Kant on Synthesis

It is a well-worn theme that Kant’s Deduction is a difficult, dense piece of work. There isn’t an easy entry point nor a set of abstractable ideas which will reveal the secret at the heart of it. Modern-day philosophers without a sense of patience for the text will easily find problems in its reasoning, or will impose their own foreign contemporary frame of mind on it to come to grips with it. We have seen this happening a lot recently with the so-called nonconceptualism debate in relation to Kant (I plead guilty!). That debate seemed fruitful in terms of its sheer quantity, but the effective result looks more like an entrenched warfare between two opposite factions that both claim Kant as their source; surely an indication that the framing of Kant as either a conceptualist or nonconceptualist might in the end not be so appropriate.

This is part of the fateful approach in contemporary (largely anglophone) Kant studies, with the gamut of academic papers shortsightedly dealing with the Deduction (as with Kant in general) in piecemeal fashion, as if we were dealing, in the case of the Critique, with an encyclopædia of ideas in the way of the German rationalists: ‘Kant’s theory of imagination’, ‘Kant’s theory of mind’, ‘Kant’s theory of the soul’ etc. etc. Churning out papers along these lines makes nice fodder for quotation rates and getting higher up the greasy pole of academia, but it doesn’t serve a proper understanding of Kant’s arguments. We need to get back to the more holistic approaches of earlier commentators. We need to start reading the text again, integrally, instead of using the text—which is what often happens in contemporary Kant scholarship—for the purpose of scaffolding one’s own theory about what Kant’s alleged theory of thus and so is supposed to be.

Having said that, it is useful, while keeping in mind the holistic approach, to concentrate on a common theme in Kant’s text, which it will turn out is the quintessential element of his novel ‘way of thinking’, as he himself put it in preface of the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. This common theme is the idea of synthesis, which is what holds together, and is the entryway to, all the other familiar aspects of Kant’s thought: his concept of self-consciousness or how mind is involved in cognition, his ideas about the role of the imagination, his theory of knowledge and his metaphysics of experience, and not unimportantly, its relation to what is probably the most Kantian element here: the categories of the understanding as the first principles of knowledge. But the meaning of synthesis and its role in its various facets, though frequently the subject of discussion in papers and monographs alike, is hardly understood in contemporary Kant scholarship. Most readings of the text of the Deduction, the part in which Kant elucidates his concept of synthesis, exhibit a shallow, mechanical understanding of it.

A compounding factor is, again, that synthesis can’t really be understood independently of the other aforementioned elements of Kant’s thought. Grasping the meaning of synthesis implies coming to grips with his concept of self-consciousness and the way both self-consciousness and the categories are intricately and intimately involved. Most interpretations consider these aspects too much as if they were indeed separable faculties or entities that serve separable functions, undercutting an important feature of Kant’s metaphysics: the possibility of a priori unified cognition, for which an indivisible self-legislating subject is responsible. Rather, they are expressions of various aspects of a singular function of the mind as the ground of possible unified knowledge.

One striking example of such a superficial reading of the text is the way the relation between figurative synthesis and intellectual synthesis—or in the case of the A-Deduction the threefold synthesis—is standardly interpreted, as if the two are independent or quasi-independent functions of different faculties of the mind, the imagination and the understanding. In a paper that I presented (in short form) earlier this month in Turin, I focus on the relation between figurative and intellectual synthesis, while arguing that failing to understand this properly, indeed the relation between the imagination and the understanding, leads to a vicious regress in the explanation of the ground of knowledge, for which a priori synthesis is specifically designed. In other words, failing to see the intimate relation between the imagination and the understanding, the very identity that lies at their root, risks losing sight of the primary aim of Kant’s thought: the possibility of a priori unified knowledge.

A draft of the paper (just over 10,000 words) can be downloaded here.

© Dennis Schulting, 2023.