Waxman Kants Analogies

What Are Kant's Analogies about?
Author(s): Wayne Waxman

Source: The Review of Metaphysics , Sep., 1993, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Sep., 1993), pp. 63-113
Published by: Philosophy Education Society Inc.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20129454
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Philosophy Education Society Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to The Review of Metaphysics
This content downloaded from

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
WHAT ARE KANT'S ANALOGIES ABOUT?
WAYNE WAXMAN
iV claim that two hundred years of interpretation have missed the

point of one of the most important and frequently revisited texts in
the philosophical canon is bound to be greeted with suspicion. Unless
I am mistaken, however, such is the case with Kant's Analogies of
Experience. The problem it addresses has, in my view, invariably
been misunderstood, with the result that Kant's solution to it has al
ways been adjudged in relation to one or another problem it was never
intended to solve. The reason it has hitherto eluded interpreters, I
shall argue, is that transcendental idealism, a doctrine as essential to
the Analogies as to virtually everything else in Kant's philosophy,1 has
been almost universally misconstrued. With this done, I shall attempt
to show that the theory of objective experience that then emerges not
only better accords with the text but also is more powerful, perspic
uous, and persuasive than the alternative. The latter tends to detach
the Analogies from the portions of the Critique of Pure Reason that
precede them, and derives principles of experience that can legiti
mately be claimed to have only epistemic indispensability, not the
1 Transcendental idealism is the basis on which Kant rests his entire

philosophy: "The system of the critique of pure reason turns on two cardinal
points: as system of nature and of freedom, one leading with necessity to the
other.?The ideality of space and time and the reality of the concept of free
dom, the first leading inexorably and analytically to the second. According
to the one, synthetic-theoretical cognition a priori; according to the other,
synthetic-practical, likewise completely a priori."; Kants Gesammelte Schrif
ten (henceforth, "KGS"), vol. 18, ?6351 (1796-8) (Berlin and Leipzig: Preus
sische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1938). All quotations from Kant's writ
ings are my own translations taken from this edition. Citations will be made
to this edition; in the case of published works, I will refer to them by title
also. The sole exception is the Critique of Pure Reason (henceforth, UCPR ")
for which I shall be translating from the Raymond Schmidt edition (Hamburg:
Felix Meiner Verlag, 1956) and citing the page numbers of the original (A and
B) editions (1781 and 1787).
Review of Metaphysics 47 (September 1993): 63-113. Copyright ? 1993 by the Review of

Metaphysics

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
64 WAYNE WAXMAN
fully fledged objective reality that was Kant's goal. The theory out
lined here, by contrast, weaves together the Transcendental Aesthetic,
the Analytic of Concepts, and the entire System of All Principles of
Pure Understanding to yield a genuine refutation of the Humean skep
tical thesis that principles like "every beginning of existence must have
a cause" can at most be known to be necessary conditions for thought
of objects, while we must remain ignorant of whether they are likewise
necessary conditions for the objects themselves.
Undoubtedly, the principal reason the Analogies have attracted

so much attention is that they are the culmination of Kant's endeavor
to surmount the challenge posed by Hume's skepticism regarding cau
sality.2 Hume's analysis of causality, and in particular of the general
principle that every existence must have a cause, represented for Kant
a watershed in the history of philosophy. It seemed to him that Hume
thereby exposed all previous metaphysics, including Kant's own trea
tise on the mundus intelligibilis, as an empress without any clothes.
The time when it was possible to make a simple dogmatic assumption
of the objective validity of a notion like cause and effect, without any
thought as to the nature or limits of its employment, had been brought
to an end. Yet, far from following Hume in his wish to consign all
metaphysical works to the flames, Kant envisaged the possibility of a
new, reformed metaphysics?one capable at once of assimilating
Hume's teachings and of surmounting his skeptical challenge. The
work which finally emerged was, of course, the Critique of Pure Rea
son; and the portion of it consecrated to the Humean challenge was
the Analogies of Experience.
Because the Analogies are Kant's response to Hume's challenge,
philosophers have naturally tended to assume that the problem Kant
is addressing in them was Hume's own. They thus regard it as (mer
cifully) rather less deeply rooted in the specifics of the Kantian system
2 Although Hume is not mentioned by name in the Analogies themselves,

that he was Kant's intended target is made clear in the corresponding portions
of the Prolegomena. See Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Met
aphysics, ??27-31 and Preface; KGS, vol. 4; see also CPR, B5, B19-20 and
A760/B788ff.; and Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, pt. 1, bk. 1,
div. 1, sect. 2; KGS, vol. 5.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANTS ANALOGES 65
than other portions of the Critique, and even perhaps sufficiently in

dependent to be amenable to treatment in isolation. This assumption
seems to me mistaken, however. By the time Hume sounded the knell
which roused Kant from his dogmatic slumber, Kant had already recast
his philosophical position in the mold of the doctrine he was eventually
to entitle transcendental idealism.3 Transcendental idealism is a the
ory of the nature of space and time which, in Kant's own eyes, sets his
philosophy apart from every other, be it empiricist or rationalist, ma
terialist or subjective idealist, intellectualist, sensualist, or what have
you?all, to him, mere varieties of transcendental realism. We can
thus be reasonably certain that, when a recollection of Hume struck
the spark that ignited Kant's philosophical muse, it was transcendental
idealism that supplied the flammable material.
What is transcendental idealism? It is the doctrine that space
and time are mere subjective forms of our sensibility, so that spatial
and temporal characteristics are restricted to the sensible represen
tations immediately present to consciousness, and things distinct from
our representation are maintained to be aspatial and atemporal.
(Kant's usual designations for that within representation which is spa
tial and temporal is "appearance" or "object of intuition," while that
outside representation which is neither spatial nor temporal he de
nominates "thing in itself," "transcendental object," or "noumenon.")4
3 See Kant's Inaugural Dissertation of 1770; KGS, vol. 20. Kant's awak
ening is generally thought to have occurred sometime in 1771 or 1772 (the
"dogmatic slumber" remark is from the Prolegomena's Preface). Kant's first
acquaintance with Hume's analysis of cause and effect probably dates back
to the late 1750s or early 1760s, shortly after the appearance of a translation
of Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; this however seems
to have made no great impression on him at the time. That Hume's critique
of the metaphysical employment of the concepts of cause and substance first
struck Kant as the great philosophical challenge of the age not when he ini
tially encountered it but only after his reflections on space and time had led
him to transcendental idealism suggests that the transcendentally ideal nature
of space and time and the objective validity of a priori concepts became
inextricably linked in his mind quite early. See also my discussion of Kant's
notion of epig?nesis in Wayne Waxman, Kant's Model of the Mind: A New
Interpretation of Transcendental Idealism (hereafter, KMM) (Oxford: Ox
ford University Press, 1991), chap. 7. For a detailed examination of Hume's
views on causality, with an emphasis on their proximity to Kant's own, see
my forthcoming book, Hume's Theory of Consciousness (Cambridge: Cam
bridge University Press, forthcoming), pt 2.
4 The motives behind Kant's choice of varying modes of designation for
nonrepresentational reality are difficult to fathom. My own view is that his
terminology is generally determined by the correlative faculty of representa

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
66 WAYNE WAXMAN
Kant's attempt to surmount the challenge of Humean skepticism and

found a reformed, critical metaphysics in the Critique of Pure Reason
is, in my view, premised on this thesis and impossible to understand
if regarded from any other point of view. This is true in particular of
the problem addressed in the Analogies of Experience: it can be posed
only within a transcendental idealist perspective and otherwise van
ishes from view.
That transcendental idealism is presupposed by the Analogies has
of course been noted before, since no careful reader can overlook
Kant's iterated, if implicit, references to it. His reliance on the thesis
that sensible appearances are merely representations and not things
in themselves is one example;5 another, plainer still, is the iterated
thesis?stated as a premise in each of the Analogies6?that time is
imperceptible. (The real, for Kant, is the perceptible; time, as the pure
form of sensibility which first makes temporal perception possible, is
necessarily itself imperceptible and, therefore, ideal.)7 All too often,
however, Kant's references to transcendental idealism are taken lightly
or discounted altogether, apparently on the ground that, when all is
said and done, idealism is idealism, and the Kantian variety cannot be
tion, "transcendental object" being best suited to the Analytic of Concepts

(understanding), "thing in itself to the Transcendental Aesthetic (sensibility),
"noumenon" to the Analytic of Judgment (judgment), and the "object of the
idea" to the Transcendental Dialectic (reason). For a different view, see
Gerd Buchdahl, Kant and the Dynamics of Reason (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1992), chap. 1.
5 See esp. CPR, A189-90/B324-5 (cf. A45-6/B62-3, A104-9).
6 See CPR, B219, B225, A183/B226, B233, A200/B245, and B257. There
are quite explicit indications in Kant's other writings that the same holds for
pure space as well (time, it must be remembered, is the exclusive focus of
the Analytic of Principles because it alone is a form of all appearances).
Elsewhere, Kant states quite plainly that transcendental idealism has been
presupposed throughout the Analytic of Principles: "The understanding can
make no use of the categories [except] in relation to the unity of intuitions
in space and time, and even this unity they can determine a priori through
universal concepts of combination only because of the ideality of space and
time"; CPR, B308.
7 The formal character of space and time implies ideality, the material
character of sensation reality: "I speak of ideality in reference to the form
of representations; but [Eberhard and Garve] interpret this to mean ideal
ity with respect to the matter, that is, the ideality of the object and its
very existence"; Letter to Beck, 4 Dec. 1792; KGS, vol. 12. See also section
II-B below.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANT'S ANALOGIES 67
all that different, at bottom, from the Berkeleian or other varieties of

idealism then current.8 Anyone who disputes this is, of course, under
the obligation to spell out precisely how Kant's form of idealism is
unique, and to do so in such a way as to demonstrate that this unique
ness demands that transcendental idealism never be overlooked in the
analysis of Kantian doctrine. The inability to do this satisfactorily is
one of the signal failings of recent Kant interpretation, and stems, in
my view, from a simple failure to comprehend what transcendental
idealism means.
My divergence from the prevailing interpretation of transcenden
tal idealism centers on how one should understand the "sensibility" of
which space and time are the pure forms. The sense of "sensibility"
is generally supposed to be restricted to the receptive part of the mind,
and so excludes any role for the active faculties, including imagination.
So construed, a form of sensibility is the peculiar manner in which the
mind is constituted to receive sensory affections, so that if one's forms
happen to be space and time, sensations originally present themselves
in the mind in relations of juxtaposition and succession; pure space
and time are thus, in effect, species of grid (relational nexuses) in
which sensations arise and take up positions in the mind. Accord
ingly, Kant's denial of supersensible reality to space and time?his
transcendental idealism?signifies only a denial of spatiality and tem
porality to things in themselves; it does not, however, deny them to
sensations (quite the contrary). By contrast, on the interpretation I
propose, "sensibility" should be construed only to exclude discursive
understanding (concepts, judgments), but not preconceptual, "blind"
imagination and its synthesis.9 Here, "forms of sensibility" signify the
8 For instance, "Kant, as transcendental idealist, is closer to Berkeley

than he acknowledges"; Peter Strawson, Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen,
1966), 21.
9 In what is surely an intentional echo of the "intuitions without concepts
are blind" thesis of A51/B75, the imagination is likewise said to be blind be
cause of its dependence on understanding in order to bring its synthesis to
concepts at A78/B103. Kant usually defined sensibility as inclusive of imag
ination, especially on those occasions when his intention was to contrast it
with understanding (as the faculty of concepts); see CPR, A124; Immanuel
Kant, Anthropology, ?15; KGS, vol. 7; see also KGS, vol. 25, ?223, ?225 (c.
1783), and ?229: "Sensibility, as belonging to the cognitive faculty, is sense
and imagination; (the understanding: concepts). Intuition." See also KGS,
vol. 28, pt. 1, p. 473: "To empirical intuition belongs sense; to pure intuition
imagination. The latter is the capacity for intuition even in the absence of
objects. Both together, sense and imagination, constitute the sensibility."
Imagination belongs properly to sensibility because it is not a source of con

