Book II. The Analytic of Principles

THE ANALYTIC OF PRINCIPLES

The distinction which Kant here introduces for the first time between understanding (now viewed as the faculty only of concepts) and the faculty of judgment (Urtheilskraft) is artificial and extremely arbitrary. As we have seen, his own real position involves a complete departure from the traditional distinction between conceiving, judging, and reasoning, as separate processes. All thinking without exception finds expression in judgment. Judgment is the fundamental activity of the understanding. It is “an act which contains all its other acts.” Kant is bent, however, upon forcing the contents of the Critique into the external framework supplied by the traditional logic, viewed as an architectonic; and we have therefore no option save to take account of his exposition in the actual form which he has chosen to give to it. Since general logic develops its teaching under three separate headings, as the logic of conception, the logic of judgment, and the logic of reasoning, the Critique has to be made to conform to this tripartite division. The preceding book is accordingly described as dealing with concepts, and this second book as dealing with judgments or principles; while understanding and the faculty of judgment, now viewed as independent, are redefined to meet the exigencies of this new arrangement, the former as being “the faculty of rules,” and the latter as being “the faculty of subsuming under rules, i.e. of distinguishing whether something does or does not stand under a given rule (casus datae legis).”

The reader need not strive to discover any deep-lying ground or justification for these definitions. Architectonic, that ‘open sesame’ for so many of the secrets of the Critique, is the all-sufficient spell to resolve the mystery. As a matter of fact, Kant is here taking advantage of the popular meaning of the term judgment in the sense in which we speak of a man of good judgment; and in order that judgment and understanding may be distinguished he then imposes an artificial limitation upon the meaning in which the latter term is to be employed.

As formal logic abstracts from all content, it cannot, Kant maintains, supply rules for the exercise of “judgment.” It is otherwise with transcendental logic, which in the pure forms of sensibility possesses a content enabling it to define in an a priori manner the specific cases to which concepts must be applicable. The Analytic of Principles is thus able to supply “a canon for the faculty of judgment, instructing it how to apply to appearances the concepts of understanding which contain the condition of a priori rules.” This will involve (1) the defining of the sensuous conditions under which the a priori rules may be applied--the problem of the chapter on schematism; and (2) the formulating of the rules in their sensuous, though a priori, concreteness--the problem of the chapter on “the system of all principles of pure understanding.”

Such is Kant’s own very misleading account of the purposes of these two chapters. There are other and sounder reasons why they should be introduced. In the Analytic of Concepts, as we have seen, the transcendental deduction only succeeds in proving that a priori forms of unity are required for the possibility of experience. No proof is given that the various categories are just the particular forms required, and that they are one and all indispensable. This omission can be made good only by a series of proofs, directed to showing, in reference to each separate category, its validity within experience and its indispensableness for the possibility of experience. These proofs are given in the second of the two chapters. The chapter on schematism is preparatory in character; it draws attention to the importance of the temporal aspect of human experience, and defines the categories in the form in which they present themselves in an experience thus conditioned by a priori intuition.