The constitutive and regulative principles in Kant

Front matter

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FOUNDED BY JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER

A DISSERTATION

Contents

CHAPTER AGE

I. Introduction 5

II. The Ideality of Time and Space as the Source of the Distinction between Constitutive and Regulative Principles . 14

Chapter I Introduction

The purpose 1 of this essay is to inquire into Kant's reasons for the classification of principles as constitutive and regulative, and to find, if possible, how far and in what sense the distinction holds. The method employed will appeal to the use of the principles in experience. The inquiry will not extend beyond the limits of the application of the principles of the understanding, it being assumed that any other use of the principles as constitutive or regulative has its basis within those limits.

Kant is asking in what the certainty of knowledge consists. He assumes that knowledge, when conceived of as the whole of our recorded and present subjective experience, has somewhere a stable point with reference to which changes have significance, and from which progress takes its direction. This point is called the object, and the certainty of knowledge is established when its relation to the object is determined. All difficulties which arise in connection with the description of the knowledge process are just questions of the nature of this relation; and they may all be summed up as the problem of the definition of the object. What constitutes the difficulty in the case of any definition of the object, is the tendency, on the one hand, to put the definition in terms of our particular subjective experiences, and on the other, to have left as unaccountable a realistic remainder after the subjective definition has been made.

The first of these tendencies suggests the "construction" of the object; the second the discovery of the object indirectly and in a "regulative" way. Kant's justification of construction claims a basis in the fact of the a priori certainty of mathematical knowledge ; and his justification of regulation in the fact of the practical certainty of empirical knowledge. At the outset he claims that "one part of this knowledge, namely, the mathematical, has always been in possession of perfect trustworthiness; and thus produces a favorable presumption with regard to other parts also, although these may be of a totally different nature." 2 It is probable that the other parts here referred to are the knowledge of morality, but the real difficulty is whether the presumption

1 Results are summarized on the last page of the essay.

holds favorable with respect to perceptual experience. The purpose of this essay may be stated again as an inquiry as to how far this favorable presumption may be said to hold good.

To examine the process of construction calls for an examination of the concept of quantity, and the results obtained here will lead us to notice the nature and extent of the application of the regulative principles. When the latter have been established in their logical connections, it will be necessary to show their identity with the constitutive principles, not, however, through the complicated machinery employed by Kant, but through the simple characters of objects in experience.

Construction is in pure intuition. Many questions arise, however, in connection with pure intuition, as e.g., What is pure intuition ? What does construction in pure intuition mean? Kant's answer to the first of these questions is that pure intuition is space and time, and as such, is valid as an object, and is definable as a rule of synthesis in the time relations of representations. This answer does not simplify matters, for it answers the epistemological question perhaps too hastily, in any case, abstractly. The intuitions are now referred to the real in sensation, and the question is whether the latter may be constructed quantitatively. Looked at more closely, quantity is seen to have connections with all the other categories through time.

For Kant there is a pure consciousness of quantity, or a consciousness in which no other character is involved; but of quantity in this sense there are no axioms, and hence no general certainty. Where there are axioms, quantitas becomes quanta and is schematized as number. It is the fact that quantitas becomes quanta which brings it into relation with the other categories; and if the principles involved here are constitutive, they are also regulative.

At this point Kant abandons quantity for its schema number, which again raises the question of the relation of sense and thought. Its definition involves time and the consciousness of succession as a synthesis. But succession in time with regard to objects involves phenomena in relations of space; this again involves substance and the permanent, with reference to which time is constitutive, and an act, which would decide the question in favor of construction. Time, however, constructs only possibilities, to which there are: (i) realistic objections with the argument of evolution; and (2) skeptical objections. To (1) Kant would say that evolution is merely a "predicable" of time-quantity, and does not apply. To (2) there is appeal to the transcendental concept of the possibility of experience.

INTRODUCTION 7

Kant at this point seems to realize that as time and number, quantity ends in abstraction and does not touch objects. If quantity is to be a valid concept a content must be discovered for it, so a distinction must be made. Quantity is extensive quantity; and if the possibility of experience and hence the transcendental argument is to hold good, it must be remembered that the possibility of experience is just what makes the synthesis of the homogeneous a quantity. This synthesis as abstract quantity is empty conception and the bare possibility. To find a content for the synthesis we must appeal to the homogeneous in space. Generalized time formulas involve space; but the generalized synthesis is the object as the permanent substance, hence space and time are both necessary to quantity, that is, space is the schema of time just as time succession as number is the schema of quantity. Time as a schema applies to objects in only a computative sense, and provides for succession only. But the real phenomena demand their coexistence, so quantity must be schematized as space also. Quantity schematized as both time and space involves the permanent.

