Kant’s Transcendental Deduction: A Cosmology of Experience

In her new book, Alison Laywine applies the historical approach of her earlier book Kant’s Early Metaphysics and the Origins of the Critical Philosophy (1993) to the delicate philosophical task of interpreting the Transcendental Deduction (hereafter ‘Deduction’) in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787). While historical and exegetical work on the Deduction has certainly increased in recent years, there are still relatively few English language book-length studies devoted to it (e.g. Allison 2015; Vinci 2015; Kaye 2015; Schulting 2018). Laywine’s contribution combines a fine-grained sensitivity to the historical development of Kant’s philosophy with a novel interpretation of his critical project, making it a necessary read both for scholars of the Deduction and of Kant’s metaphysics. With rich textual and contextual detail, Laywine brings the first Critique into dialogue with Kant’s writings of the so-called ‘silent decade’ (1770–1780) and argues that the Deduction recasts Kant’s pre-critical cosmology as a ‘cartography of the sensible world’ (Ch. 4 §2).

Laywine’s approach may be contrasted with Allison’s recent (2015, Chs. 1–3) historical reconstruction and interpretation of the Deduction. While both studies trace the threads of the Deduction through Kant’s published works and Reflexionen from 1760–1780, Allison operates with a standard view of just what the key theme of the Deduction is: the objective purport of a priori concepts. Laywine’s reading of the same pre-critical texts leads her to a bold new perspective on the Deduction as indebted to Kant’s early cosmology, which has been adapted to the problem of making nature possible as a unified whole (210). Accordingly, on her view, we must take up a cosmological lens to fully understand Kant’s thought that any piece of empirical knowledge can be such only by being part of a law-governed nature.

Laywine presents Kant’s views in the first Critique as immanent developments of his earlier metaphysical commitments, and thus as part of a slow but steady retreat from Leibniz and Wolff rather than an all-new epistemological investigation sparked by a pivotal reading of Hume. From this perspective (compare, e.g. Watkins 2005, 182; de Boer 2020), the first Critique is a further step within a long-standing metaphysical project. However, Laywine is not attributing conservatism to Kant: ‘The interest here is not that Kant may still have been wedded in the mid-1770s to ideas he would later reject or revise. It is rather the work that he apparently thought they could do for him in his attempt to try out something new’ (50). This shifts the historical-exegetical focus away from the question of exactly when Kant dropped his pre-critical commitments and when the critical ideas were properly born. Laywine’s aim is instead charting precisely how Kant’s metaphysics became a resource for him leading up to the publication of the first Critique.

After summarizing each chapter, I discuss the book’s structure in more detail, and how it informs Laywine’s interpretation of the Deduction. I then focus on her claim in Chapter Four that the Deduction provides a ‘cartography of the sensible world’, and raise some critical questions about the conception of images this interpretation involves.

Chapter One traces the development of Kant’s metaphysics in the Duisburg Nachlaß, interspersed with precursors in the inaugural dissertation (1770) and the Nova dilucidatio (1755), and a contemporary metaphysics lecture transcript titled L1, dated 1777–1780 (30). Laywine highlights two recurring topics in the Duisburg Nachlaß which in her view directly inform Kant’s approach to the unified, objective experience at stake in the Deduction: knowledge of objects by external relations (Ch. 1 §1), and the mutual dependence or ‘real interaction’ among substances of a world-whole (Ch. 1 §2). Chapter Two covers key concepts of the Deduction: the manifold, synthesis, unity, apperception, and self-activity. The nature of thinking and objectivity, which Laywine takes to be the focus of §15-§17 (in the 1787 or ‘B’ edition Deduction), further link the Duisburg Nachlaß to the first Critique. Chapter Three scrutinizes §18 and §19, which revolve around the subjective/objective distinction and the relation between concepts in judgements. In Chapter Four, Laywine develops her view of the structure of the Deduction and fills in the details of her cosmological interpretation in terms of a ‘cartography of the sensible world’ (Ch. 4 §2). She reads §15-§21 as the first step of Kant’s argument, concerned with thinking as such, all while anticipating the ‘cosmology of experience’ which only fully comes to light in §26. The second step, §24-§26, concerns the legislation of laws to nature (122). Chapter Five, ‘Cartography and Autobiography’, argues that empirical self-knowledge depends on the cartography laid out in the previous chapter (263).

