Kant’s categories

Note: This blog post has been retracted, since I no longer think of it as a good representation of how I think about its topic. I may, or may not, have written a better post about the same topic since; check the full list of posts.

I have just finished reading the Analytic of Concepts, which is the part of the Critique of Pure Reason where Kant talks about his table of categories (pictured to the right). I have the following disorganized thoughts about it.

from the Hackett edition; some footnote numbers edited out

The table, undeniably, looks impressive. I appreciate Kant’s attempt to derive it in an orderly fashion, “from a common principle”. But I had several issues with the table as soon as I saw it, and I pored through the rest of the chapter expecting an elaboration of the division and a defense of it; instead, the bulk of the Analytic of Concepts is dedicated to explaining why we should have any categories at all. My hope was lost when I came to this sentence, in which Kant confirmed that no help was coming:

But for the peculiarity of our understanding, that it is able to bring about the unity of apperception a priori only by means of the categories and only through precisely this kind and number of them, a further ground may be offered just as little as one can be offered for why we have precisely these and no other functions for judgment or for why space and time are the sole forms of our possible intuition. (B145–146)

That the categories should even be derived from the functions for judgment in the first place is a very strange doctrine. Categories are fundamental concepts, not judgments; a division of judgments does not seem to bear upon them. Kant seemed to be fascinated by his idea that we can “trace all actions of the understanding back to judgments, so that the understanding in general can be represented as a faculty for judging” (B94). But he does, nevertheless, accept the Aristotelian division of “the higher faculties of cognition” into the “understanding, the power of judgment, and reason” (B169), so he shouldn’t have mixed those up.

He regards the categories as “concepts of an object in general, by means of which its intuition is regarded as determined with regard to one of the logical functions for judgments.” (B128) But they do not seem to actually do this. If the tables are supposed to correspond to each other, then we should ask – can we not think about substance in hypothetical and disjunctive judgments? How are all judgments about impossibility problematic? Kant seems to think that substance is defined as “something that could exist as a subject but never as a mere predicate” (B149) – this seems to regard the concept’s place in a judgment, not the logical function of the judgments where it appears. What gives?

When they do, in fact, determine the logical function, they do not seem to actually be concepts at all; this is the case with the categories of modality. If “existence” refers to something’s being able to be thought, or understood, then it does not seem to be distinct from unity, which Kant says belongs to every cognition of an object (B114). But if it refers to something’s appearing before the senses, then it cannot belong to a concept at all, and belongs rather to the intuition. Besides appearance and thought, there cannot be another sense to the term “existence”; similar considerations apply to the other terms. Only judgments have modality, not concepts. (“Community”, also, is a very strange category, and seems rather to refer to a judgment involving two concepts.)

The division of judgments according to relation is poorly drawn. While these judgments differ in their form of being stated, they do not differ cognitively, since all hypothetical judgments imply categorical judgments. To say that “if A is B, then A is C” implies that “all B are C”, or at least that “all B that are X are C”, where X is something that was understood within the definition of A. The thoughts are equivalent, and only the words aren’t; the division has its place in logic, but not in the theory of knowledge.

Kant says that the transcendental properties of being, “one, true, and good”, are the same as his three categories of quantity, (B113) which I do not dispute. He says, however, that they are “logical requisites and criteria of all cognition of things in general”, rather than belonging to things in themselves. Now, there is nothing more to things than: the things insofar as they are sensed, and, the things insofar as they are understood through concepts. It makes no sense to ascribe anything else to things in themselves, so it is very strange to limit the term like this, as though things in themselves had something more than their sensible and intelligible properties. I would rather say that whatever belongs to things as intelligible (through concepts) is what belongs to things in themselves; indeed, Kant himself seems to do this, when elsewhere he speaks of “the categories, on which nature (considered merely as nature in general) depends, as the original ground of its necessary lawfulness” (B164).

Similarly, Kant restricts the term “cognition” to concepts that have corresponding intuitions, (B144ff.) excluding the categories as “empty concepts”, which are merely “thought” but have no object. This language is strange, since it makes the knowledge of the universal determinants of all possible experience into a lesser form of knowledge. Elsewhere, he refers to the categories as “the manifold of intuitions in general” (B154), and this is quite right, since all intuitions must fall under them; it is more appropriate to say that they have a general object than no object. They do not correspond to anything in particular, but they do correspond to something; properly, only self-contradictory concepts have no object.

For a division of real categories – fundamental concepts which enter, as highest genera, into the formation of all other concepts – see my ontological taxonomy, which is broadly similar to Aristotle and Porphyry’s projects. Kant says that “the objective validity of the categories, as a priori concepts, rests on the fact that through them alone is experience possible (as far as the form of thinking is concerned)” (B125); if we admit that experience must happen through concepts, a thoroughly exhaustive division of categories seems to secure this, since it shows that no concept can be defined which falls outside of them. I believe that my divisions are clearly exhaustive, so that Kant’s elaborate justifications of the categories seem to be superfluous to me.