But if space as well as time is involved in construction we are carried beyond the idea of quantity as merely extensive. To construct the object of experience, quantity must be definitely limited, and as such becomes intensive quantity. For knowledge, differences of extensity are immaterial, and to make a knowledge difference extensity must be qualified. As qualified by a line of approach to the real, quantity is characterized by differences of degree. Quality has a statement in terms of a priori possibilities, for it must be a priori if there is to be formal construction. In what sense is quality a priori ? The a priori in the sensuous intuition with respect to quality is the mathematical principle that it must have a degree. As such it is described as (i) a conceptual mean in a series; (2) a moment of consciousness; and (3) a subjective fact. Neither of these descriptions is consistently worked out by Kant.

A reconstruction may begin here upon the basis of results thus far reached. The principle of the possibility of experience, if the reference is to the concrete actuality of experience, is applicable only to those principles which operate only in a regulative way. The distinctions drawn so rigidly between sense and understanding and space and time must be ignored; and whatever principles were found applicable to experience after those distinctions are made, must be regarded merely as special applications of the principles which operate within experience taken as a whole and with all its connections intact. In this way the constitutive principles are analytic only, and serve to exemplify the method of the regulative principles. They do not construct the object, but merely represent to consciousness the object as the purpose of the complex of the representations in consciousness. While we allow an independent function to the constitutive principles, our notion of the object is the crudely realistic one, and we have upon our hands the ambiguous question of representation. This question disappears as meaningless when the constitutive principles are shown to apply only to the imaged stage of a purpose, which is completed as an object when upon the method of the regulative principles it is connected at all points with experience.

The nature of the regulative principles is then to be understood from a proper estimation of these experience connections, and these connections can be corrrectly estimated only when approached from the point of view of their unity of purpose. It thus simplifies our method when we regard all experience connections as instants of causation, while all other regulative principles will come out in the account as corollaries of this one principle. It is just from this general point of view that the first result prohibits application of causality to the sequence in time only, for that sequence never reaches the consequent which we call the object. Causation regarded as merely temporal shows by its failure that some other idea is needed to complete it. This qualifying character is found to be the very connectedness of experience itself. Causation in experience is thus seen to involve more than time, in fact every general characterization of experience is involved in any concrete instance of it.

How are objects known, is the fundamental question for Kant, and his famous formulation of it as, How are synthetic judgments a priori possible, arises from a recognition of the fact that all judgments that are significant get their significance from a point of reference beyond the individual intent from which they start — in other words from reference to an object. That significant judgments are "objective" is true, however it may be necessary to define the object. The relation of thought to its object is the locus of all questions of validity, and therefore the proper object of all philosophical investigation. That same famous question was less formally and more intelligibly stated before the form of the Kritik was worked out, as is shown by the letter to Herz, 1 in which its form is, "Wie konnen sich Begriffe a priori auf Objecte beziehen?" Questions of the nature and limits of thought are unintelligible apart from considerations of the nature of the objects.

There have been various explanations of the relations which thought

1 See Riehl, Der philosophische Kriticismus, Vol. I, p. 329.

INTRODUCTION Q

bears to its object — that the object participates in the nature of the idea, that the object is represented in the idea, that the object is unreal and a miscarriage of the idea, that the relation between the two is unique and must be taken without explanation, that the object is the construction of the idea — the latter having various interpretations. For instance, the object is constructed out of a perfectly undifferentiated original matter through the process of time; or the object is made by the idea out of the original elements of the latter. All of these Kant reduces to two general doctrines, 1 namely, representation and construction, and he accepts the latter. It requires, however, the whole of the Kritik to explain in just what sense he holds to construction. Briefly, the object is constructed by the idea out of original forms; but the freedom of indifference is not given the active thought principle, since the latter has itself a definite constitution within which only it can operate. Thought is limited by itself; has its own bounds set for it in its own nature. Within these bounds it is free to construct its object, to say what it will mean, to determine its own direction.