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
68 WAYNE WAXMAN
peculiar manner in which the imagination synthesizes sensations;

space and time are, therefore, forms not of sensations themselves but
merely of their synthesis of apprehension in intuition, that is, forms of
our consciousness of sensation (perception).10 Hence, as I construe
it, transcendental idealism involves the denial not merely of supersen
sory reality to space and time but superimaginative reality as well;
correspondingly, not only things in themselves but sensations too have
no intrinsic spatiality or temporality (as prior to and independent of
imagination, sensations count as transcendentally real).11
Now whatever its merits philosophically (and it is not my purpose
here either to defend or to attack it), at least this much may be said
of the doctrine of transcendental idealism as I suggest it be interpreted:
transcendental idealism alone is capable of sustaining Kant's claim to
stand apart from all other philosophers on the question of space and
time. Dating back at least to Descartes, it was agreed that the actual
data, or input, of the senses is a kaleidoscopic flux of representations:
new sensations enter the mind to displace those of the preceding in
stant, only to be supplanted in their turn by those of next, thereby
cepts (these being, in Kant's view, a very special sort of representation, re

quiring a quite distinct faculty of the mind to account for them, namely, dis
cursive understanding).
10 See A30/B46 (perception of sensations as simultaneous and successive
presupposes time) and A23/B38 (experience of sensations as outside and
alongside presupposes space). Kant's clearest statement that space and
times are the forms not of sensations themselves but our consciousness of
them can be found in Immanuel Kant, Progress in Metaphysics; KGS, vol. 20,
Ak 266: "An intuition which is supposed to be possible a priori can only
concern the form under which the object is intuited, for to represent some
thing a priori means to make a representation of it prior to and independently
of perception, i.e. empirical consciousness" (my emphasis). Throughout
this paper, "synthesis of apprehension" should be understood to include syn
thesis of reproduction; see KMM, chap. 5-E.
11 Since that in representation which is imagination-independent counts
as transcendentally real on this interpretation, the representation of acts of
the mind as spontaneity (in generating time, space, and the representation "I
think") must also be accorded transcendental reality; see CPR, B422 and note;
B157-58n; and KMM, chaps. 6-A, 8. A good example of the standard view,
according to which transcendental idealism is simply mind-dependence and
it simply is not asked whether this might mean, more specifically, imagination
dependence, is furnished by Henry Allison: " 'Ideality', in the most general
sense in which Kant uses the term, signifies mind dependence or being in the
mind (in uns); while 'reality' (Realit?t), in the sense in which it is opposed
to 'ideality', signifies independence of mind or being external to the mind
(ausser uns)"; Henry Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1983), 6.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANTS ANALOGES 69
forming a single continuous succession (while from confused percep

tions of agglomerations of colored and/or tactile points we first be
come conscious of the idea of space). In considering how to interpret
transcendental idealism we must therefore ask, How can this depiction
of the receptivity of our minds be said to differ in any fundamental
respect from the way Kant's own position is customarily portrayed? I
can detect no substantive difference between the pre-Kantian consen
sus that the sensory given is a flux and the standard interpretation of
transcendental idealism, according to which our minds are so consti
tuted that the manifold data offered by the senses originally present
themselves in relations of succession. By contrast, a truly fundamen
tal divide separating Kant from his predecessors results when we in
terpret his doctrine as I propose. Succession is then nothing more
than the manner in which the imagination apprehends the nonsuc
cessive, nonjuxtaposed manifold data of the senses, and has nothing
whatever to do with the way in which that manifold is present preimag
inatively in receptivity.
I have evaluated the two conflicting interpretations of transcen
dental idealism in considerable detail elsewhere, adducing extensive
textual evidence to demonstrate both the correctness and novelty of
my reading.12 Here my purpose is a narrower one: to show this in
terpretation to be crucial to a correct appreciation of the problem Kant
addresses in the Analogies of Experience. The consequence of re
moving sensations from space and time (juxtaposition and succession)
is the confinement of the latter to pure imagination. That is, space
and time can never be apprehended in perception, and everything that
can (that is, the a posteriori) is devoid of existence in space and time
(that is, it neither occupies nor contains space or time). Since, for
Kant, the only reality ever present to us is that given in sensation, this
means that space and time are deprived of all objectivity (empirical
reality), and so risk being reduced to mere fictions. Hence, on the
interpretation I propose, the transcendental idealist is confronted with
a demand to demonstrate the objective reality of space and time vis
?-vis precisely those immediately apprehended data of perception of
which, on the standard interpretation, they are presupposed to hold!
Further, it was Kant's genius to recognize that this problem and the
Humean challenge are but two sides of the same coin. He saw that
the a priori application to appearances of the concepts of cause (with
12 See KMM, Introduction and Part 1.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
70 WAYNE WAXMAN
its implication that the existence of the cause necessarily precedes

that of the effect) and substance (with its implication of permanent
existence)?that is, the application of the very concepts whose a priori
objective employment Hume questioned?would serve to place all ob
jects of perception within a single, all-embracing network of relations
of space and time, thereby effectively objectifying space and time.13
Two strands of Kantian thought that previously could not be fit to
gether?the ideality of space and time and the objective validity of
metaphysical concepts?were thus fused into a single problem with a
single solution. In particular, Kant could concede Hume's point (in
stead of dogmatically rejecting it as transcendental realists were
obliged to do) that concepts such as "cause" and "substance" have no
inherent application to objects, and nevertheless affirm their a priori
objective validity on grounds Hume himself would never have ques
tioned: that is, as conditions of the possibility that perceptions actually
exist in relations of juxtaposition and succession.
My proposal will be examined in detail below. Here, however,
we need only recognize that since, on the standard interpretation of
transcendental idealism, the problem of objectifying space and time
does not even exist (since objects of perception are presumed already
to exist in relations of succession and juxtaposition), its espousal pre
cludes any such approach to the Humean challenge. That the stan
dard interpretation leaves Kant without the problem of objectifying
space and time, and so no way of surmounting the Humean challenge,
is evident also from the following consideration. The Analogies form
part of a transcendental system of principles which, according to Kant,
amount to nothing less than the creation of nature and its laws by the
faculty of understanding:
The order and regularity in appearances which we call nature we our
selves introduce, and could never be found there had we, or the nature
of our mind, not originally put it there. . . . The understanding is thus
not merely a capacity to produce rules through a comparison of appear
ances: it is itself the law-giver for nature, i.e. without understanding there
would be no nature at all. ... So, however exaggerated and absurd it
may sound, to say that understanding is itself the source of the laws of
nature, and thence of the formal unity of nature, is correct.14
13 A priori validity, as Kant understands it, betokens the necessary and

universal application of these concepts to appearances.
14 CPR, A125-7; see also A114. This view is reaffirmed in the B edition
Deduction: "That the laws of appearances in nature must agree with the un
derstanding and its a priori form ... is no stranger than that the appear
ances themselves must agree with the form of a priori sensible intuition. For

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANT'S ANALOGIES 71
Texts like this put two things quite beyond doubt. First, principles of
pure understanding like the Analogies are supposed not simply to be
valid of nature but actually to create it; that is, they not only hold of
our experience of objects (as with Hume) but are constitutive of the
objects themselves which make such experience possible. Second,
this creative, constitutive role premises transcendental idealism in the
notion that nature (that is, the entire spatiotemporal cosmos) is noth
ing but our own representation, subject a priori to the faculties of
sensibility and understanding. The pure concepts involved in the
Analogies find their place in this scheme as the source of the time in
which appearances exist (that is, of objective time, as distinct from
the subjective time which is merely the form of their apprehension in
intuition).15 They are thus constitutive specifically of that which Kant
calls experience: the ordered whole of appearances in which each ap
pearance has determinate time-relations of duration, succession, and
simultaneity (one Analogy per mode of time)16 with respect to every
other. (Experience, in this sense, involves inference and should be con
trasted with immediate intuition and perception.)17 Yet, any such cre
ative, constitutive role for understanding is precluded by the standard
interpretation of transcendental idealism, according to which appear
ances already exist in relations of time, simply by virtue of the forms
of sensibility in accordance with which sensations originally present
themselves in the mind, and so prior to and independently of their
apprehension by imagination in intuition. What need is there then for
constitutive principles of pure understanding to endow appearances
with existence in time? Any would-be objective time the understand
ing and imagination might fashion for epistemic purposes would then
laws no more exist in the appearances but only relatively to the sub
ject . . . insofar as it has understanding, than appearances exist in them
selves but only relatively to this same being insofar as it has senses"; CPR,
B163-4.
15 "By means of these rules the existence of every appearance can be
determined in respect of the unity of time"; CPR, A176/B219.
16 There are three Analogies not only because there are three categories
of relation but also so that objective time may be constituted in each of its
three modes: duration, succession, simultaneity.
17 The Analogies hold only "under the condition of empirical thought in
one experience, and thence only mediately and indirectly"; CPR, A160/B200.
Following Hume, Kant situates necessary connection not in perception but in
empirical thought: "no necessity determining their connection is or can be
revealed in the perceptions themselves"; CPR, B219. Intuition and percep
tion have their own constitutive principles of pure understanding: the Axioms
of Intuition and the Anticipations of Perception (see section II-B below).