The key metaphysical themes discussed developmentally in Chapter One and recalled throughout the book are (1) that we relate concepts to objects according to external relations, and (2) that a world structured by relations in this way must be a reciprocally-determined whole. The first theme is introduced through Laywine’s account of the ‘exposition of appearances’ (§1), a phrase Kant uses in R4674 (17.646.5–14) of the Duisburg Nachlaß. Laywine explains this usage, echoed in the metaphysics lecture transcript L1, via a presentation convention of geometrical proofs in Euclid and Apollonius: the statement (‘enunciation’) of the general rule was followed by the Ekthesis, a labelled illustration of a ‘representative case’ (31). The key difference between the latter and construction, which is more often discussed in connection with Kant’s geometrical examples, is that exposition concerns the object-relatedness of appearance, where construction only concerns that of intuition (21). While construction applies to pure intuition, only exposition has a license to deal in empirical intuition, and hence to establish the existence of objects. Laywine argues that the ‘exposition of appearances’ is the precursor to Kant’s talk of ‘going through the manifold’ at A99 and B162 (34).

The second metaphysical theme is Kant’s early notion of real interaction underpinning ‘harmonious’ or ‘real’ world-wholes, as opposed to the mere ‘agreement’ of ‘ideal’ world-wholes (54). Laywine shows us how Kant’s view that substances change because of the laws of their reciprocal dependence takes root in the Nova dilucidatio and re-emerges in R4679 of the Duisburg Nachlaß (54ff). According to Laywine, Kant defended real world-wholes in order to resist Leibniz’ system of pre-established harmony – according to which substances only act according to their intrinsic natures, appearing to mutually interact only because God set things up this way. For Kant, Laywine argues, true harmony ‘is possible just in case the totality of creatures stand to one another in real relations of mutual dependence’ (54). Here we may appreciate the originality of Laywine’s approach: A view initially motivated by a concern for metaphysical harmony ends up serving Kant in his critical attempt to ground the difference between subjective and objective relations, as evidenced in this Reflexion quoted by Laywine: ‘Everything that belongs to an aggregate objectively is in reciprocal determination to one another, for otherwise it is only a subjective ideal whole’ (17: 649, 56).

According to Laywine, Kant’s discussion in §26 of a lawful nature governed by the categories is the direct descendant of these commitments (212). The need for a Deduction of the categories arises from two changes to this overall metaphysical picture: The understanding, rather than God, legislates this real interaction of substances in a world. However, this legislation is not self-transparent. For the critical Kant, the mind no longer has a ‘title to itself’ (81), and the unity of the mind is not a metaphysical fact: ‘Since the unity of the mind is as much of a task as the unity of the object, we cannot prescribe in advance how the latter is to be articulated’ (149). Laywine takes the latter revision to be key to Kant’s evolution between the Duisburg Nachlaß and the Deduction, and to resolve the skeptical possibilities the Deduction has often been taken to raise: Rejecting both ‘the idea that the unity of the mind is metaphysically given and … the idea that thought of an object depends on projecting its unity on to appearances … puts a brake on the worry that the mind constructs an object and a world for the object to inhabit that is so much in its own image as to be pure fantasy’ (149). However, some issues about correspondence between image and world resurface in Chapter Four.

Laywine’s claim that the Deduction articulates a ‘cartography of the sensible world’ involves the intriguing notion of ‘pure images of space and time’ (Ch. 4 §2b), which is her interpretation of the ‘intuitions themselves [Anschauungen selbst] (which contain a manifold)’ at stake in §26 (B160). First, Laywine contends that perception in the sense §26 is concerned with is, in parallel with A120, ‘a species of image formation’ (236, 240). She then argues that B160’s ‘intuitions of space and time in their own right are images, just like perceptions’ (239). The latter, which Laywine calls ‘pure images’, make the images of perception possible (240ff). But even if ‘intuitions themselves’ are required to make perception possible, it is not clear why they would be imagistic in nature.

There is a gap, I suggest, between the Deduction’s need for a faculty of productive imagination, i.e. the general a priori capacity for ‘image-making’ (242), and Laywine’s interpretation of §26 that we need ‘pure’ – general, all-purpose – images of pure intuition in order to perceive objects. It is clear enough that we have ‘a capacity to situate parts of space relative to one another and parts of time relative to one another’ and that ‘we put that capacity to work when we produce timelines and spatial grids’ (242). But Laywine proceeds to treat these lines and grids themselves, and not only the capacities we exercise in forming them, as conditions of the possibility of nature (ibid.). I doubt this move is necessary for explaining §26, and it reintroduces skeptical issues about the purport of such representations.