Thus there are objects of the understanding and "ideals" of the reason; and if the latter are as objects problematical, it is because objects are needed when the forms of space and time do not lie in the direction in which the need becomes intention. The former are determined after the analogy of mathematics by or according to principles that are constitutive; the latter on the analogy of experience by or according to principles that are regulative. 2 It will be shown below, however, that the distinction between constitutive and regulative is not so much one of principles as one of objects; and that all principles, in that they relate to objects, are both constitutive and regulative.

A distinction might here be made between principles of thought and principles of knowledge. The former get their distinctive character as the active agencies at work in the process of thought, or, if the different faculties of mind are not differentiated so sharply, represent only the different directions or means by which thought seeks its object. The latter have value, after the object is obtained and defined, in comparing and organizing the objects of thought in the system of experience as a whole. The former are subjective, principles of mind, and are active and constitutive in determining objects. 3 The latter are objective,

1 A., p. 92. See also the letter to Herz, February 21, 1772, Kant's Werke, Kirchmann's ed., Vol. VIII, pp. 402-9. a A., p. 179; B., p. 221. 3 A., pp. 126, 300, 718-19; B., pp. 356, 746-47-

IO THE CONSTITUTIVE AND REGULATIVE PRINCIPLES IN KANT

principles of the determined object, and relate to those characters which allow the object to be used as a term of the comparative judgment, and to be fitted into a tentative whole of knowledge. They are more than this, however, in that when the idea of a conditional whole is justified through a comparison of objects, these principles may go on from the suggestion of the structure of the whole to the determination of the direction in which objects may be sought; that is, they find characters in the objects organized which suggest the grounds of the possibility of objects, find the conditions in general according to which the object must conform, and so determine a priori what may, in a given direction, be an object of thought at all.

Thus the conditions of the possibility of experience are laid in the constructive capacity of thought in experience, and this idea of the possibility of experience becomes the guide to the disposition of objects in knowledge or their arrangement in science, as well as to the actual character and constitution which the object must have if it is to be an object of thought at all. These regulative principles are thus not without influence upon the object, either as to form or content, since they indicate the direction in which construction is possible; and, besides, in the opposite direction, or after construction is determined as possible, they determine the extent to which it is valid.

The regulative principles are therefore indirectly or mediately constitutive. They are, when operative, synthetic a priori judgments in which the appropriation of the new is mediated by the idea of the old in experience. And they determine content, since they define the constitution of things in such a way as to be able to say that if there is to be a content at all, it must be found in this or that direction and under these or those conditions. This is no more than saying that the sense experience as the "real" in a possible experience is determined a priori as under the bounds of a constitution which is or may be known, and that, within these bounds, content is determined upon or selected with respect to characters of the known constitution which are then and there the object of the speculative purpose. In other words, sense is under the law imposed by the understanding, its forms are also concepts of the understanding, and its content therefore dependent upon the purpose of the understanding. And the inclusion of the forms of space and time within the system of the concepts is just what is meant by the "ideality" of space and time, or the transcendental idealism. This point is also the basis of the distinction between constitutive and regulative principles, and for the idea of a constitutive function of mind.

INTRODUCTION II

Constitutive principles are constitutive of objects directly; the exercise of the understanding under them gives the object in its reality, not merely in answering to their form but in producing their content. The forms represented by constitutive principles are grounds or reasons for experience, or characters of the constitution of experience — experience being assumed as having a definite constitution. These grounds are active as " causes," 1 since no object of knowledge can be conceived except in its distinction from its ground. 2 And it makes no difference here if the "causality of the cause" is freedom, since the event distinguished as object could not occur except as it is recognized as necessarily related to something else. 3 If no object can stand alone in experience, that is, if no object is possible except as it has relations which determine it an object, these relations show its dependence upon something else as necessary (as under the conception of possible experience), and the something else must be looked upon as a cause or reason for the object. 4 The causes are in this case the forms of the understanding, and they are the grounds which determine a priori the possibility of there being an object. They say that if there is to be an object at all (and the first act of consciousness assumes that objects can be) that object must conform to the limits, or be within the bounds, or square with the general reasons why there can be an object. This calls attention to the fact that the determination of the object carries with it the recognition that there are certain conditions upon which the object depends, which conditions not only may be but are known, and may be known independently of the particular object as the condition of the object in general. The main question here is whether these conditions are "merely subjective" or really objective, so that our mere intention toward the object may be distinguished from the actual construction of the object — whether our dreaming can be distinguished from our thinking. For Kant, this distinction can be made with absolute confidence: some objects can be known completely, both as to form and matter, so there is knowledge of absolute certainty. This knowledge is mathematical.