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
72 WAYNE WAXMAN
be reduced to an idle fiction, its pretensions to objectivity mocked by

the subjective flux of sense in which appearances really exist. Kant's
Analogies could have at most the validity of thought determinations,
that is, of Humean style fictions of how appearances must be regarded
(irrespective of how they really are) if we are to think them as objects
existing in nature; in that case, however, no pretense could be made
that there are synthetic a priori propositions genuinely determinative
of experience and its objects. In short, on the standard interpretation
of transcendental idealism, the whole Kantian enterprise, displaying
understanding in a creative, constitutive role, promptly collapses.
No such difficulty arises if transcendental idealism is understood
as the thesis that space and time (including succession) have no reality
outside or independently of imagination. With time no more than the
ideal form of the apprehension of the manifold of sensation in imagi
nation, this manifold itself lacks existence in time; that is, it is alto
gether devoid of temporal relation. This means that, given immediate
consciousness alone (that is, intuition and perception), there can be
no objective time of appearances (even existence as a mere flux) dis
tinct from the purely formal successiveness of the mode of their ap
prehension. Since appearances which are atemporal (and aspatial)
in respect of existence are not suitable objects for possible experience,
however, transcendental idealism, properly construed, leads directly
to the demand for principles capable of determining their existence in
relations of time a priori: principles not of intuition or perception but
of inference founded on repeated experience (association). This is
the demand satisfied by the Analogies of Experience: to create a time
comprehending the existence of appearances where otherwise there
is none18?for instance, the irreversible order of existence that follows
when one event is determined as cause and another as its effect. They
achieve this by means of concepts of necessary connection capable of
uniting all appearances in relations of existential dependence: from
such connections, relations of time are inferable which, because they
are founded on determinations of the existence of appearances, count
as genuinely real and objective.19 Thus, the problematic of the Anal
ogies will be obscured from us so long as we remain wedded to a
18 In respect solely of what is given immediately in intuition and per

ception.
19 "Since they [namely, concepts of relation that connect perceptions
according to their existence] carry necessity with them, it follows that ex
perience is only possible through a representation of the necessary connec

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANTS ANALOGES 73
conception of transcendental idealism according to which appear

ances already have existence in time, and so stand in no need of con
cepts of pure understanding to receive such existence.
II
A. To comprehend Kant's problem in the Analogies with sufficient

precision, we first need to gain a better understanding of two things:
the pure intuition of time of the Transcendental Aesthetic, and the two
principles of pure understanding that precede the Analogies?the Ax
ioms of Intuition and the Anticipations of Perception. The crucial
point concerning pure time?or rather pure space and time together?
is that they are nothing more or less than the particular form assumed
by the original synthetic unity of the manifold (that is, original, tran
scendental apperception, "The Supreme Principle of all Employment
of the Understanding")20 in beings whose sensibility is constituted like
ours. Where is this stated? As Hegel remarked,
tion of perceptions"; CPR, B219. In this, as in so much else, Kant is following

a path first marked out by Hume: "the mind stops not there. For finding,
that with this system of perceptions [of the senses and memory], there is
another connected by custom, or if you will, by the relation of cause or ef
fect, ... it forms them into a new system, which it likewise dignifies with
the title of realities. . . . 'Tis this later principle, which peoples the world,
and brings us acquainted with such existences, as by their removal in time
and place, lie beyond the reach of the senses and memory. By means of it I
paint the universe in my imagination, and fix my attention on any part of it I
please. ... All this, and every thing else, which I believe, are nothing but
ideas; tho' by their force and settled order, arising from custom and the re
lation of cause and effect, they distinguish themselves from the other ideas,
which are merely the offspring of the imagination"; David Hume, A Treatise
of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clar
endon Press, 1978), 73^4, 108. See Waxman, Hume's Theory of Conscious
ness, chap. 4.
20 CPR, B136 (from title of ?17). Time and space are to be identified
with transcendental apperception not in its most general signification (that
is, the synthetic unity of the manifold in general) but only in respect of the
specific form in which it is realized given a sensibility constituted like ours.
See also CPR, B150, B159-60, A177/B220. In Kant's notes, one finds remarks
like these: uConsciousness of oneself (apperceptio) is an act whereby in gen
eral the subject makes itself into an object. It is yet no perception (appre
hensio simplex), i.e., no sense representation (for which it is required that
the subject be affected by means of some object, and the intuition becomes
empirical), but pure intuition, which under the names of space and time con
tain merely the form of composition (coordinatio, et subordinatio) of the

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
74 WAYNE WAXMAN
It is not where it ought to be, in the transcendental exposition of these

forms [in the Transcendental Aesthetic], but only in the sequel, when, in
the deduction of the categories, the original synthetic unity of appercep
tion finally comes to the fore and is recognized as the principle of figu
rative synthesis, or the forms of intuition. There, space and time are
conceived as synthetic unities, and the productive imagination, i.e. spon
taneity and absolute synthetic activity, as the principle of sensibility
which previously had been characterized only as a receptivity.21
While there are at least two passages in the A edition of the Transcen
dental Deduction (1781) where the careful reader can discern Kant's
view that space and time are original a priori synthetic unities founded
on pure understanding,22 it is only in the B edition (1787) that one finds
it spelled out explicitly and unequivocally. The first such occasion is
the following:
Space and time, and all their parts, are intuitions, and are thus, with their
manifold, singular representations (see the Transcendental Aesthetic).
They are thus not mere concepts, through which the very same con
sciousness is contained in many representations, but, on the contrary,
contain many representations in one, and in the consciousness of that
representation. . . . The unity of that consciousness is therefore syn
thetic and yet also original.2*
This remark, with its explicit reference to the Transcendental Aes

thetic, was appended as a footnote to the assertion that "all the mani
fold of intuition should be subject to conditions of the original syn
thetic unity of apperception"; hence, there can be no doubt that the
outcome of subjecting the manifold to these conditions, given a sen
sibility constituted as ours is, is the pure space and time of the Aes
thetic. This thesis is reformulated shortly afterward, when Kant states
that "the pure form of intuition in time, merely as an intuition in gen
eral which contains a given manifold, is subject to original unity of
consciousness simply through the necessary relation of the manifold
of intuition to a single (zum Einen) T think'; hence, through the pure
manifold of intuition; with them [results] an a priori principle of synthetic

cognition of the manifold which for just this reason makes the object in
appearance representable"; KGS, vol. 22, p. 413; see also pp. 16, 74, 90, 105,
364, 435.
21 G. W. F. Hegel, Glauben und Wissen, in Werke in Zwanzig B?nden
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969), 2:297 (my translation).
22 See CPR, A99-100, A107.
23 B136n; corresponds closely to A107.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANTS ANALOGES 75
synthesis of the understanding which underlies the empirical synthe

sis." Finally, in section 26, the culminating section of the Transcen
dental Deduction of the categories, space and time serve as the essen
tial link between perceived appearances, on the one hand, and the
categories, on the other; and Kant states quite categorically that they
are able to discharge this mediating role only because they themselves
are an original, preconceptual synthetic unity of the apprehended
manifold:
Space . . . contains a combination of the manifold given according to

the form of sensibility in an intuitive representation, so that . . . the
formal intuition gives unity of representation. In the Aesthetic, this
unity was credited solely to sensibility merely in order to indicate that
it precedes all concepts, though to be sure it does presuppose a synthesis
not belonging to the senses which yet first makes possible all concepts
of space and time. For since through it (in that understanding deter
mines sensibility) space and time are first given as intuitions, the unity
of this a priori intuition belongs to space and time, not to the concept
of the understanding (cf. ?24).
Kant could not have been plainer: the pure space and time of the Tran
scendental Aesthetic could not even be given as intuitions did the un
derstanding not impart synthetic unity to the manifold offered by sense
by means of the transcendental synthesis of imagination.
The identification of space and time (but particularly time since
only to it are all appearances subject, outer no less than inner) with
the synthetic unity of apperception in the Transcendental Deduction
is the single most crucial, yet in recent times most widely overlooked,
element in Kant's system of experience. In my view, we can follow
his reasoning through each stage in the unfolding of that system only
when we have conditioned ourselves to read "time" whenever he
states that, in the absence of synthetic unity of apperception, expe
rience would be impossible. A particularly illuminating example, with
24 CPR, B160n; corresponds closely to A99-100. Kant's reference to ?24

at the end indicates that the synthesis in question is the transcendental syn
thesis of imagination (for a detailed analysis of this text, see KMM, ch. 2.).
Also: "One can and must concede that space and time are mere thought en
tities and creatures of the imagination"; Immanuel Kant, On A Discovery,
KGS, vol. 8, Ak 203; "Space is itself a synthesis a priori"; KGS, vol. 18, ?5876
(1783-4); "Space and time are of course not objects of intuition, but merely
its subjective forms. They do not exist apart from representations and are
given only in the subject; i.e. their representation is an act of the subject itself
and a product of the imagination for the sense of the subject"; KGS, vol. 22,
p. 76.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
76 WAYNE WAXMAN
special relevance to the Analogies, is the following passage from the

A edition of the Transcendental Deduction:
If this unity of association were not also to have an objective ground
which makes it impossible that appearances should be apprehended by
imagination otherwise than under the condition of a possible synthetic
unity of this apprehension, it would then be entirely contingent that ap
pearances should fit into a coherent whole of human cognition. For
even though we should have the power of associating perceptions, it
would remain entirely undetermined and contingent whether they would
also themselves be associable; and should they not be associable, there
might be a multitude of perceptions, and indeed even an entire sensibil
ity, in which much empirical consciousness would be found in my mind,
but separately, and without belonging to a consciousness of myself:
which, however, is impossible. For it is only because I ascribe all per
ceptions to one consciousness (original apperception) that I can say
regarding all perceptions that I am conscious of them. There must
therefore be an objective ground. . . . This can be found nowhere save
in the principle of the unity of apperception. . . . According to this, all
appearances must . . . be so apprehended that they conform with unity
of apperception, which would be impossible without synthe
tic unityOKin their connection, which therefore is itself objectively
necessary.
This text bears directly on the Analogies because its focu

ation and its conditions (thus recalling Hume's account o
effect in terms of customary association).26 The claim t
tion demands an objective ground which makes it possible f
ceptions to belong to one consciousness should, in my vie
25 CPR, A121-2. This should be read in conjunction with sect

the B Deduction, in which apprehension is brought into conformi
inal apperception by virtue of being subject to the formal intuit
and time.
26 This is confirmed by the specification of the synthesis as connection
(Verkn?pfung): the species of combination (Verbindung) which is the exclu
sive province of the Analogies. (I exclude the Postulates of Empirical
Thought since they are merely subjective principles, not principles constitu
tive of objects?see CPR, A219/B266.) See CPR, B201n and the B edition
formulation of the general principle of the Analogies at B219. It should be
remarked, however, that it was never Kant's intention to assert that powers
of association of the kind to be found in animals depend on apperception,
and thence on intuition of the space and time of the Transcendental Aesthetic.
For insofar as such association (unlike the Humean variety) does not presup
pose the union of the manifold of different apprehensions in synthetic unitary
time, it is independent of the conditions of cognition and experience.
(Kantian psychology, especially the account given in the A edition Transcen
dental Deduction, is geared toward, and contingent upon, apprehension's and
reproduction's lending themselves to the cognition of objects existing in ob
jective space and time, but this does not mean they do so essentially; see
especially my discussions of Kant on animal consciousness in KMM, 200-1.)

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANTS ANALOGES 77
simply as a call for all appearances to stand together in a single

(synthetic-unitary) time. If appearances did not successively exist in
one and the same time, how could they belong together in one con
sciousness and so be amenable to association? Kant's thesis that time
is our form of sensibility, properly understood, is simply another way
of saying that all appearances must stand together (exist) in time if
they are all to be mine. Conversely, for perceptions to arise in a
sensibility detached from a consciousness of myself would be simply
for there to be, instead of one time intuition which precedes and makes
possible all particular times (the original synthetic unity of the mani
fold), a plurality of separated, ununifiable times. It is difficult to see
how else to make sense of this text: only if we recall that, for Kant,
time is the form of our sensibility (that is, that in the intuition of which
all possible appearances are contained),27 can we understand how,
without original apperception (that is, time, in humans) "there might
be a multitude of perceptions, and indeed even an entire sensibility,
in which much empirical consciousness would be found in my mind,
but separately, and without belonging to a consciousness of myself."
For all intents and purposes, a sensibility separated from myself is, by
Kantian lights, a distinct person: "the manifold representations which
are given in a certain intuition would not all be my representations if
they did not all belong to one self-consciousness."28 Indeed, since the
perceptions belonging to such a sensibility could not be supposed to
fall within the same temporal nexus (that is, the same synthetically
unified manifold) as that in relation to which my self-consciousness
(analytic unity of apperception) is defined, more than merely demar
cating a different person, that sensibility would quite literally inhabit
a different universe, detached from and utterly unknown to the sen
sibility definitive of me and my universe.29 The avoidance of such a
27 See CPR, A34/B50, B136n.

