpose: what is experienced is not an object that can be subsumed under a concept, but a form of experience that cannot be subsumed under a concept.In judging things to be beautiful and sublime, we cannot objectively know what we are talking about.By that same token, when Kant speaks about the Negro he cannot possibly know what he is talking about.This notwithstanding, he has his thoughts about The Negro and declares them quite readily.This is a problem of definition; and according to Kant's "Architechtonic of Pure Reason," defining something "really only means to present the complete, original concept of [that] thing within the limits of its concept" (CPR, 586).[26] By completeness Kant means clearness and sufficiency of characteristics; by limits he means the precision with which characteristics superfluous to the complete concept are excluded; and by original he means that these limits are derived solely from the complete concept, to the exclusion of all other sources, in which case the concept is self-evident, requiring no proof or example (KrV, 493, fn).Clearly then, very little can be defined, per se.Because the characteristics represented in empirical concepts cannot possibly be complete, which can produce a confusion of reference: they cannot be defined but only made explicit.[27] That is to say that certain characteristics are emphasized in order to make distinctions, which guarantees that the concept's limits are never sure.
The means by which such emphasis is achieved is word designation (Wortbestimmung) in which what is called definition is nothing but the association of a word with the thing.For similar reasons of confusion in reference, a priori concepts cannot be defined either.This time the confusion is due to the probable nature of any concept because the indeterminacy of Imagination's synthesis prevents it from being apodictically certain.
So Kant refers to their exposition (Exposition), rather than their definition.Nor can arbitrarily presented concepts be defined, because due to their being arbitrary there can be no definitive determination of their objective possibility.The definition of such concepts is better considered as their explication (Explikation) or declaration (Deklaration).The only concept that allows definition is one which contains an arbitrary synthesis admitting an a priori construction, i.e., a concept which is completely homogeneous with its representation: Axioms.And insofar as Kant finds Axioms only in mathematics, it is only in mathematical knowledge that definition is possible.Philosophy can have no definitions, per se.
What does this mean for the four to five hundred or so pages of categorical definitions which Kant has provided in the Critique of Pure Reason up until this point?Kant tells us that they have in fact been Erklärung: The German language has for the terms exposition, explication, declaration, and definition only one word Erklärung, and we need not be so strict in the requirements [of language] as to altogether deny philosophical Erklärung the honorable title, definition.We shall confine ourselves simply to remarking that ... philosophical definitions are never more than expositions of given concepts (CPR, 587).[28] What is Kant telling us with all of this?
In effect, he has given an exposition of how the indeterminacy of Imagination precludes any definitive determination of cognition's genealogy in its being only uncertainly heteronomous to Understanding.Every designation, every association and reproduction is finally probabilistic.This does not mean, however, that the definition of the Transcendental Philosophy is not possible; it only means that its necessity is theoretical.Indeed, this indeterminacy is its necessity.
The way in which Kant effects this recuperation of indeterminacy in the interests of theoretical knowledge is remarkable.He engages a Wortbestimmung, he designates a word, Erklärung, as comprehending the entirety of indeterminacy.Wortbestimmung, then, is the process of generating a discursive economy in which the indeterminacy of referentiality (that which cannot be subject to thought) is come to terms with.In other words, in talking one cannot help but to know what one is talking about, because talking is the very possibility of cognition.Or, in the more precise kantian terminology at stake here, discursivity enables thought.
As long as Kant can keep on writing, there is hope for the success of the Transcendental Critique's project: defining the universally necessary architectonic of cognition by which the perfection of humanity will be realized.By that same token, as the paralogism of the Negro demonstrates, the more he writes in order to come to terms with indeterminacy the more indeterminacy confronts him, manifested in the mysterious genealogy of Imagination's schemata.Always before him, Imagination's lawlessness assures the futility of the project.The play of Wortbestimmung by which Erklärung is claimed as the mode for outlining the hypotyposis of representation discovers the possibilities of cognition to be determined by the possibilities of referentiality inherent in narrative structures--i.e., discursive economies .Or, as Kant would have it, through Wortbestimmung the history of Reason is delineated.In these terms, to say that Kant's architectonic engenders a realignment of metaphysics into a new organization of knowledge as anthropology--which attempts to trace the primary site of inscription (the genealogy of knowledge) in order to comprehend difference in the experiencing of materiality--is to suggest that anthropology is the science of transcribing the phenomenal materiality of experience according to an a priori discursive logic of development.Put differently, the subject of the architectonic is that which violates the limits of, is beyond, thought, yet somehow essential to thinking.
