Kant on the spontaneous power of the mind

ABSTRACT

It is well known that at the heart of Kant’s Critical philosophy is the claim that the mind possesses an essentially spontaneous power or capacity (Vermögen). It is also sometimes maintained that Kant’s appeals to this spontaneous power are intimately tied to his recognition of there being a fundamental and irreducible normative dimension to judgement. However, I attempt to complicate this picture by way of appeal to some less appreciated influences upon the development of Kant’s epistemology. A different conception of the role of spontaneity in judgement has clear precedents, I claim, in the works of Cudworth and Rousseau. There the imagined role for the active power of the mind is not to identify criteria that might serve as norms for epistemically responsible judgement. Rather the spontaneous power of the mind is cited as the source of representational contents that secure the truth conditions of our everyday claims to empirical knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Kant
• power
• spontaneity
• Cudworth
• Rousseau

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and to Teemu Hupli whose thoughts on Kant on the givenness of space were formative for me here.

Notes

1 References to the Critique of Pure Reason will be given using the standard A/B system. All quotations follow the Kant (1998) translation.

2 For a recent discussion of the relevance of the distinction for German idealism more generally, see Haag, ‘Faculties in Kant and German Idealism’.

3 For Kant’s so called ‘Discursivity Thesis’, see Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, 12–16.

4 Engstrom provides an extended reading that exploits Kant’s appeal to hylomorphism – see Engstrom (‘Understanding and Sensibility’).

5 The thought that the normative, spontaneous and conceptual domains are all co-extensive, if not identical, is notably defended in McDowell (Mind and World). The Kantian lineage of similar thoughts is claimed in Allison (Idealism and Freedom); Allison (Kant’s Transcendental Idealism); Brandom (Tales of the Mighty Dead); Pippin (Idealism as Modernism) and others. The literature on the meaning and role of spontaneity is predictably large, though a range of the pertinent issues are covered in Allison (Idealism and Freedom); Brook (Kant and the Mind); Kern (‘Spontaneity and Receptivity’); Kitcher (Kant’s Transcendental Psychology); Kitcher (Kant’s Thinker); Land (‘Kant’s Spontaneity Thesis’); Merritt (‘Reflection, Enlightenment’); Valaris (‘Spontaneity and Cognitive Agency’).

6 Korsgaard (The Sources of Normativity, 92–3). The passage is quoted by Boyle in the context of discussion of Kantian approaches to normativity and judgment (‘Making up Your Mind’, 2).

7 Sarasohn (Gassendi’s Ethics, 127ff.). Similar distinctions between types of activity were common in the Early Modern period – for some discussion see Pink (‘Thomas Hobbes’).

8 For one thing, the issue of Kantian spontaneity in the Anglophone literature is entangled with the question as to whether Kant’s model of cognition might be thought to anticipate certain broadly functionalist and material theories of the mind. This thought seems to have originated in Sellars (‘ … This I or He or It’) and was subsequently taken up by Brook (Kant and the Mind) and Kitcher (Kant’s Transcendental Psychology); Kitcher (Kant’s Thinker). The view faces opposition from Allison (Idealism and Freedom) and Pippin (Idealism as Modernism). The discussion I present here is not designed to have any bearing on this particular debate.

9 A further source of influence, one I deliberately neglect here for lack of space, concerns the Newtonian conception of ‘power’ and the relevance (if any) of Kant’s subsequent scientific work to his transcendental philosophy of mind.

10 My aim is to draw attention to some neglected sources that were likely to have been influential for Kant. Kant possessed a copy of the Latin version of Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe in his library (Warda, Immanuel Kants Bücher, 47). However, the possible influence of the work has not been examined in the secondary literature. Secondly, while Rousseau’s Émile is by contrast widely acknowledged to have been an enormously influential work for Kant, the influence of Rousseau’s epistemological reflections have been similarly neglected. This is not to exclude the possibility of other sources of influence however, for example, the reception of some of the arguments I claim Kant was concerned have Platonic origins, such as in the Theaetetus and the Phaedo, the latter of which was made very popular by Moses Mendelssohn. However, Cudworth’s True Intellectual System abounds in Platonic references, and could have as easily been the source of many of Kant’s thoughts here. The appearance of these arguments in Émile in the 1760s, when Kant was developing many of the crucial positions of the Critical period, and – as I will argue – the focus there upon spatial relations – suggest a likely source of formative influence. I am grateful to anonymous reviewers pressing me to clarify the scope of my claims here.

11 The type of argument, usually associated with Chomskyan nativism, is discussed at length in Cowie (What’s Within?) and Laurence and Margolis (‘The Poverty of the Stimulus’).

12 The premise is, it seems to me, one that was remarkably popular in Early Modern philosophy of mind. A direct attack upon this premise – as pointed out to me by reviewer – would emerge in Stumpf’s Erkenntnistheorie (228).

13 The relationship between the two faculties is a notoriously vexed one, from Kant’s odd suggestion that each capacity might nevertheless trace back to a single source (A15/B30) to his claim that the original intuition of space is itself a product of the synthesis of the understanding (B160-1 – note). I do not attempt to resolve these difficulties here.

14 For example, see Ameriks (‘Kant, Human Nature’); Cassirer (Kant’s Life and Thought); Shell (Kant and the Limits); Velkley (Freedom and the End of Reason); Zammito (Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology).

15 For discussion of Rousseau’s epistemology see Hanley (‘Rousseau’s Virtue Epistemology’); Marshall (‘Epistemology and Political Perception’).

16 For a recent discussion see Audidière (‘Why Do Helvétius’s’). My attention was drawn to Rousseau’s critique of Helvétius by Wayne Martin’s unpublished ms ‘Inverse Psychologism in the Theory of Judgment’.

17 All references are to the translation in Kant (1992) and accompanied with the standard Akademie references.

18 For discussion of Kant’s theory of sensation, see George (‘Kant’s Sensationism’); Falkenstein (Kant’s Intuitionism).

19 Kant’s claim from the Metaphysical Exposition that we represent space as a given infinite manifold is meant to contrast with the thought that we might initially represent finite manifolds and only acquire a notion of infinite space subsequently. In fact, Kant claims our representation of space is presented to consciousness as an infinite continuum in the first instance. This claim, compelling or not, is obviously compatible with the claim that the representation itself is contributed.

20 One must qualify one’s claims here regarding the difficulty of interpreting the Second Analogy itself, and given the variety of readings available. For a very small selection of the relevant literature here see Bardon (‘Temporal Passage and Kant’s’); Bayne (‘Objects of Representations’); Bayne (‘Kant’s Answer to Hume’); Strawson (The Bounds of Sense); Allison (Kant’s Transcendental Idealism); O’Shea (‘The Needs of Understanding’); Friedman (‘Causal Laws and the Foundations’); Osborne (‘Two Major Recent Approaches’); Osborne (‘Does Kant Refute Hume’s’); Watkins (‘Kant’s Model of Causality’); Watkins (Kant and the Metaphysics); Harper (‘Kant’s Empirical Realism’). In what follows, I present what I take to be one plausible reading of how to take the section for the purposes of showing that such a reading is in keeping with the argument schema detailed above; however, a full defence of this interpretation of Kant on causation would have to be undertaken elsewhere.

21 The examples are at A190/B235 and A192/B237 respectively.

22 For discussion see Ameriks (‘Kant’s Transcendental Argument’).