28 CPR, B132.
29 It should be noted that the "me" (that is, the "I think") in question is
not to be equated with my self or person?which normally happens when,
thanks to the usual reading of transcendental idealism, the "I," or subject of
experience, is set into time; see KMM, 265 n. 17. Representations do not
exist in time, pre-imaginatively; Kant's "I" is therefore not a Cartesian-type
perduring substratum, a catch-basin in which a succession of momentarily
existing representations are retained, but something real that is neither ap
pearance nor thing in itself (see CPR, B422n). More importantly, not only
does the empirical self exist in time, it is merely one object (phenomenon) in
the universe of space and time among all the rest and has exactly the same

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
78 WAYNE WAXMAN
scenario is both the principal consequence of and the rationale for

adopting the transcendental idealist thesis that time is nothing other
than a form of our sensibility.
In addition to having demonstrated the sensible and intuitive char
acter of time, Kant prefaced the Transcendental Analytic with the
Transcendental Aesthetic in order to establish time's uniqueness and
its unicity, that is, to establish that all times are contained within a
single, all-embracing time and that this one time, far from being an
aggregate composed of particular times, precedes them and makes
them possible. The two features together yield the original synthetic
unity of the Analytic?a sensibility encompassing all possible repre
sentations, a truly universal self-consciousness.30 For, in the absence
of unicity, there might be a succession of times (that is, of distinct
apprehensions of manifolds in inner intuition) but nothing to unite
them as representations belonging to one and the same sensibility.
Time, so construed, would not then give form to our sensibility by
unifying distinct apprehensions; and since it is only as such a form that
Kant's ideal time is able to manifest itself to consciousness in the first
place, the result would be, in effect, fleetingly existing, detached
sensibilities, incapable of being brought together in a single self
consciousness. In the absence of uniqueness, there would be a mul
titude of times unconjoined and uncontained by any other. Though
each might still be characterized by unicity (that is, it might constitute
relation to the "I think" as any other: an ordinary objective representation

produced when the "I," as subject of judgment, unites some synthesis of a
manifold in a concept (see Kant's definition of an object at B137). As that
in which all objects are contained, psychological no less than material, the "I
think" is most appropriately denominated universal self-consciousness (one
of Kant's several designations for apperception at B132). Thus, insofar as
subjective unitary sensibility is to be equated with the objective infinity of
space and time, the sensibility in question is that corresponding to universal,
not individual, self-consciousness (otherwise, the universe of objective space
and time would be present in something which is present in them).
30 See the previous note. Besides being the keystone of Kant's theory
of objectivity, universal self-consciousness has a logical dimension of equal
interest and importance. Any representation, in being thought, is thereby
(namely, through its relation to the "I think") related to every other possible
representation, and thus acquires a genuinely universal scope (that is, a po
tentially universal application). This theory of universals without words
therefore avoids, on one side, Lockean abstractionism (since concepts are
not universal in content, only in [potential] application) and, on the other, the
ersatz universals of Humean association. See the discussion of Kant's po
sition in Waxman, Hume's Theory of Consciousness, ch. 3-B.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANTS ANALOGES 79
a sensibility embracing a plurality of manifolds apprehended according

to a certain form), since no single one necessarily encompasses all the
others, the universal self-consciousness on which Kant bases the pos
sibility of experience (objectively grounded association) would be nul
lified.
What this means can perhaps best be grasped, for our purposes,
by considering its implications vis-?-vis Humean association. First,
Hume simply takes for granted that the immediately apprehended ob
jects of consciousness ("perceptions" in his terminology) exist as a
flux (that is, as a time series). Next, he supposes that, when enough
resemblances between sequences of perceptions have been observed
at various points in the time series, the imagination associates them
in relations of constant conjunction (as when sensations of heat and
bright flickering light are regularly observed to precede sensations of
billowing grey, certain noxious fumes, a choking feeling, and so forth).
Finally, the constantly conjoined perceptions become united in imag
ination by custom, such that the existence of present phenomena is
deemed dependent on predecessors (for instance a hot, bright flick
ering light becomes for us the cause and the billowing grey the ef
fect).31 From Kant's point of view, Hume's failure was to have simply
presupposed the unity of time in the succession of perceptions (that
is, their all belonging to the same sensibility), without inquiring into
the conditions whereby alone such unity is possible. Had he done so,
he might have recognized that a priori principles of necessary connec
tion (namely, the Analogies) are the only way otherwise atemporal
perceptions can come to exist in determinate time relation to one an
other (that is, as a time series); and because synthetic unitary time is
essential to inference-based experience (that is, the world of judgment
founded on customary association),32 this would have obliged him to
admit that his psychological account of such experience presupposes
a transcendental grounding. Without conformity a priori to concepts
of necessary connection, perceptions could not be represented as
31 See Hume, Treatise, 252ff. Hume's commitment to the transcenden

tal reality of succession is clear also on pp. 635-6. (For Kant's own affir
mation of the "flux" see, for instance, CPR, A381-2?but see also notes 33
and 73 below). Indeed, in my view, it is the source of the dilemma described
in the appendix on personal identity (633ff); see Wayne Waxman, "Hume's
Quandary Concerning Personal Identity," Hume Studies 18, no. 2 (November
1992): 233-53. For a fuller account of Hume's views on custom and neces
sary connection, see Waxman, Hume's Theory of Consciousness, chap. 5.
32 See Hume, Treatise, 108.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
80 WAYNE WAXMAN
themselves forming a time series, and the possibility of taking cogni

zance of resembling sequences of perceptions scattered through that
series and associating them in relations of cause and effect would be
precluded.33
B. In order fully to understand what is at stake in the Analogies,
it is necessary to consider their relation to the two principles of pure
understanding which precede them, the Axioms of Intuition and the
Anticipations of Perception. When Kant designated these two prin
ciples constitutive and the Analogies only regulative,34 he did so with
a quite precise meaning. For him there are only two constituents of
appearances: the spatial or temporal form of their intuition and the
sensation matter of their perception. The Axioms are a constitutive
principle of objects of intuition, and the Anticipations a constitutive
principle of objects of perception. Because there are but two con
stituents of appearances, no other principles of pure understanding
constitutive in respect of appearances are possible. But it should not
be overlooked that, while only regulative with regards to intuition and
perception, the Analogies are nevertheless "constitutive in respect of
experience, "35 that is, in respect of synthesis of perceptions.36
To understand how there can be a place for principles constitutive
of the objects of experience which yet are merely regulative in respect
of the appearances from which they are synthesized, one must first
appreciate the constraints transcendental idealism, properly under
stood, imposes on the Axioms and Anticipations. According to Kant,
33 "The general principle of all three Analogies rests on the necessary

unity of apperception in respect of all possible empirical consciousness (i.e.
all perception) at each time, and consequently ... on the synthetic unity of
all appearances as regards their relation in time"; CPR, A176/B220. This of
course does not complete the story of how Kant raised questions bearing on
the possibility of the representation of the subjective flux and thereby refuted
subjective idealism from the inside. The coup de grace is delivered in the
section entitled "Refutation of Idealism," in which Kant maintains that the
existence of appearances in space (where alone it is possible to represent the
permanent substratum necessary for time-determination described in the
First Analogy) is a precondition for their having an existence in time (see
B275-9; also B291-4).
34 See CPR, A179/B222.
35 CPR, A664/B692 (my emphasis).
36 Experience is defined as the synthesis of perceptions described in the
Analogies themselves (see CPR, B218) and elsewhere as well (see B161,
B164-5, A764/B792).

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANTS ANALOGES 81
"reality, in the pure concept of the understanding, is that which cor

responds to a sensation in general."37 This claim makes perfect sense
provided one recognizes that, for him, "ideal" means "imagination
dependent." Thus, as forms of synthesis which exist only in and for
imagination, space and time are ideal, whereas sensations, as prior to
and independent of imagination (and so too prior to and independent
of space and time) are real: "Since time is only the form of intuition,
and so of objects as appearances, that in the objects which corre
sponds to sensation is the transcendental matter of all objects as things
in themselves (thinghood, reality)."38 Yet if, as the standard interpre
tation of transcendental idealism would have it, sensations originally
presented themselves in the mind in relations of succession, then like
succession (time) itself they too would be transcendentally ideal. By
contrast, if understood as atemporal, they must be regarded as tran
scendentally real constituents of our representation, which, if they
have any ground at all, must be referred to things in themselves?just
as Kant claimed to be the case.39 Since, however, things in themselves
can never be given in intuition, and so cannot be determined in con
formity with space and time or the categories, they are useless for
purposes of cognitive experience. Thus, in order for concepts of re
ality to acquire a priori objective validity on the one hand and, on the
other hand, to make possible a phenomenal objective reality, the re
ality defined by sensations must somehow be transferred to appear
ance; and this is precisely what the principle of the Anticipations of
Perception enunciates: "in all appearances, the sensation, and the real
corresponding to it in the object (realitas ph nomenon), has an in
tensive magnitude, i.e. a degree."40
Perception, for Kant, is consciousness in which there is sensation;
it thus not only betokens empirical consciousness, but also conscious
ness of the real.41 The implication here of Kant's transcendental ide
37 CPR, A143/B182.
38 CPR, A143/B182. Wille, and Kemp Smith after him, add a "not", thus
reversing the sense of this text to bring it into accord with their conception
of transcendental idealism. See also Kant, Prolegomena, pt. 1, remark 3;
Immanuel Kant, First Principles of Natural Science-, KGS, vol. 4, Ak. 481;
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, Intro. VII (2d ed.) and ?1, and note
7 above.
39 See CPR, A30/B45. The only other transcendentally real constituent
of our representation is spontaneity (see CPR, B422-3n; KMM, chap. 7).
40 CPR, A166.
41 See CPR, B147, A225/B272-3, and A373ff.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
82 WAYNE WAXMAN
alism, understood as I propose, is that, like sensations themselves,

the cognizable, phenomenal reality which corresponds to them nei
ther contains nor occupies space and time (which is why it has no
extensive magnitude: "since neither the intuition of space nor that of
time is to be met with in it, its magnitude is not extensive . . . but
intensive").42 Accordingly, time and space, in and of themselves,
lack all perceptible objective reality (hence their purity and ideality),
while, on the other hand, real objects of perception lack determinate
existence in time and space. That is, precisely insofar as appear
ances constitute realities in their own right, distinct from their ap
prehension in accordance with pure time, they are entirely devoid of
temporal or spatial relation. With this, we come face to face with
the reason, given transcendental idealism, that constitutive princi
ples of experience, over and above those of appearance, are indis
pensable. Unless and until realities apprehended in perception are
set in determinate relations of time (that is, unless and until such
reality is determined as temporal existence), unity of consciousness
(that is, all perceptions belonging to one and the same sensibility),
and so objective experience, will be impossible.
Because a time in which the realities of perception actually exist
is not "already there" waiting for imagination to represent it, tran
scendental idealism makes the possibility of experience hinge on our
ability to produce such a time via principles of pure understanding.
Since neither intuition nor perception (that is, immediate representa
tion) are fit for the task, there is no option left for Kant but to posit
the philosophically unprecedented idea of determinative discursivity
to fill the breech: constitutive principles of objects which yet hold only
"under the condition of empirical thought in one experience, and
thence only mediately and indirectly."43 Securing the possibility of
42 CPR, B208. See also Kant, Prolegomena, ?24, ?26; KGS, vol. 4.
43 CPR, A160/B200; see also note 17 above. It should be noted that the
Axioms and Anticipations are principles not of the form and matter of ap
pearances per se (as pure space and time are, vis-?-vis their form) but only
of their judgment in discursive understanding. The Axioms concern the con
ceptualization of intuition, for instance, its construction in accordance with
a previously obtained concept of space or time; it thus yields cognizable ob
jects of intuition, where "object" is understood as an object of a concept (in
the sense of B137: that in the concept of which the manifold is united). Like
wise, the Anticipations concern the conceptualization of perception, and