Although the subject of anthropology cannot be given in thought--it cannot be defined either phenomenologically or theoretically--its phenomenological and theoretical effects are certain in Imagination's schematizing.The resulting schemata is that of a theoreticallly determinable modality of meaning-production (thinking), which is dependent on discursive properties that stand beyond any subjectivity and so are not intentional.This indeterminacy of Imagination is realized , for Kant, in the inability to definitively express thinking in language.Yet, there is something about the specific signifying practice in which he is engaged that enables him to give an account of indeterminancy which still allow for at least a hypothetical grounding of meaning.In Kant's case this signifying practice entails an assemblage of the diverse discourses of methaphysics, natural philosophy, law, etc., expressed in one mode of communication: writing.It is the flow of writing, its structural capacity for nigh on perpetual word-play (designation), for modifying its field of reference, that both allows for this account of indeterminacy, and is a working of indeterminacy.Nor is this indeterminacy some kind of mystery, or secret; it is linguistic structures, the play of linguistic tensions, linguistic events that occur, possibilities which are inherent in language's capacity for word-designation.All of which are independent of any intent or desire to mean.Indeterminacy proves to be nothing more or less than how the very process of signification (the signifying-practice) indexes that aspect of its historical situation which, as such, is not made by us as historical beings (de Man, 87).It is inhuman.Not that linguistic structures, tensions, and events are mysterious things--in the sense of being a locus of agency beyond the human and language--they are not.What they are is "eminently discursive," So discursive in fact that they uncover the illegitimacy of the rapport between the human and nature.This fundamental non-human character of linguistic referentiality encompasses a fundamental non-definition of the human, it does so because what the word "human" refers to is something all together other than this indeterminate discursivity.
There is still a tendency in Kant scholarship to discover a theoretical determination for this inhumanity in the Critique of Judgment, where Kant shifts consideration from the problem of apprehension engendered by the "Analytic of the Mathematical sublime" to terms of resistance entailed in the "Dynamic Sublime." If indeterminate discursivity is connected with Kant's conception of the mathematical and dynamical aspects of human cognition, then the inhumanness of referentiality would be represented as a mathematical concept.It would become a problem of apprehension, of the inability of the transcendental subject (the transcendental unity of apperception) to comprehend its genesis in the discursivity of thought.In that case we might be inclined to regard the word inhuman as a periphrasis, a singular noun, substituted for a series of failed apprehensions.
Yet even though it might very well be periphrasis, the inhumanity of the Negro is neither Beautiful nor Sublime.Rather, the lesson that can be gleaned from Kant's Negro problem is fourfold: (1) all humans necessarily synthesize perceptions; (2) those perceptions do not have any inherent or immediate meaning; (3) meaning is ascribed to those perceptions by an arbitrary act of attribution; and (4) this act of attribution is realized in the syntax of judgments or propositions (i.e., sentences) which unites the synthesized perceptions with meaning as if (als ob) the two were of the same order.In other words, Kant saw, after some work, that the two operations (synthesis of perceptions, and attribution of meaning) are heterogeneous to each other and only the fundamentally indeterminate designation/signification of language makes them coexist.
The Negro problem affords us a glimpse at the inhuman in linguistic referentiality precisely because of the inability of any phenomenology of language, or of a poetics which would be in any sense a phenomenology of language, to subsume it under one of the concepts of the familiar philosophical formulations.Or more precisely, what is at stake in the Negro problem is the historiography of ideas that distinguishes between the legitimate concerns of philosophy's formulations and those of semiotics.This is why I have expressed the problem of what is unrepresentable about the Negro in an admittedly clumsy and involved formulation that, by all proper accounts, inappropriately juxtaposes the problems of linguistic referentiality and phenomenal intentionality.
[7] Only three of these four /pp 21-22/ functions of judgment constitute the content of a judgment, and they are quantity, quality, and relation.[8]The fourth, /pp 22-23/ modality, does not contribute to the content of judgment, but concerns only the value of the copula in relation to thought in general.[9]