A Stanford University Press classic.

Kant's Transcendental Deductions

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Contributors................................................................................................................................xiiiAbbreviations and Translations..............................................................................................................xviiKant's First Drafts of the Deduction of the Categories WOLFGANG CARL.......................................................................3Two Ways of Reading Kant's Letter to Herz: Comments on Carl LEWIS WHITE BECK...............................................................21Kant's Notion of a Deduction and the Methodological Background of the First Critique DIETER HENRICH........................................29Psychology and the Transcendental Deduction PAUL GUYER.....................................................................................47Sensibility, Understanding, and the Doctrine of Synthesis: Comments on Henrich and Guyer P. F. STRAWSON....................................69Themes in Kant's Moral Philosophy JOHN RAWLS...............................................................................................81Justification and Freedom in the Critique of Practical Reason HENRY E. ALLISON.............................................................114Justification and Objectivity: Comments on Rawls and Allison BARBARA HERMAN................................................................131The Social Spirit of Mankind STUART HAMPSHIRE..............................................................................................145Why Must There Be a Transcendental Deduction in Kant's Critique of Judgment? ROLF-PETER HORSTMANN..........................................157The Deductions in the Critique of Judgment: Comments on Hampshire and Horstmann REINHARD BRANDT............................................177Apperception and Ether: On the Idea of a Transcendental Deduction of Matter in Kant's Opus postumum BURKHARD TUSCHLING.....................193Kant's Selbstsetzungslehre ECKART FÖRSTER.............................................................................................217Kant's "Dynamics": Comments on Tuschling and Förster JULES VUILLEMIN..................................................................239Notes.......................................................................................................................................249Index of Persons............................................................................................................................269

Chapter One

DIETER HENRICH

How did Kant conceive the program and the method of the transcendental deduction in the first Critique? In trying to provide an answer to this question, I shall draw on sources that have been hitherto unused or unknown. At the same time, I shall point toward a framework that could accommodate and account for all deductions in Kant's work.

The range of problems and sources implicated is too extensive, however, to be covered adequately within a single paper. Thus my remarks will take the modest form of a research report. But as I progress I hope it will become apparent that a survey of the assumptions and the context within which Kant's program of philosophical deductions unfolds has a greater interest than the careful elaboration of one of its facets. I shall, however, clarify Kant's notion of a philosophical deduction in a more detailed fashion, and then turn to a more summary treatment of further aspects of, and perspectives on, Kant's philosophical methodology.

In spite of long-lasting efforts, the key chapter of the first Critique resists penetration. We have no commentary that explains, in terms of shared principles and intentions, the argumentative strategy Kant employs—both in detail and as a whole, and for both editions jointly. Furthermore, attempts to reconstruct or to extend Kant's way of reasoning by means of similar but independent philosophical theories or forms of analysis cannot yet account convincingly for the nature and the source of the similarities and differences between their own projects and Kant's. This situation appears not to be accidental. To understand it, we must clarify the background against which Kant's reasoning in the deductions unfolds. We have reason to believe features of this background that Kant could take for granted have escaped us thus far.

Any successful interpretation of Kant's deductions must meet a number of criteria, of which I shall mention only three.

First, an interpretation should be capable of comprehensively explaining the vocabulary that Kant employs when he comments on the program of his deductions, in a way that exhibits the unity and the internal connectedness of its various terms.

Second, an interpretation should provide means for understanding the way in which Kant composed the texts of his deductions—not only the two deductions of the first Critique, but also the deductions in Kant's work in general. The deduction of the first Critique, to be sure, deserves special attention, for it was within the context of this deduction that Kant became convinced that the program he carried out under the name "deduction" is indispensable and is best characterized by the term "deduction." Furthermore, the deductions of the first Critique are by far the most extensive ones, and they stand out clearly against the rest of the corpus of the first Critique because of their style and the condensed and intense reasoning in which they engage.

Third, an interpretation of Kant's deductive strategy must be able to apply to the deduction of the second Critique. There the deduction depends upon a so-called fact of reason (which Hegel derided as "the undigested log in the stomach, a revelation given to reason"). We are inclined to adopt, almost automatically, an understanding of the term "deduction" that immediately creates a tension between a deduction and reference to a fact. This results in misunderstanding of Kant's argument in the second Critique—misunderstanding also of the way in which it is sytematically related to the deduction of the first Critique.