Regulative principles are constitutive of the possibility of objects,

4 That the idea of construction involves the regulative principles of causation and community will be shown later (chap. iv). That is, principles of the quantitative and qualitative nature of objects are insufficient to show that objects can through their individual content be conceived as under the conditions of possible experience, or belong to a world of experience. As under the mathematical principles, when rigidly applied, the object becomes a little world in itself, and the plurality of objects the aggregate world of monads which "have no windows."

which, if actualized, would have as attributes characters corresponding to and known from the more general relations of objects in experience. These relations are imperfectly conceived because of the limitations of the understanding to the a priori forms of objects. If the intuitions of objects in experience were identical with the conceptual forms of those objects, as is assumed in the mathematical principles, there would be no need of regulative principles, since the ideal object would not be necessary, being realized in the actual. All principles would be constitutive if the intuition were given with the concept. But the field wherein such occurs is limited to objects of a particular kind; so that if there be principles beyond that field, they must be merely regulative, or guides for the thought toward a region where, in the absence of intuition, there may be objects known by certain necessities due to the characters of objects known actually in both intuition and conception. The ideal is of course to identify the two kinds of principles by finding that their fields of operation coincide in the idea of the unity of the world. This ideal is that of the speculative purpose, and the character of its knowledge is mathematical, where the intuition loses itself by inclusion in the conceptual. Subjectively, or on the anthropological side, the ideal would include objects of will and feeling, where quality gets its own, 1 and where the conceptual is exhibited in intuition. On the side of the grounds of such an ideal, the unity would represent the identity of the sense with the understanding in an " intuitive understanding" whose methods of operation would be principles constitutive completely and without limitation, that is, principles not only of objectivity in general, but also of the object in the concrete.

In our own experience, according to Kant, the mathematical is an instance of the completely valid knowledge. This knowledge may therefore be taken as the type of all knowledge upon either of two conditions. The first of these is that knowledge as such, in so far as valid, is purely a matter of quantity, and the quantitative relation an adequate statement of its law. The second is that knowledge as such, and as including the quantitative, is uniquely qualitative, and capable of formulation in other than mathematical terms. Quantity, then, is a narrow abstraction. 2

1 Later, this question becomes that of the possibility of the identity of extensive and intensive quantity.

2 It will turn out that quantity is a thought term, with reference only to the use of the intellect in laying plans; while quality (instead of being merely, as for Kant, intensive quantity with reference to the synthesis in space and time) is a knowledge term, with reference to thought as objectified, or to objects in their character of fitness for becoming centers of reference in experience. Or, briefly, quality refers to the significance of objects for knowledge.

INTRODUCTION 13

It is the purpose to show that in the development of the mathematical ideal, Kant had in mind not the quantitative character of reality, but a character that is unique and qualitative, which we may call significance for knowledge. Upon this character rest Kant's faith in the ultimate rationality or knowability of the world, his postulation of the intelligible as beyond and above the sensible, and his doctrine of the primacy of the practical reason as the faculty through which objects are known without the instrumentality of the sense.

Chapter II The Ideality Of Time And Space As The Source Of The

DISTINCTION BETWEEN CONSTITUTIVE AND

REGULATIVE PRINCIPLES

We have seen that the relation of the forms of time and space to the concepts of the understanding is the locus of the distinction between the constitutive and the regulative principles. It is therefore in connection with the Aesthetic that the discussion of that distinction should begin. It may seem that since time and space are called perceptions, and therefore regarded as inactive and as having no function but to await a content from sensation, there is no suggestion in the Aesthetic of any active faculty which might have constitutive force. Yet the mere fact of the separation of perception and its "given," from the faculties which are operative, is in itself significant while we are engaged in the search for the object of knowledge.

It is clear that sensation of itself does not give an object, 1 neither as a single sensation nor as a sum of sensations can it do this. For the particulars composing a sum can only be thought analytically and consecutively, and the sum as representing the particulars is only a mark which suggests their enumeration. Such a sum gives no clue to the qualitative character of the particulars, nor indeed do these characters enter into the sum. Qualities are independent of enumeration, they cannot be counted, but only the instances or times in which they occur. Or, at best only kinds of qualities can be enumerated, that is, abstracted from the concrete in the particulars. But these abstractions are no objects, since when they are found in experience they are recognized as mere instruments.