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANTS ANALOGES 83
experience by bringing time out of pure imagination into perceptible

reality thus proves to be possible only by means of pure concepts of
necessary connection whose a priori objective validity rest solely on
their ability to function as surrogates for pure time in the field ap
pearance. In this capacity, Kant characterized these concepts?the
relational categories of substance and accident, cause and effect, and
community?as exponents, the express purpose of the Analogies being
none other than to explicate their time-surrogacy:
Our analogies . . . exhibit the unity of nature in the interconnection

[Zusammenhange] of all appearances under certain exponents, which
express nothing other than the relationship of time (insofar as all exis
tence is encompassed within it) to the unity of apperception, which can
only take place in synthesis according to rules.44
C. Kant's problem in the Analogies of Experience has commonly

been interpreted as the question how, given the subjectivity of percep
tion, objective cognition can arise; for if nothing is ever before us but
mere representations, how can an object distinct from them be given
or cognized through them? But in addition to what was said earlier
regarding the inadequacy of this conception, it teeters on the brink of
(and often falls into) a related misconception: that at least subjectiv
ity?the solipsistic world of an enduring self?is given immediately.
As is well known, however, Kant made quite plain in his Refutation of
thereby its construction as an intensive quantity. Both principles make pos

sible empirical laws governing judgments which bear on objects of immedi
ate consciousness and not repeated experience (association, constant con
junction).
44 CPR, A216/B263 (rules = concepts); also A159/B198, A331/B387, A416/
B443. "To exponiate a representation of the imagination means to bring it
to concepts"; Kant, Critique of Judgment ?57, remark 1; KGS, vol. 5. "We
must exponiate [exponieren] concepts if we are unable to construct them.
We cannot construct appearances, although we can intuitions. But we must
have rules of their exposition. These rules . . . are actually conditions of
apprehension in their transition from one to the next . . . The principle:
everything that is thought stands under a rule, for only by means of a rule is
it an object of thought"; KGS, vol. 17, ?4678 (1773-5). We cannot construct
appearances precisely because the reality they contain corresponds to sen
sation, and so can only be given a posteriori. The reference to rules that are
conditions governing the transition from one appearance to the next in ap
prehension seems to be an allusion to the Analogies (for instance, the concept
of cause and effect renders the order of apprehension irreversible?see CPR,
B234, A192-7/B237-42).

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
84 WAYNE WAXMAN
Idealism that the empirical subject is not representable unless a per

manent is likewise representable;45 and since the possibility of a per
manent in our representation is founded on the First Analogy, the em
pirical subject too is possible only "under the condition of empirical
thought in one experience, and thence only mediately and indirectly."46
Hence, where there is as yet only immediate intuition and perception,
an enduring self (that is, personal identity over time) is just as unrepre
sentable as empirical objectivity generally (things distinct from and
independent of our apprehension). Indeed, the same seems to be true
of the self transcendentally as well. According to Kant, the transcen
dental representation "I think" (analytic unity of apperception)?and
so too the thought of its correlate, the transcendental object47?pre
suppose the synthetic unity of the manifold in one, universal self-con
sciousness (the synthetic unity of apperception).48 As emerged ear
lier, however, universal self-consciousness is possible only if all
representations exist together in one, synthetic unitary time; this pos
sibility Kant likewise predicates on the Analogies ("Our analo
gies . . . express nothing other than the relationship of time, insofar
as all existence is encompassed within it, to the unity of appercep
tion").49 Hence, the subjective succession of apprehension prominent
in all three Analogies must not be construed as the perspective either
of an empirical or a transcendental "I"; it is instead a blind, unself
conscious, immediate apprehension in imagination of the flux simply
as such.50
45 See CPR, B275-9.

46 That the Analogies presuppose empirical thought is stated at CPR,
A160/B200, and that "this T (a mere thought) may ... be just as much in
flux as the remaining thoughts which are linked to one another by its means"
at A364.
47 The transcendental object, as described at CPR, A109-10 and A250-1,
is the correlate of synthetic unity of apperception, and so has to be thought
through given sensible data (in contrast to the negative noumenon, in the
concept of which we abstract from the sensible mode of our intuition). See
note 4 above.
48 This dependence is clearest at CPR, A364 (the end of which is quoted
in note 46 above). The presupposition of synthetic unity of apperception by
the analytic unity of apperception is stated at B133. Regarding "universal
self-consciousness" see notes 29-30 above.
49 CPR, A216/B263.
50 It is probably no accident that this awareness corresponds so closely
to the scene Hume painted in his theater analogy of the mind ("I may venture
to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collec
tion of different perception, which succeed each other with an inconceivable
rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement . . ."; Hume, Treatise,

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANTS ANALOGES 85
D. There is one final potential source of confusion we need to

clear up before turning to the Analogies themselves: the relation be
tween the schemata of the relational categories and the Analogies as
principles. "The schemata of pure concepts of the understanding are
the true and only conditions which procure for these concepts relation
to an object, and thence signification (Bedeutung)."51 Schemata are
as integral to Kant's attempt to surmount the Humean challenge as the
transcendental ideality of space and time. Hume demanded that met
aphysicians present a birth certificate for concepts like cause and ef
fect to demonstrate their nonempirical origin and acquisition without
in any way relying on the unwarrantable theses of rationalist dogma
tism (abstractionism, innatism, preformationism, supernatural inter
vention, and so forth).52 Kant deemed this demand wholly justified.
To meet it he went so far as to reduce such concepts (that is, pure
concepts of an object) to sheer logical functions of judgment, utterly
devoid of objective content, and thus metaphysically so barren that
even Hume might be able to countenance the claim that they have
their origin in pure understanding and are acquired through the mere
act of thought (judgment) itself.53 Schemata of transcendental imag
ination become necessary in consequence of this stripping away of
everything extralogical from the categories in order to supply them
with objective content and relation:
The categories have this peculiarity: only by means of a universal sen

sible condition can they have a determinate signification and relation to
an object. When this condition is omitted from the pure category, it
then contains nothing but the logical function of bringing the manifold
under a concept. From this function by itself, i.e., the form of the con
cept, we cannot cognize and distinguish which object falls under it since
abstraction has been made from the sensible [condition] under which
alone objects can fall under it. Therefore, the categories require, in
addition to the pure concept of the understanding, determinations of
their application to sensibility in general (schemata), without which they
would not be concepts through which an object may be cognized and
distinguished from others but only so many ways of thinking an object
252-3): both portray what inferential thought finds before it, before it sets to
work conjoining perceptions in relations of necessary connection. Kant al
most certainly came across this passage in the German translation of Beattie's
Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1772), of which there is a
modern edition by F. Wolf (Stuttgart-Bad Constatt: Friedrich Neumann, 1973).
The passage is quoted almost in entirety in Beattie's Essay.
51 CPR, A146/B185.
52 See KMM, chap. 3.
53 See esp. Kant, Prolegomena ?28 and ?39; KGS, vol. 4.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
86 WAYNE WAXMAN
for possible intuitions . . . [which] cannot be defined without going in

a circle because the definition would itself be a judgment and thus have
to make use of this [logical] function.54
Yet if it is only through schemata that categories become more than

mere forms of judgment, one may well wonder whether my elucidation
of the problem of the Analogies does not commit Kant to circularity.
For the objective signification and relation to objects the categories of
relation acquire through their schemata are strictly temporal: the per
manence of the real in time (substance); the reality which, whenever
posited, is invariably succeeded by another (cause and effect); and the
simultaneity, in accordance with a universal rule, of the determinations
of one substance with those of another (community).55 But if time is
what alone can give objective meaning to the categories of relation, how
can these concepts in turn be exponents constitutive of time in the field
of appearance? That is, if, as I claim, time derives its objectivity from
the categories of relation, then it does not seem possible that these cat
egories in their turn can derive objective sense and signification from
time; and it follows either that the teachings of the Schematism and the
Principles conflict or that Kant has presupposed each in his explanation
of the other.
This difficulty can actually be resolved quite easily, via the inter
pretation of transcendental idealism expounded above. The schemata
are determinations of the pure time intuition of the Transcendental Aes
thetic.56 Since this time is not real but ideal, it is imperceptible and so
itself in need of objectivization in the field of appearance:
54 CPR, A244-5; see also A242-5, A248-9, B305, A321/B378, A349, B378,
B428, and B431. The logical dimension of Kant's theory of experience is
perhaps the most important of all, yet also the least satisfactorily treated and
most neglected. The only study of the Transcendental Analytic I know which
gives full due to Kant's logic, especially his metaphysical deduction of the
categories from the logical forms of judgment, is B?atrice Longuenesse, Kant
et le pouvoir d?juger (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993). It is a
welcome antidote to the generally prevailing tendency to diminish or ignore
the metaphysical deduction and derive the categories from Newtonian sci
ence by way of principles of time-determination, as well as to those of an
ahistorical bent who pour scorn on Kant's logic without troubling to obtain
the information necessary to understand and evaluate it (by a study especially
of Christian Wolff and Georg Meier, together with KGS, vol. 14, and Kant's
students' lecture notes).
55 See CPR, A143-4/B183-4. I translate Zugleichsein by "simultaneity"
in preference to Kemp Smith's "coexistence"; see note 98 below.
56 See CPR, A138/B177. Keep in mind that the time intuition is nothing
more than a form of synthesis; see sections I and II-A above.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANTS ANALOGES 87
Even space and time, their concepts likewise so pure of everything em

pirical and it so certain that they are represented in the mind completely
a priori, would be without objective validity and without sense and sig
nification [Sinn und Bedeutung] if their necessary use in [the constitu
tion of] objects of experience were not shown; indeed, their represen
tation is a mere schema which always relates to the reproductive
imagination which summons up [herbeiruft] the objects of experience,
apart from which space and time would lack signification. ... An ob
ject cannot be given to a concept otherwise than in intuition; and even
a pure [sensible] intuition, though possible a priori in advance of the
object, can itself only acquire its object, and thence objective validity,
through the empirical intuition of which it is the mere form.57
From this it is plain that there is neither inconsistency nor circularity

in Kant's reasoning in the Analytic of Principles. On the one hand,
the categories of relation are the basis of principles of necessary
connection between distinct appearances; and although these con
nections exist only in and for empirical thought, not immediate in
tuition, the real time-determinateness of appearances (that is, their
existence in relations of succession and simultaneity), in conformity
with the principle of pure synthetic unitary time, may be inferred
from them. In this way, by means of these conceptual surrogates,
pure space and time attain empirical objective sense and significa
tion. On the other hand, real time-determinateness could not be in
ferred from the categories of relation (which in themselves are mere
logical functions) were it not for pure time as determined by the
schema (that is, "the phenomenon, or sensible concept of an object,
in agreement with the category");58 hence, we are only able to com
prehend and utilize the categories of relation as pure concepts of an
object of intuition by means of the sense and signification they ac
quire on the basis of transcendental determination (schemata) of
pure time. The circle is virtuous: pure time gives the categories of
relation the sensible sense and signification that enables us to infer
objective temporal relations between appearances from their neces
sary connections,59 and thereby bestow empirical and objective sense
57 CPR, A156/B195 and A239/B298 (I have added "sensible" based on