I

In Kant's philosophical language, the meaning of the term "deduction" is different from what we almost irresistibly expect, and this largely accounts for a persistent failure to understand Kant's deductions as a unitary and (within its unity) well-structured program. For "deduction" is a term that is quite familiar to us. It refers to the logical procedure by means of which a proposition—namely, the conclusion—is established through the formal relationship of other propositions, its premises. Thus we take a deduction to be a syllogistic proof. Kant was familiar with this usage of the term "deduction." Yet, unlike now, this was not the only, and not the most common, usage in eighteenth-century academic language. Indeed, if we assume that Kant announces under the heading of "deduction" a wellformed chain of syllogisms, we must arrive at a very unfavorable conclusion about his capability of carrying out such a program. The deduction of the first Critique, to be sure, does claim to be a proof. But if it is to be defined as a deduction on the basis of its correctness and, above all, its perspicuity as a chain of syllogisms, its failure to meet its own standards would be completely obvious. We know, however, that within the first Critique Kant repeatedly showed his ability to design accurate syllogistic proofs—for instance, in the Refutation of Idealism and in the Antinomies. We have, consequently, good reason to look for a reading of the term "deduction" in Kant's sense, one that does not make the meaning of his very program entirely dependent upon the design of a chain of syllogisms.

The literal meaning of "to deduce" (in Latin) is: "to carry something forth to something else." In this very general sense it is not restricted to derivations within a discourse, for one "deduces" a river by digging a new riverbed. Within the range of the methods of discourse, "deduction" can have a variety of applications. A "deduction" in the original (Latin) sense can take place wherever something results from a methodological derivation from something else. Relics of this very widespread usage are preserved in the European languages in various ways: in English, for instance, in "tax deduction."

Everybody who is familiar with the first Critique will remember the first sentence under the heading "The Principles of Any Transcendental Deduction": "Jurists, when speaking of rights and claims, distinguish in a legal action the question of right (quid juris) from the question of fact (quid facti); and they demand that both be proved. Proof of the former, which has to state the right or the legal claim, they entitle the deduction" (A84/B116). Since here Kant apparently wants primarily to distinguish the two questions, one can easily be led to the opinion that he employs "deduction" in the ordinary logical sense, with the further qualification that the premises of the syllogism should be capable of justifying legal claims—thus, presumably, normative propositions.

But by adopting this seemingly natural and almost irresistible reading one has already missed what is distinctive to the methodological idea that gives to Kant's deductions a unitary structure. One also misses the reasons for which Kant refers to the juridical paradigm, and why he could and did structure the first Critique in its entirety around constant reference to juridical procedures. In four steps I shall try to elucidate the background of Kant's adoption of the term "deduction" from its juridical context and set out the reasons why he transferred it to his philosophical program.

1. By the end of the fourteenth century, there had come into being a type of publication that by the beginning of the eighteenth century (when it had come into widespread use) was known as Deduktionsschriften ("deduction writings"). Their aim was to justify controversial legal claims between the numerous rulers of the independent territories, city republics, and other constituents of the Holy Roman Empire. They presupposed both the invention of printing and the establishment and universal recognition of the Imperial Courts as an authority above the otherwise largely independent members of the Empire. These deduction writings were not sold by publishing houses but were distributed by governments, with the intention of convincing other governments of the rightfulness of their own positions in controversies that might eventually lead to military force and thus to the need of finding support from other rulers. Before the final decisions of one of the Imperial Courts (which were by no means always respected), legal proceedings also required that a deduction had to be submitted by both parties. Most of the legal controversies concerned inheritance of territories, the legal succession in reigns, and so forth. In all the cases extensive arguments about the way in which a claim had originated and had been maintained over generations had to be given.

The size of the deduction writings varied, from brochures to folio volumes of up to three thousand pages. Governments preserved deductions in special libraries so that they could be drawn upon in unforeseeable future conflicts. Since their printing was often very fine and elaborate, deductions were also collected—for instance, by former diplomats, who had access to them. Thus, after centuries, auctions of special deduction collections could bring considerable amounts of money. Approximately twelve thousand deductions were published from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth century. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, it proved profitable to publish bibliographies of the deductions. Writing deductions was a juridical specialty, and a famous deduction writer could easily become rich. The most admired deduction writer of Kant's time was J. S. Pütter, professor of law at Göttingen and coauthor of the textbook that Kant used in his frequent lectures on natural law.

