Since publication, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason has generated its fair share of interpretative controversy, and there are a broad range of issues that continue to engage the secondary literature. At the same time however, there are some aspects of the first Critique (or of Kant’s theory of knowledge and consciousness (or mind) more generally) that are taken for granted; as entrenched interpretative norms that inform the subsequent framework of textual exegesis. Amongst these givens, or consensus views, is the idea that for Kant, apperception (the thinker’s identity with reference to any representation that stands before them – the ‘I think’/self-consciousness) is only possible through the application of the categories (pure concepts of the understanding) to the data of sense (intuition), so that the categories are necessary for apperception. Another standard, or consensus view, is that with the first Critique, Kant importantly demarcated between a psychological philosophical means of philosophical enquiry, and an epistemological means of  philosophical enquiry; and that in proceeding according to the latter means of investigation Kant is understood to have minimized the role of psychology (psychological talk) in philosophical enquiry and found a more certain means for investigating the elements of knowledge (or what we can and cannot know about ourselves and the world).

It is central to Waxman’s thesis that both of these consensus views are not only intimately related, but are fundamentally incorrect; and that insofar as we continue to misunderstand the place of apperception within Kant’s account as a fundamentally psychological notion that is explicated to account for the possibility of representational content at all (including the possibility of the categories themselves), then we will continue to misconstrue the fundamental nature of Kant’s project as a embodying a continuity of the sensibility (psychological) philosophy of his empiricist predecessors (most notably Hume). Making apparent  this continuity is important to the project of Kant’s Anatomy of the Intelligent Mind (KAIM), and Waxman invests a good amount of time in tracing the methodological continuities between empiricist psychological philosophy and what he calls Kant’s ‘a priori psychology’. On this account there is less of a divergence between Kant’s philosophy and his empiricist predecessors than is commonly assumed (on an epistemological, normativist reading of Kant), so that Kant’s indebtedness to Hume is only half understood insofar as there is a failure to realize that Kant was working with the same (Humean/empiricist) sensibilist (psychological philosophical) methodology that Hume had used to call the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments into question (what Kant referred to as ‘Hume’s Problem’). The divergence of philosophies here is just that the sensibilist empiricist philosophers had never considered the idea that the senses themselves (through apperception) could be the source of our a priori representational content (the unity of sensibility), and this realization marks Kant’s radical philosophical innovation within the psychological philosophical tradition. But what is ‘a priori psychology’, and how can a theory of knowledge that takes its starting point from certain psychological facts about the human mind presume to ground the necessity and universality that the a priori requires? It is central to Waxman’s thesis that this is possible precisely because of the way Kant radically overhauled certain empiricist assumptions regarding the data (the ‘given’) of sense, so that whereas the empiricists assumed an ineluctable given for sensibility itself (the transcendentally real), for Kant there is no prior ‘given’ representational content, but only what is unified through the actions of the mind itself. Because the data of sense at the most primitive level of representation is unified (synthesized) by me (my ‘I think’), then this data is imbued with a necessity and universal scope just because it is synthesized by me (my mind, as my representation). Insofar as we trace the source of the a priori to this initial synthesizing activity in the mind,then we have a fundamentally psychological notion of how the requisite universality and necessity can be generated in making a priori judgments possible at all.

But what is this aspect of the human mind that enables such a unity of representational content that even the data of sense itself is unified before it can be anything for me? This is of course, apperception, and, as we stated, the view typically adopted here is that apperception is only possible insofar as the pure concepts of the understanding (the categories) are active in unifying this data of sense. This standard view, as Waxman emphasizes, is multiply problematic, and one of the key issues here is that there are various places in the first Critique itself that state that apperception is the ground of any subsequent unity that can be delivered through the pure concepts of the understanding (see (CPR B131) for instance), rather than a unity that can only be attained through these concepts. Another, related issue is that Kant also states that there is a unity of space and time itself (space and time as formal intuitions) that, although unified through the understanding, are not unified through the concept of the understanding (i.e. not through the categories). The sheer starkness of this statement again conflicts with the standard view: for how can there be a unity in understanding – in apperception – that is not arrived at through the concept of the understanding, when the unity through the concept is taken to be definitive of this faculty and of apperception itself? This is perhaps where the greatest resistance to Waxman’s thesis will be felt, for in positing a pre-discursive unity of apperception that can nevertheless be said to take place in the understanding, Waxman is offering nothing less than a transformative conception of Kant’s account of the understanding itself (where a pre-discursive unity in sensibility itself is constitutive of, and essential to, this revised conception of the role and scope of the understanding).