Kant's addition?see Kant, Nachtr?ge 118; KGS, vol. 23.) The categories too
are said to be "the pure schema of possible experience"; A237/B296.
58 CPR, A146/B186. Despite Kant's characterization of schemata as sen
sible concepts, they should be thoughts of as intuitions (that is, as intuitions
fashioned in accordance with the rule expressed in a concept, as in mathe
matical construction; see Critique of Judgment ?59; KGS, vol. 5.
59 These connections are arrived at, presumably, in the Humean associ
ative manner, based on the formal time relations of immediate apprehension.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
88 WAYNE WAXMAN
and signification on pure time. The result, therefore, is empirically

real and objective spaces60 and times which nonetheless conform a
priori (thanks to categorial exponents) to the pure synthetic unitary
space and time of the Aesthetic (that is, to the original synthetic unity
of apperception of the Analytic).
Ill
A. The Solution in the First Analogy.61 As in the subsequent

Analogies, Kant's starting point in the first is the thesis that all appre
hension in intuition, as subject to pure time, is successive. (Note that
perceptible qualitative change is irrelevant: even if qualitative identity
The relations thus inferred count as pertaining to the existence of the ap

pearances themselves rather than merely to our empirical consciousness of
them (that is, they count as distinct from and independent of their apprehen
sion). Because the categories are not concepts specifically of space and
time, they require surrogates of their own which are (namely, schemata), in
order thereby to stand in relation to the specific variety of appearance that
results in view of the peculiar constitution of our faculty of intuition.
60 "In all experience something must be sensed, and this is the real of
sensible intuition. Consequently, the space in which we are to set up ex
perience regarding motions must also be capable of being sensed, i.e., must
be indicated by what can be sensed; and this space as the sum total of all
objects of experience and itself an object of experience is called empirical
space. Now, such space insofar as it is material is itself movable. But a
movable space, if its motion is to be capable of being perceived, presupposes
again another enlarged material space in which it is movable, and this en
larged space presupposes just as well another, and so to infinity. . . . The
space in which motion is perceived is a relative space, which itself moves
again"; Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science,
Ak 481; KGS, vol. 4. But because these relative spaces and times are expon
iated by means of concepts which obtain their objective sense and significa
tion from the pure synthetic unitary space and time of the Transcendental
Aesthetic, the uniqueness and unicity of the latter are nevertheless guaranteed
never to be violated (that is, space and time remains, always, one). For the
relation of the latter to the concept of absolute space and time, see CPR,
A430/B457, A452/B480.
61 Since detailed textual analysis of Kant's solution to the problem of the
Analogies would protract this essay unacceptably, I shall restrict myself to a
series of remarks pertaining to my central theme: the importance of tran
scendental idealism to the elaboration of Kant's theory of experience.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANTS ANALOGES 89
is maintained, appearance is be apprehended in intuition as a succes

sion.)62 Since our sensibility is so constituted as always to intuit (ap
prehend) a manifold as successive whether it actually exists as such
or not, the question arises how it is possible to determine the temporal
relations in which the manifold exists objectively, that is, distinct from
and independently of the order of intuition. If time were perceptible,
we could simply read off the temporal positions of each appearance
and thereby determine their temporal relation to one another. Since
time is the pure, merely ideal form of sensibility, however, it is alto
gether absent from appearance (perceptible reality), and appearances
as such are thus devoid of temporal position and relation. So too they
would remain were it not a condition for universal self-consciousness,
and thence of experience and its objects, that all appearances stand
together in a single, synthetic unitary time.63 For this reason, the pos
sibility of experience demands a time-surrogate existing right in per
ceptible reality itself: something real that, as permanent, constitutes
an unalterable substratum in relation to which succession and simul
taneity may be represented objectively, that is, in a manner distinct
62 Those considering, say, Kant's house example (see CPR, A190-1/

B236-7) often overlook the fact that it is not necessary to walk around
the house for the problem of whether the apprehended manifold is suc
cessive or simultaneous in the object to arise: standing quite still our ap
prehension is still successive. Perspective (which presupposes an objec
tively real space in which perceptions already exist) seems to me posterior
to Kant's real question. For a different view see William Harper, "Kant's
Empirical Realism," in Kant on Causality, Freedom, and Objectivity, ed.
William Harper and Ralf Meerbote (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984).
63 It is of the first importance to recognize that Kant's sole warrant for
the objective validity of the categories?that is, their necessity not only to
our thought of objects (which Hume could and did affirm) but to the ob
jects themselves?is their role in the objectification of pure synthetic
unitary space and time (that is, the original synthetic unity of appercep
tion), which thereby renders possible both experience and its objects.
There is no comparable warrant for Kant's metaphysics of nature or his
transition to physics (in the Opus Postumum; KGS, vols. 21-22): their prin
ciples can lay claim to objective validity only insofar as they constitute
instances and/or applications of the transcendental principles of the Ana
lytic of Judgment. Thus, without the transcendental philosophical
grounding provided in the first Critique (especially the Transcendental
Deduction of the Categories), they could count only as mere Humean ne
cessities of thought.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
90 WAYNE WAXMAN
from and independent of the order in which appearances are appre

hended in intuition. This "permanent in relation to which alone ap
pearances can be determined in relations of time is substance in ap
pearance, that is, the real of appearance which, as substrate, remains
ever the same through all change."64
Anyone considering the First Analogy is apt to be perplexed by
Kant's contention that the representation of objective change presup
poses not merely a relatively permanent substratum but an absolutely
permanent one. The explanandum seems neither to demand nor to
warrant a claim that for every change not only must something con
tinue identically the same before, during, and after the change, but
something must exist permanently both into the past and into the fu
ture. Our perplexity vanishes, however, once we recognize that
Kant's real explanandum is not objective change (which can only be
cognized empirically) but objective time, the presupposed "substratum
(as permanent form of intuition) ... in which all change of appear
ances has to be thought" and which "remains and does not change."65
Clearly nothing except what exists permanently, and is thinkable only
through a pure concept original to pure understanding (substance),
can serve as exponent of pure time. An impermanent basis of time
determination could not guarantee the unity of time essential for pos
sible experience, for, as time-proxy, its beginning and end would be
token the beginning and end of time itself. Alternatively, the
representation of any such beginning or end would be possible only
in relation to something else at least relatively permanent in respect
to it, and this something would have to be itself absolutely permanent
or else a regress would ensue (just as if one were to ascribe succession
to time itself, in which case "one would have to think another time in
which this succession would be possible").66 Indeed, since pure syn
thetic unitary time is the form of (the unity of) sensibility, with only
64 CPR, B225.
65 CPR, B224-5; see also A182-3.
66 CPR, A183/B226. The advent of a new substance implies that some
thing comes into existence that is not a determination of any substrate but is
itself a substrate of determinations. There would thus be a first state of that
substance, that is, a determination without any predecessor. Since this de
termination could not be referred to any other determination as its successor,
it would be temporally indeterminate, that is, (since time itself is not percep
tible) its existence could not be determined in relation to synthetic unitary
time. To suppose that this determination could be effected simply by refer
ring it to the state of another substance begs the question: it assumes that
the second substance exists in time relations of precedence and simultaneity

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANTS ANALOGES 91
a relatively permanent time-surrogate multiple sensibilities might re

sult and there "would not be cognition but a rhapsody of perceptions,
unsuitable for a (possible) consciousness in which perceptions were
connected (verkn?pften) in an orderly union (Zusammenhang) ac
cording to rules, and so too for the transcendental and necessary unity
of apperception."67 Thus, only by means of an absolutely permanent,
unalterable reality can appearances be set into time (and vice versa)
and "existence in different parts of the time series acquire a magni
tude, entitled duration."68
The preceding should also serve to make clear why Kant deemed
himself the first philosopher actually in a position to demonstrate the
principle that all change in the objects of perception (appearances)
must be thought in relation to an unchanging permanent substratum
(substance). Empirical grounds suffice only to warrant the supposi
tion of something relatively permanent (for instance, the sun, or the
stars in the night sky), but never anything absolutely permanent; they
thus can make possible time-determination within a limited sphere but
never?as only a surrogate of genuine synthetic unitary time can?
serve as a basis on which to unify all possible realities of perception
in one universal experience. Nor do mere conceptual considerations
suffice, since there is no contradiction in supposing that something be
given in intuition that lacks relation to a permanent ("appearances can
certainly be given in intuition without functions of the understand
ing").69 A permanent reality can be proved necessary only if appear
ances are to have real existence in synthetic unitary time and space,
and so only "under the condition of empirical thought in one experi
ence, and thence only mediately and indirectly."70 This conditional
character is what makes the principle of permanence synthetic, and
so unprovable from mere conceptual considerations alone. Any at
tempt by the dogmatic rationalist to demonstrate that the transient
with respect to the first, and so presupposes that both substances already
exist in one and the same time?yet it is precisely because any such time
(that is, an objective time prior to and independent of categories of necessary
connection) is lacking that conceptual exponents are necessary at all.
Hence, an object of perception without a predecessor is not a possible ex
perience. See CPR, A188/B231.
67 CPR, A156/B195-6.
68 CPR, A183/B226. "Since this substrate thus does not change in its
existence, its quantum in nature can be neither increased nor diminished";
B225.
69 CPR, A90/B122.
70 CPR, A160/B200.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
92 WAYNE WAXMAN
existence of objects of perception entails a permanent existent is