It can be shown that Kant was familiar with the practice of deduction writing. He was for six years a librarian of the royal library in Königsberg and had to check its stock when he assumed his office. He uses the terminology of the deductions in his own little juridical quarrels (C 12:380, 421). And he speaks occasionally about deductions in the archives that had been ignored by rulers who preferred to use violence (MM §61, 6:350). Kant also had very good reasons to assume—given the widespread practice of arguing through deduction writings—that his audience would understand him when he transferred the term "deduction" from its juridical usage to a new, philosophical one. What he could not foresee was that such a widespread usage would very soon become obsolete, when the Holy Roman Empire was abolished under pressure from Napoleon. With this, the Imperial Courts and the practice of writing deductions disappeared forever, and the term "deduction" became extinct and almost incomprehensible. With regard to the Critique and its deductions, we can thus understand in a new light the old saying that books, too, have their destiny.

2. The practice of deductions reaches back to a time when the tradition of Roman law was not yet revitalized and the modern theory of law had not yet been founded. These two processes resulted in a need to refine and regulate the practice of the writing of deductions, and this affected Kant's way of conceiving their philosophical correlate in the first Critique. The old deductions were perceived by the new generations of jurists as clumsy and largely unfit for the purposes for which they were written. Thus, within the fast-growing methodological literature on law, academic jurists provided analyses of what a deduction was and guidelines for a deduction's author. This literature provides clues for reading the transcendental deduction as well. In 1752, for instance, one of the methodologists produced the following criteria for a good deduction: Since a deduction is not a theory for its own sake, but rather an argumentation intended to justify convincingly a claim about the legitimacy of a possession or a usage, it should refrain from unnecessary digression, generalizations, debates about principles, and so forth, which are of interest only to the theoretician. A deduction should be brief, solid but not subtle, and perspicuous.

The author of this treatise praises highly a practice of Putter, the famous deduction writer. If Pütter did not succeed in producing a deduction that satisfied these criteria, he would write a second deduction, a brief and elegant text that summarized the main points of his argument. I have checked some of Putter's deductions, and there is indeed one to which such an additional text is attached, printed in different format and on less expensive paper; it carries the title "Brief Outline [Kurzer Bejjriff] of the Zedwitz Case." Now, if one looks at the text of Kant's transcendental deduction, one finds at the end of it a similar summary, which Kant gives nowhere else. More importantly, the summary carries in the second edition the very same title: "Brief Outline [Kurzer Begriff] of this Deduction" (B168).

It does not seem very probable that this is an accident (although the phrase Kurzer Begriff as title for an outline was indeed common in eighteenth century scholarly language). It appears that Kant thought his deduction as a text should be modeled on the juridical paradigm and meet its criteria of excellence. Thus we conclude—before analyzing the argumentative form of the deduction—that Kant wrote the text of the deduction of the first Critique following the standards of a good juridical deduction, which focuses exclusively upon justifying a claim. Not only is the argumentation of the deduction correlative to the juridical argumentative form (as we shall see shortly), the text of the transcendental deduction is a deduction writing in the technical sense. That explains why Kant could not agree with those who complained that he refrains from extensive theorizing. He deliberately intended to be brief and to focus exclusively upon his crucial points. In the first edition of the deduction he says explicitly that he intends to avoid elaborate theory. Later he recommended the second-edition deduction because it arrived at the intended result by the easiest way.

3. We must now turn to questions about the argumentative form of a juridical deduction. They have been discussed by the theoreticians of natural law, and the first to come up with a definition of what a deduction consists in was Christian Wolff. The basic distinction between types of rights is between innate and acquired rights. In J. S. Putter and G. Achenwall (the authors of Kant's textbook), these are called absolute and hypothetical rights, respectively. Hypothetical rights originate in a "fact" (factum, meaning both "fact" and "action"), which must exist before the right in question can come into being—mostly from an action by virtue of which the right is "acquired." Innate or absolute rights, conversely, are inseparable from a human being as such. Humans by their very nature possess such rights.

But acquired rights have a particular origin. I have the right, for example, to carry a title of nobility if I am the legitimate child of a particular couple. I have the right to carry an academic title if I have successfully passed the examinations without fraud. I can use a particular good—a house, for instance—if I have purchased it by a valid contract or if I have inherited it by a valid last will.

In order to decide whether an acquired right is real or only presumption, one must legally trace the possession somebody claims back to its origin. The process through which a possession or a usage is accounted for by explaining its origin, such that the rightfulness of the possession or the usage becomes apparent, defines the deduction. Only with regard to acquired rights can a deduction be given. This implies that by definition a deduction must refer to an origin.

(Continues...)

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