We might raise some basic questions about pure images. What are they images of? What do they represent? Laywine gives a few interesting but seemingly incompatible answers: that abstract space and time lines represent space and time (241), that a combined space-and-timeline ‘purports to represent the phenomenal world as a world’, and ‘represents a fragment of the phenomenal world’ (244) and that these images ‘represent our ability to orient ourselves and the things of our interest to us relative to each other’ (245). Perhaps to resolve the tension, Laywine notes that this sort of image represents as a map represents, by resembling its target isomorphically rather than pictorially (245f, 250f). Laywine thus treats pure images as representational in that they are used as a guide to a target domain (nature, the world of experience).

The pure image Laywine adapts from Kant’s inaugural dissertation (2.401.28–38, 243) is a time-line enhanced with perpendicular lines ‘along which we imagine all the states that obtain at a given moment’ (243). This image is then extended to spatial relations, rendering two – or three- dimensional spatio-temporal grids (244). Kant, however, uses the diagram in the dissertation to illustrate a philosophical point about the nature of time, and the Critique’s mentions of drawing lines illustrate sensible conditions on our ability to represent space and time. Laywine’s suggestion that all thinkers make use of such diagrams in perception seems to confuse a general capacity to represent objects of experience in time, with particular sensible representations of the generality of space and time (as Kant puts it in 2.401.28–38, the ‘ubiquity of time’). I believe this issue may be partially clarified by this passage from §24:

[T]ime, although it is not itself an object of outer intuition at all, cannot be made representable to us except under the image of a line, insofar as we draw it, without which sort of presentation we could not know the unity of its measure at all … likewise … we must always derive the determination of the length of time or also of the positions in time for all inner perceptions from that which presents external things to us as alterable; hence we must order the determinations of inner sense as appearances in time in just the same way as we order those of outer sense in space. (B156, my emphases)

The passage suggests that we can only represent temporal relations with the help of outer spatial relations, which seems to go in the opposite direction of Laywine’s extension of the time line illustration to include spatial relations (244). Is our ‘map’ of spatial relations not primarily, for Kant, outer appearances? Another concern, related to the representational purport of these space-time grids, is how Laywine’s mentions of ‘world-making’ (230) and ‘world-building’ (289) relate to her talk of ‘image-making’ in Chapter Four (234, 242). If we build the world directly, as Laywine sometimes suggests, why do we also need to construct map-like images as a guide to the world? The latter solution suggests some system of correspondence between image-maps and the domain they map, where we are more directly in touch with the map than the terrain. This suggests a particular kind of representationalism that not all interpreters would comfortably attribute to Kant.

Finally, a few remarks about the book’s structure. As is to be expected for any conceptual genealogy of a scope as wide as Laywine’s, the book often travels far from the immediate context of the Deduction. Chapter Two, the first chapter on the Deduction, makes frequent references to pre-critical works other than those mentioned so far, e.g. the Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763) (88–93), the Enquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (the ‘prize essay’) (1764) (98, 103, 106–13) and Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics (1766) (95). These references propel Laywine’s genetic account of key concepts of the Deduction, but are experienced as lengthy digressions insofar as they take us far afield from the book’s announced strategy of comparing the Deduction with the Duisburg Nachlaß (10).

This impression of indirectness is compounded by Laywine’s views about the internal structure of the Deduction and the Critique. She argues that the ‘paradox Kant associates with empirical self-knowledge’ in §24 and §25 is ‘easier to understand after the cosmology of §26 is in place’ (230). But given Kant’s extensive re-writing of the Deduction for the ‘B’ (1787) edition, it seems implausible that we would be expected to understand it in reverse. In the Conclusion we learn that for Laywine, the cosmology of experience is in fact only completed in the Analogies of Experience. And Chapter One, which is not yet officially about the Critique, discusses the Analogies rather than the Deduction (21–26). Laywine’s argument thus kicks off and culminates with her reading of the Principles. These choices of emphasis, to be clear, are nothing to complain of as such. My concern is that they conflict with Laywine’s stated strategy and focus, which makes this reader wonder whether the work would be better presented as systematically linking Kant’s pre-critical works generally (rather than only the Duisburg Nachlaß) with the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique (rather than only the Deduction).

Despite these reservations, Laywine’s account of Kant’s intellectual progress between the Duisburg Nachlass and the Critique is thought-provoking and illuminating. The book is deep and patient, rich in context, and carefully written. Laywine’s contribution to debates on the genealogy and philosophical significance of the Deduction is essential reading. The book raises important questions about the genesis of the Deduction and its place within the Critique, and paints a novel picture of Kant’s critical philosophy as a whole.