So Waxman’s conception of the understanding is transformative precisely because his conception of apperception is transformative, and that the relation between the two is so tight should come as no real surprise given that Kant characterizes apperception itself as the ‘supreme principle of the understanding’ (CPR §25-26), and the ‘highest point to which all employment of the understanding, even the whole of logic and, in accordance with it, transcendental philosophy, must be attached’ (CPR B133-4n). Pre-discursive apperception in an original synthetic unity (pure space and time) is necessary just because it is the psychological and transcendental ground and basis of all subsequent representational unity: from the subsequent ‘analytic unity of apperception’ (the identity of consciousness with reference to a representation/manifold that is before me (CPR B133-4)), to the higher level conceptual unity arrived at through the application of the pure concepts. This gives pre-discursive apperception such a key and fundamental role for Kant’s overall account, that a failure to recognize the importance of this aspect (or at least grapple with its argument) is detrimental to an understanding of Kant’s theory of knowledge (and further aspects of Kant’s philosophy more generally). Indeed one of the most remarkable features of Waxman’s argument is the way in which he traces the original synthetic unity of apperception, through analytic unity of apperception (which converts ordinary representations into universals), to the unity that is generated by the logical functions of judging as such (or ‘the capacity to judge’ – another way in which Kant characterizes the understanding) and the pure concepts of the understanding themselves (the categories, as derived from the logical functions of judging). Insofar as the original synthetic unity is kept in focus throughout this account, as accounting for the possibility of any representational content,  then there is a direct and key relation between the pre-discursive original synthetic unity conferred at the most primitive representational level (unity of representation) and the relating of representations through the logical forms of judging that already have universal status conferred upon them (analytic unity of apperception) through the unity of their representational content as spatiotemporal representations. Because apperception is a fundamentally psychological notion that explicates the emergence of cognition itself, then the unity delivered through these logical functions and the derivative pure concepts, is also fundamentally an a priori psychological enterprise (Waxman argues that ‘far from being the essentially normative exercise it is commonly taken to be, the Transcendental Deduction [of the Categories as pure concepts] is the most purely psychological undertaking in Kant’s entire philosophy’ (KAIM: 318)

There is a great deal more we could discuss about what is original and innovative in Waxman’s interpretation, and it is impossible that a short review could possibly do justice to the massive scope of KAIM. However, it should be mentioned that one of the major merits of KAIM is that it engages with a kind of anxiety that troubles not only readers of Kant, but readers of historical philosophy more generally: the question of the contemporary theoretical relevance of a given philosophical position/theory. In the case of Kant, there are a range of issues that are assumed to be outdated or irrelevant, thereby jeopardizing a full engagement with his philosophy. The most prominent of these  concerns include: a doubt about the relevance and validity of his analytic/synthetic distinction given later criticisms of this distinction by Quine and others; the validity (and problem of) of Kant’s supposed attribution of Euclidean properties to space in light of later non-Euclidean developments; the worry that Kant’s conception of logic is rendered obsolete by developments in the wake of Frege and Russell; and the thought that Kant’s transcendental laws of the understanding (the principles of the pure understanding) are rendered obsolete by later advances in physics (Einstein, quantum theory, etc.). Although this is not the place for an extensive discussion of how Waxman approaches each of these concerns, it suffices to say that he does engage with each of these concerns head on, and presents a forceful argument in defense of each criticism. Again the importance of apperception is essentially relevant here, as it is the purely logical character of the ‘I think’ that leaves Kant’s theory of understanding as presented in the Transcendental Analytic (original synthetic unity of apperception, analytic unity of sensibility, logical functions of judging, pure concepts of the understanding, synthesis speciosa and the principles of pure understanding) essentially content-empty, and by itself uncommitted to any theoretical implications regarding the nature of space, time or nature (e.g. the unity of sensibility as such (as spatial) does not carry with any conclusions about the nature of space, but only in serves to guarantee the unity of representation that is before me as spatially unified. When the subject constructs space in pure intuition (synthetically), nothing Euclidean enters into this construct. Any theoretical implications and conclusions have to be yielded non-transcendentally, and this is always a feature that immunizes transcendental philosophy from any dogmatic theoretical position).

So not only will KAIM be of interest to those with an interest in interpretative issues surrounding the first Critique and Kant’s theory of knowledge and mind more generally, it will also present an interesting set of arguments for those who are interested in the relations between Kant’s philosophy and: the Philosophy of Science (including the science of the mind); the Philosophy of Mathematics; the Philosophy of Logic and Language and the history of philosophy more generally (especially those with an interest in the relations between empiricist, rationalist and Kantian philosophies). Indeed I cannot recommend this book highly enough for those with an interest in Kant as such. KAIM is an exceptional piece of scholarship that revitalizes the subject in way that is seldom seen, whilst remaining true to the spirit of Kant. Even if one disagrees with Waxman’s thesis, they are sure to be all the richer and all the more informed for having engaged with it.

© 2014 Simon D. Smith

Simon D. Smith (PhD), Hon. Research Fellow, University College London (UCL).