bound to remain open to Hume's charge that we may simply be mis
taking a necessity of our thought of objects for a necessity of the
objects themselves.71 The only way to lay the Humean doubt to rest
and to link all changes in appearance to substance (as its determina
tion) is by reference to the conditions for possible experience, and
above all to a synthetic-unitary time in which appearances exist in time
relations distinct from and independent of their apprehension.72 In
particular, by showing that objective time?even the flux in which
Humean perceptions ostensibly have their existence73?is entirely a
function of a principle of pure understanding founded on pure concepts
of necessary connection, and not vice versa, Kant cut the ground out
from under a Humean-style psychologists account premised on repeated
observations of perceptions, the successive existence of which (that is,
existence in one time, hence one sensibility) is simply presupposed.
B. The Solution in the Second Analogy. The first and decisive
mistake in virtually all commentary on the Second Analogy is the seem
ingly innocuous assumption that Kant's starting point is the thesis that
"representations as such have a temporal order, but nothing about the
temporal order of what they represent can be inferred from their own
temporal order."74 That representations as such do not have a tem
poral order is, in my view, the very raison d'?tre of the Second Anal
ogy. For it is one thing to say that representations are apprehended
as successive in empirical consciousness (owing to the form of sen
sible intuition, pure time) and quite another to say that representations
themselves have temporal order (that is, exist in temporal relations of
71 For Hume, the objects that appear are one and all perceptions. He
held that, for all we are able to know of self-subsistence by pure reason alone,
it makes just as much sense to regard perceptions themselves as self-subsis
tent as any supposed substrate they may be thought to have. See Hume,
Treatise, 207, 233-34, 244, 252.
72 See CPR, A184/B227-8, A736/B764-5.
73 Kant, of course, believed he had demonstrated that representations do
not exist as a flux (they are merely apprehended as such in intuition), espe
cially through the use made of the First Analogy to refute Cartesian skeptical
idealism (see note 33 above). Thus the notion, current through Hume and
beyond, that the time in which appearances exist exactly mirrors the succes
siveness of their apprehension is denied by Kant. Kant's expressed opposi
tion is converted to full agreement if his transcendental idealism is interpreted
in the usual manner.
74 Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cam
bridge University Press, 1987), 244; see also pp. 248-9. This formulation is
his, but the assumption it expresses seems to me quite general.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC34:56 UTC
KANTS ANALOGES 93
succession). To equate the two, it seems to me, is to presuppose

precisely what Kant set out to demonstrate in the Second Analogy:
how, through the category of cause and effect, representations which
in themselves are devoid of temporal determinateness first acquire it,
and so come actually to exist, in their own right, in objective relations
of succession, distinct from and independent of their subjective ap
prehension.75 Confounding the two is a direct and unavoidable con
sequence of adherence to the standard view of transcendental ideal
ism, according to which appearances are preimaginatively given?and
so independently of understanding and empirical thought exist?in
temporal succession.76 Thus, quite apart from saddling Kant with the
starting point of the empirical idealists (especially Hume) to whom he
was opposed, this sets him the impossible task of warranting, entirely
a priori and without invoking a Cartesian deus ex machina, inferences
from the immediately apprehended temporal order of one set of ex
istents to the temporal order of another set of existents which are
never immediately given. It is, therefore, little wonder that interpret
ers have made Kant the butt of repeated accusations of fallacious rea
soning, the unon sequitur of numbing grossness"77 being only the most
famous: their misunderstanding of the most fundamental doctrine of
his philosophy leads them to situate his endeavor to exhibit the cate
gory of cause and effect as the source of a constitutive principle of
experience in the wholly inhospitable setting proper to Descartes and
Berkeley, thereby dooming it to failure.
The hopeless predicament in which Kant, or anyone, is placed if
he assumes that representations as such have a temporal order and
75 This is why, until they are subordinated to the principle of the Second
Analogy, appearances "are in no way differentiated from their apprehension,
i.e., their being taken up into the synthesis of imagination"; CPR, A190/B235.
Apprehension, as we have seen, concerns merely the ideal form of appear
ances in their intuition, not their reality as objects of perception; hence, as
realities (as defined in the Anticipations), they are not in time at all.
76 Again Guyer: "The manifold of subjective states occurs or is given
successively. . . . That is, any pair or series of distinct representations,
whether they represent states of affairs which coexist but are successively or
states which succeed one another and thus comprise the several states of an
actual event or alteration, themselves succeed one another"; Guyer, Kant and
the Claims of Knowledge, 171, 243-4). Although this assumption is usually
implicit, I have never seen it denied and an interpretation of the Second Anal
ogy built thereon.
77 Strawson's phrase (echoing Lovejoy).

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
94 WAYNE WAXMAN
then attempts to reckon with the problem of inferring from their tem
poral order the imperceptible order of the objects they represent is,
in essence, Descartes' predicament. The Cartesian (or, in Kant's ter
minology, skeptical or problematic)78 idealist holds that the only ob
jects ever given to us are our own perceptions, and that their situation
and relations alone are perfectly known. Since the objects percep
tions represent are, by contrast, never directly given to us, how matters
stand with them can only be known by inference from the perceptions
whose cause we presume them to be. Now, these unperceived objects
are supposed to come in two varieties?momentary events and en
during things?and the problem is how to distinguish one from the
other via their representations. If representations truly mirrored their
objects, we should expect momentary perceptions to represent events
and abiding ones to represent enduring things; yet since all apprehen
sion is successive,79 this simply is not the case. (For instance, it is
impossible to distinguish successively apprehending one enduring per
ception from apprehending a succession of exactly resembling ones,
each representative of a distinct event.) The more pressing question
thus becomes, How can fleeting perceptions represent enduring
things? One possibility is that, by displaying a qualitative identity
over time, a series of perceptions warrants our inferring the numerical
identity of their object. But were that so, then, as soon as the quali
tative identity were broken (as by a mere blink of the eyes), we would
have to infer that the object had, at that moment, ceased to exist; nor
would it follow from a qualitative change in its perception that the
represented object must have ceased to exist (Descartes's beeswax,
for instance) or even have changed (the change may only have been
in the lighting, angle of view, or the like). Finally, one must ask what
feature it is of perceptions themselves that prompts us to suppose that
they are merely mental representations of things unperceived outside
the mind; that is, how do they convey to us the idea that not they but
things we never perceive are the true reality?
It is generally supposed that Kant's own questions in the Second
Analogy were of this type, and that he believed the key to their solution
lay in the subordination of perceptions a priori to the law of cause and
78 See CPR, A377, B274.

79 As immediate objects of consciousness, perceptions can be supposed
to exist only so long as they are perceived; and since one cannot perceive
the immediate past or future, they were generally regarded as momentary
existents.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANTS ANALOGES 95
effect (as that which can alone permit "the justification, verification,
or confirmation of the judgments about empirical objects that we
make on the basis of our representations of them").80 The category
of cause and effect is conceived not as originally bestowing temporal
order on our representations but as determining the order they already
have (in virtue of being given by the senses as a flux), that is, fixing
it, rendering it necessary. Thus, once I determine that X is the cause
of Y, I know not only that Y succeeds X but that it must succeed it, so
that even if the representation of Y should sometimes precede that of
Xin apprehension, I still know that the objects?or event as may now
be called?precedes the event Y. Since the objective temporal order
may thereby diverge from the subjective order of apprehension, the
supposed purely epistemol?gica! goal of the Second Analogy is, in this
manner, achieved.
Since Cartesians distinguish representations from the objects they
represent as two distinct kinds of entity?mental and material?they
could find such an account acceptable. Kant's transcendental ideal
ism, however, led him to regard material objects themselves as mere
representations, indeed as "nothing but the sum (Inbegriff) of [suc
cessively apprehended] representations."81 The Kantian idealist is
therefore obliged to assign to one and the same series of representa
tions not one but two distinct, potentially divergent temporal order
ings: their immediately intuited subjective succession in apprehend
ing imagination and their inferred objective succession in discursive
understanding. This means that, with the Cartesian option of distrib
uting these divergent sequences among different sets of existents ex
cluded, the Kantian has no choice but to regard one time series as real
and the other as fictitious whenever they diverge (for instance, when
I see or smell the smoke before seeing the fire). Which is it to be: the
existents we immediately apprehend, or those never given to us and
known only by inference from those which are? Hume's answer is
well known;82 and the fact that the standard account of the Second
80 Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge, 246. Guyer of course is

not alone: in every interpretation known to me, Kant's solution to the problem
of experience in the Analogies reduces, in the end, to epistemic indispensa
bility of one kind or another. See, for instance, the interpretations of Harper,
Robinson, Allison, and Melnick.
81 CPR, A191/B236; see also A104ff.
82 See his criticism of double existence theories; Hume, Treatise,
210-18.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
96 WAYNE WAXMAN
Analogy requires us to give essentially the same answer Hume did

serves more than anything else to expose its basic interpretive fallacy.
For the assumption that representations have temporal order prior to
and independently of their subordination to the inferential principle
of cause and effect leaves its proponent no choice but to view the
subjective time series as the true one and to regard the objective time
series superadded in understanding as fictitious (however indispen
sable this fiction may be epistemically).
Had Kant been ready to content himself with so patently fictitious
a species of "objectivity," he need never have sought an alternative to
Hume's account. Hume never questioned the indispensability of the
principle of cause and effect to our thought of objects; indeed, he
deemed it so essential to all reasoning regarding matters that he
throught that upon its removal, "human nature must immediately per
ish and go to ruin."83 He opposed only the inference, common among
philosophers, from the indispensability of the principle of cause and
effect for our thought of objects to its necessary (or even possible)
validity in respect of the objects themselves: "Obscurity and error be
gin then to take place, and we are led astray by a false philoso
phy . . . when we transfer the determination of the thought to exter
nal objects, and suppose any real intelligible connexion betwixt them;
that being a quality which can only belong to the mind that considers
them."84 Therefore, for Kant actually to refute Hume, he needs to
show nothing less than that the objects themselves (Hume's percep
tions, Kant's appearances), insofar as they belong one and all to a
single, unitary sensibility, are subject to the universal law of cause and
effect: epistemic utility, even indispensability, is simply not enough.
The standard account of the Second Analogy is incapable of
yielding anything more than an epistemically indispensable princi
ple of cause and effect because of its transcendental realist as
sumption that appearances have temporal order prior to their sub
ordination to the principle of cause and effect. For what is this if
not to say that their order as appearances is in fact already fixed
and neither can nor needs to be determined by any principle of pure
understanding? Moreover, in attributing such an order to them, the
83 Hume, Treatise, 225. Kant was well aware that Hume recognized the
indispensability of the principle of cause and effect to human understand
ing?see the Preface to the Prolegomena.
84 Ibid., 168.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANTS ANALOGES 97
proponents of this interpretation have already, whether wittingly or

not, presupposed the very brand of objectivity whose possibility
Kant set out to explain in the Second Analogy; for that which exists
in a time series is, as such, an event, and thence an object. That is,
by assuming that the order in which representations are appre
hended is also the order they have, upholders of this view reify rep
resentations as occurrences?be it in a mind, a brain, or, as Hume
would have it, a "place" of which we lack even "the most distant
notion."85 If any objective necessity at all is to be salvaged for the
temporal order of representations, it can only be through relation
to their thing-in-itself ground (or transcendental object substrate),
which Kant deems the source of the affections of sense.86 But since
however transcendental idealism is construed it leads to the denial
that either things in themselves or their affective agency (attributed
to them by Kant with doubtful legitimacy)87 are in any way temporal
(or spatial), this species of transcendentally real necessary connec
tion quite clearly cannot be equated with the objective succession
whose possibility the Second Analogy is supposed to have estab
lished. What remains then for the upholder of the standard ac
count? Since, on this view, the existence of appearances (including
the temporal order in which they exist) is completely independent
of understanding, this faculty is in no position to exercise the least
influence over appearances, and any legislative, constitutive role in
respect of appearances is precluded. Already having a temporal
order of their own, representations are necessarily indifferent to any
law of time-determination which the understanding might flatter it
self it can impose upon them. It may well be that we cannot think
an object for appearances without regarding them as subject to the
85 Hume, Treatise, 253. In my view, Hume was agnostic regarding the

