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4.Analysis of the schematism chapter

The schematism chapter, which consists of no more than ten pages (A137–147), has often been considered to be the most obscure and controversial chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason. Although the studies on Kant are innumerable, the monographs exclusively dedicated to the problem of schematism are few in number (Califano 1968; Camartin 1971; Kang 1985; Gasperoni 2016; Fisher 2017); on the contrary, this chapter has been analysed and criticised by numerous authors in papers and in book chapters. The reasons for the difficulties of its interpretation are given, on the one hand, by Kant’s terminology, which sometimes seems contradictory and unclear, on the other hand, by the topic itself, which has often been considered as a redundant addition insofar as Kant has already argued in the Deduction that the pure forms of understanding are related to experience. One of the most important divisions in interpretations of the schematism chapter is the one between Cassirer and Cohen: whereas the former believes that the schematism is useless (as he declares in his Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, 1922–57), the latter (Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 1871) underlines the fundamental role of schemata in the distinctions between, first, the logical and transcendental domains and, second, analytic and synthetic judgements. Another important contribution is given in 1937 by de Vleeschauwer (La deduction transcendentale dans l’oeuvre de Kant), who declares that the necessity of a schematism chapter can be explained only by referring to Kant’s distinction between two kinds of reason and experience, i. e. the difference between speciosa and intellectual synthesis as presented in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Other fundamental contributions are given by: Helmut Holzhey (Kants Erfahrungsbegriff, 1970), who distinguishes several notion of object; Luigi Scaravelli (Scritti kantiani, 1968) and Francesco Barone (Logica formale e logica trascendentale, 1958) with their contribution to understand the relation between general and transcendental logic; and other standard studies, such as: Herbert James Paton, Kants Metaphysics of Experience (1936), Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1918), Karl Ameriks, Kant’s Theory of Mind (1982), Norbert Hinske, Kant als Herausforderung an die Gegenwart (1980). More recent works on schemata are: Versinnlichung: Kants transzendentaler Schematismus und seine Revision in der Nachfolge (2016), by Lidia Gasperoni, who also edited with Christoph Asmuth Schemata (2017) and ←73 | 74→Schema Re-schematized. A Space for Prospective Thought by Harwood Fisher (2017).

For my purposes, the most important texts are those dealing with the preoccupation concerning the role of schematism in the whole project of the Critique of Pure Reason. If in the Transcendental Deduction Kant has already demonstrated that categories must be related to experience, what is the function of schematism, which deals with the application of pure concepts? Many of the critics share this question, such as Walter Zschocke, Ernst Robert Curtius and William Henry Walsh. Going further, Geoffrey Warnock and Harold Arthur Prichard formulate similar qualms concerning the necessity of the schematism chapter. However, as I shall show, it is reasonable to agree with other accounts, such as Henry E. Allison’s, who, in order to answer the question whether the schematism chapter is necessary or not, makes reference to the difference between its task (to show that categories have a real use, i.e. they are applied to experience) and that of the Transcendental Deduction (to demonstrate that there are some pure concepts of the understanding that are necessary conditions of objective experience).

In this fourth chapter, I will analyse the schematism chapter, stressing (4.1) how and why the schematism chapter is situated in the Transcendental Doctrine of Judgement (and not in the Transcendental Aesthetic nor as part of the Transcendental Deduction). As I shall show, Kant’s notion of schemata has to be explained as time-determinations (4.2) produced by the faculty of imagination (4.3), distinct from images and concepts (4.4), closely related to pure concepts (4.5), although different in their specific function (4.6).

4.1 The Transcendental Doctrine of Judgement

While in the “metaphysical deduction” Kant exposes the criteria to judge the formal validity of a proposition, he attempts to demonstrate their justification in the Transcendental Deduction. However, since the forms of judgement are valid and necessary but lacking in content, insofar as they are completely separated from experience, they are still insufficient to justify actual judgements that are objective, i.e. determinately true or false criteria to evaluate actual cases of truth or falsity. To achieve this purpose, a Transcendental Doctrine of Judgement is required:

“Transcendental Logic must therefore be able to give us what Kant calls a Transcendental Doctrine of Judgement. It must tell us what are the transcendental schemata, the necessary and universal characteristics of sensible objects in virtue of which the pure ←74 | 75→categories can be applied. It must also tell us what are the synthetic a priori judgements which arise when we apply pure categories to sensible objects in virtue of the transcendental schemata.” (Paton 1936, p. 23)

As already stressed, transcendental logic differentiates from general logic insofar as it deals with truth: general logic abstracts from content and can be used to evaluate only the form of judgements, while transcendental logic deals with a content (namely pure a priori cognition überhaupt). It is in this sense when Kant claims that the conditions of the possibility of experience possess “transcendental truth”. Thus one can distinguish three meanings of the notion of truth: absolute, transcendental and empirical. In Kant’s view, the first is a misleading notion: it is not possible to have experience of absolute (an sich) objects, since no evaluation of the truth of judgements dealing with them is possible. The second deals with the conditions of possibility of experience, which are constraints for the domain in which empirical truths, that is the empirically correct attribution of a predicate to a subject in accordance with experience, can be inquired. As Kant puts it at the end of the schematism chapter: “All of our cognitions, however, lie in the entirety of all possible experience, and transcendental truth, which precedes all empirical truth and makes it possible, consists in the general relation to this.”(KrV A146/B185)⁹⁰

Transcendental truth, then, might be regarded as the total of the necessary conditions according to which judgements are related to objects of the possible experience. Finally, the third concerns the specific criteria for evaluating specific empirical judgements (KrV A318/B375).