This does not mean that there may not be qualitative combinations, or syntheses; but only that so long as combination is numerical the result is no more than a symbol, or abstract representation of things, whereas to produce a new thing there must be qualification of qualities, or the fusion of qualities into a whole, which, as a whole, shows characters different from those of the elements. Besides the sense elements there are others which, instead of adding to the determinations of sense in such a way as to make the object at once intelligible, give rise to the

THE IDEALITY OE TIME AND SPACE 1 5

very question as to how the representations of sense can enter into the idea of the object at all. That is, the question arises out of the relation of the mathematical or space-time character of sensation to certain other representations of the objects, which have significance for consciousness, and are distinguishable from the sense characters, but yet are indubitable characters of the object. Such a supersensible character is, for Kant, objectivity itself. 1 Thus so far as the Aesthetic is concerned, no objects have as yet entered into the discussion.

If by the sum of sensations it is meant that the idea of the object is complex, and that there is a number of distinguishable characters in it, then there can be agreement ; but agreement on the possibility of distinction is itself a suggestion toward a condition more promising of the concrete than mere aggregation. But the question is, What is the nature and the source of the complexity ? 2 Can the complexity be resolved ? and, if so, What does its resolution add to the explanations which we seek ? To say that the object is complex is merely to qualify the object yet further, that is to add to the complexity, unless in the statement there is the key to the solution of the complexity in terms of the sources and conditions under which the object exists and is known. In any case, the object does not come to us through sense, and it is Kant's recognition of this fact that calls for the investigations of the Analytic. So long as the forms of space and time are forms of intuition, that is, so long as they are the contentless receptacles of individual qualities or groups of qualities, furnished through sense, there is no going on toward the definition of the object. And while sensibility is regarded as a distinct compartment of mind which hands over a finished product, there is not only no contribution to the solution of the question of the consciousness of objects, but that question is ruled out as not of possible solution, since the relation between the two compartments of mind is declared irrational.

Thus it is not a satisfactory solution of the question of the consciousness of objects to say that one department of mind furnishes one part, another department another. For in this case the question is merely restated as that of the unity of mind. To say that the relation of representation obtains among different departments of mind does not make our theory of knowledge non-representational. It is true that in this form the question is somewhat more compactly put, but its discussion is attended with many difficulties, among which the chief is the tendency to subjectivism. But the difficulty which arises in connection

with Kant follows upon the interpretation of the notion of time and space as forms of the intuition. Interpreted passively as forms of the sensibility which by the mere accident of their form mould sense content into stereotyped shapes and mechanically drop it into the hopper of the understanding, the forms of time and space render the question of the relation of consciousness to its object inexorably insoluble. But regarded not as forms of sensibility alone; but as forms or schemes of the understanding for the sensibility, thus including the sensibility within the same circle of purposes as the other faculties, where its relation to the rest is explicable in terms of a purpose in common with the rest, the question of the unity of mind is not so hopeless. In this sense, however sensuous the application of the time and space, they are categories 1 of the understanding, and they are different in character from the other categories only in that they have a more highly specialized function.

Thus the forms cannot hold out as mere forms, as merely "ideal." They are real "for experience"; and if experience is meant here to include possible experience, little more reality could be asked for them. The forms of time and space are realities, and are principles that are operative in the determination of objects. 2 In the merest intuition, therefore, there are activities tending toward the construction of objects since there can be no intuition except as it is "pure " or related to thought. At this point of the discussion the aim is merely to show the futility of the idea of a mechanical relation between sense and thought. That the forms of space and time must be regarded as of the same sort as the categories will get consideration later. But enough has been said to show that one result of the Copernican discovery is the necessity of the assumption that with regard to objects there must be principles whose operation is constructive, and that these principles must be operative in sense.

Kant takes the apparent duality 3 of the real and subjects it to a rigid examination, and he quite appropriately begins with the objective part of the situation. 4 The most general determining characters of the object are its geometrical or space-time determinations. The object in a common-sense view seems to be constituted of them; but since the object, when known, is known within a situation which is also character-