ontological status of perceptions, that is, whether they are mental, physical,
neutral monistic, or whatever. See Waxman, Hume's Theory of Conscious
ness, ch. 6-B. Nevertheless, he objectified perceptions as events insofar as
he regarded them as existing in relations of temporal succession. Kant, by
contrast, sought to explain what Hume merely presupposed: how perceptions
first acquire the status of events, and thence of genuine objects (and here too
the "place" of their occurrence is initially undefined; see note 33 above).
86 See CPR, A30/B45, A250-2.
871 can think of no justification consistent with the constraints Kant
placed on the objective employment of the concept of cause and effect to
warrant his use of the manifestly causal notion "affection" in reference to
things in themselves. The notion "cause" seems similarly misapplied at
A288/B344, A494/B522, and A496/B524.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
98 WAYNE WAXMAN
law of cause and effect; and, in this purely subjective, epistemic

sense of "experience," then, the pure concepts of understanding are
essential to its possibility. But what use is it that we cannot help
thinking or believing them to be subject to this law if nothing con
strains the objects themselves?that is, their own, objective consti
tution?to conform to our representations? As Hume demon
strated (at least to Kant's satisfaction), neither faith nor even logical
necessity88 can make it so in reality (that is, of the appearances
themselves). Clearly, therefore, so long as we assume that repre
sentations already have temporal order, we condemn Kant to fail in
his attempt in the Second Analogy to demonstrate that the law of
cause and effect holds not only of our thought of objects but of the
objects themselves.
The challenge confronting interpreters of Kant is that, in order to
divest themselves of this assumption, they need radically to change
their construal of transcendental idealism. So long as this doctrine is
thought compatible with representations existing in succession prior
to and independently of imagination and understanding, they are left
with the alternative of supposing either that Kant simply failed to see
that a divergence between the subjective and the objective succession
of appearances exposes the latter as merely fictitious (albeit indispen
sable), or that his real aims were much more modest than his recurrent
assertions that understanding legislates to nature, is constitutive of
objects, and so forth, would lead one to suppose. Those interpreters
who do not scruple to attribute the most elementary lapses of reason
ing to a thinker of Kant's caliber, even in the formulation of cardinal
tenets of his philosophy, are apt to favor the former alternative,
whereas the latter is likely to appeal to those who cannot believe Kant
capable of overlooking something so obvious to us. Because, how
ever, the prevailing conception of transcendental idealism has wedded
88 "Abstract or demonstrative reasoning . . . never influences any of

our actions, but only as it directs our judgment concerning causes and ef
fects"; Hume, Treatise, 414. For Hume, apart from belief in the reality of
what the senses and memory present, all belief in real existence is predicated
on the relation of cause and effect (see pp. 86, 153); hence, the application
of logic and mathematics to reality (that is, to the world constituted by cus
tom; see p. 108) is contingent on causation. See Waxman, Hume's Theory
of Consciousness, pt. 2, esp. chap. 4-C. The same position is, if anything,
clearer still in Kant, for whom the subordination of appearances to the forms
of understanding (that is, to the logical functions of judgment) is founded on
imagination and its schematism.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANTS ANALOGES 99
the latter alternative to the assumption that appearances have tem

poral order prior to synthesis in imagination, members of this camp
end up transforming Kant's theory of experience into epistemology (or
even phenomenology), and are left propounding the distinctly unspec
tacular claim that such an approach is at least to be preferred to
Humean psychology. But quite apart from the manifest incompati
bility of such a thesis with Kant's iterated aims, it renders the vast
conceptual edifice and complex argumentation of the first Critique
utterly superfluous for so modest a goal?we can only regard its com
plexity as a sign of groping confusion. I, for one, find such an ap
proach less palatable than the simpler, more straightforward notion
that Kant was somehow blind to the fact that objectivity, as presented
in his system, is just as fictitious as it is in Hume's. But we have no
need to embrace either alternative provided we are willing to reex
amine the assumption fundamental to both that representations, sim
ply as given, already have temporal order.
A straightforward, compelling solution to Kant's problem in the
Second Analogy emerges directly when we distinguish the successive
ness of the apprehension of appearances in imagination from the tem
poral order?and initial lack thereof?of these appearances them
selves. Such a distinction is only possible if we suppose that pure
time is the merely ideal form of the apprehension of intuitions in imag
ination, with no original, intrinsic application to the realities of per
ception defined in the Anticipations (that is, the matter of phenomena,
that in them corresponding to sensation). From this it follows that,
in relation to immediate consciousness (intuition and perception), the
realities of perception are, temporally speaking, a blank slate. The
possibility of experience, demanding as it does the realization in ap
pearance of synthetic unitary time, thus requires a principle of infer
ential understanding constitutive of the temporal order of represen
tations in respect of their existence. This demand, Kant believed,
could not be satisfied otherwise than by a principle founded on the
category of cause and effect. In its original signification, this category
is merely the logical form of hypothetical judgment. Thanks to the
transcendental schema furnished by imagination, however, it acquires
a temporal interpretation as "the real upon which something else in
evitably follows in conformity with a rule."89 Accordingly, the Second
Analogy is a "Principle of Time Sequence in accordance with the Law
89 CPR, A144/B183.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
100 WAYNE WAXMAN
of Causality,"90 that is, a synthetic a priori proposition in which causal

connections are understood as constitutive of time order. Its conten
tion is that if appearances are subject a priori (universally and nec
essarily) to laws91 of cause and effect, then, on the basis of their nec
essary connections (that is, their relations of existential dependence),
it will always be possible to infer an objective temporal sequence.
Since this means moreover that the only temporal existence appear
ances have is that derived from the principle of pure understanding,
there is no temporal existence prior to or independent of it with which
it may conflict (for the successiveness of apprehension pertains only
to the form, which, as ideal, cannot enter into perception and confer
existence in time upon appearances). There is thus no prior time
series with which the time series arising from the determination of
sensibility by discursive understanding might be compared and in re
lation to which it might be degraded to a mere fiction (that is, a ne
cessity of thought); accordingly, it fully merits its appellation as ob
jective succession.
To be sure, this objective succession, like the subjective order of
apprehension, exists only in and through acts of pure spontaneity
(imagination, understanding). In Kant's system, however, for some
thing to have no existence outside imagination and/or understanding
does not make it an idle fiction: if it can be demonstrated to be a
necessary condition of possible experience, then it has as much ob
jectivity as anything in human cognition can have. The subjective
succession of the synthesis of apprehension lacks all cognitive value
because, in it, appearances are temporal only in form, not in reality
(that is, they lack any temporal relation to one another). Indeed, since
the temporal order of intuition has no validity of the (atemporal) re
alities apprehended in it, we are constrained to regard this temporal
order as fictitious; for since apprehended appearances as such lack
90 Title of principle in B edition; CPR, B232.

911 use the plural deliberately: the principle of cause and effect demon
strated in the Second Analogy is not itself a law of appearances but simply
the pure form (that is, the principle) of empirical laws (as the principle of the
Axioms of Intuition is not itself an axiom or that of the Anticipations of Per
ception an actual anticipation); see CPR, A126-8, B165, A159/B198; and Pro
legomena ?36; KGS, vol. 4. Kant's concern, unlike Hume's, was never with
particular causal inferences: as a transcendental philosopher, his problem
was to establish the universal, a priori validity of the concept of cause and
effect and the principle founded thereon (that is, of Hume's causal maxim of
Treatise, 78-82; see the Preface to the Prolegomena).

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANTS ANALOGES 101
temporal existence, they fail to qualify as genuine events (even in

Hume's unknown "place"). By contrast, the objective succession re
sulting from the universal subordination of appearances to laws of
cause and effect not only endows appearances with existence in time,
distinct from and independent of their apprehension, but everywhere
subjects their temporal ordering to rules. In consequence, their tem
poral existence exhibits the coherence and regularity characteristic of
nature and demanded by natural science.92
Since the Second Analogy is a nonmathematical synthetic a priori
proposition, and so has no "object" capable of being constructed a
priori in intuition, only a demonstration of its necessity for possible
experience can suffice to establish it as objective a priori.93 Kant
sought to meet this demand by relating the Second Analogy to the
First, in the following manner. The possibility of experience depends
on the possibility of all appearances existing together in one and the
same time (and thence in one universal self-consciousness). Since
time is an ideal form with no reality in the field of appearance, the
temporal determination of appearances presupposes something in per
ception the existence of which is permanent. The only concept ade
quate to think such an existent is substance, schematized as the per
manence of the real given in perception. Since this concept must be
valid a priori (universally and necessarily) of all appearances if it is
not to be merely contingent that they exist in one time, then, since
unitary time is necessary for possible experience, so too is the a priori
objective validity of the category of substance. Where the universal
validity of the Analogy based on the concept of cause and effect is
concerned, this means that if events lacked relation to a substance,
there would be nothing to guarantee that the temporal relations we
deduce from them will belong to one and the same time, and so form
a single, unique temporal order; hence, the only assurance that a time
series so determined will exhibit uniqueness and unicity (see section
II-A above) is for all causality to be referred to the agency of sub
stances (which, as permanent, serve as unitary time's proxy in ap
pearance). In other words, since the only way for the Second Analogy
92 Since order of temporal existence is entirely a function of causal re

lations and is in no sense independent of them, Kant's principle furnishes an
a priori grounding of the anisotropy (unidirectional, irreversible character) of
objective time. It may also be reconcilable with relativity theory; see note
102 below.
93 See esp. CPR, A719-22/B747-50 and note 63 above.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
102 WAYNE WAXMAN
to discharge its function as a principle of possible experience is for it

to play a role in the constitution of objective unitary time, objective
validity a priori can only pertain to causality if?and only so far as?
it is understood to express the activity and passivity of substances.
Accordingly, appearances must be determined a priori not merely as
events but as changes in the determinations of substances (that is, as
signalling alterations in the permanent substratum of perceptible re
ality, and so precluding their being events in a Humean-type indeter
minate place). For Kant, therefore, it is a necessary albeit synthetic
truth that all causality derives from substances.94
When Kant's problem in the Second Analogy and his solution to
it are set in their proper context, we can see that the issue is not so
much one of determining an object through representations as deter
mining these representations themselves as objective.95 So long as
representations are assumed already to have a temporal order?an
order corresponding to the subjective flux apprehended in inner in
tuition?this is sure to escape one; and Kant is instead saddled with
the impossible task of deducing cause and effect relations from earlier
later relations rather than vice versa.96 What we therefore need to
recognize is that, for Kant, there is no such thing as an earlier-later
relation of appearances until appearances have been subordinated to
laws of cause and effect: that is the meaning of Kant's second dynam
ical principle of pure understanding.97
94 This secures the proposition that "causality leads to the concept of

action, this in turn to the concept of force, and thereby to the concept of
substance"; CPR, A204/B249.
95 The only object Kant thought of as genuinely corresponding to ap
pearances is the atemporal, aspatial transcendental object X. See CPR,
A109-10 and A250-1.
96 The assumption that representations have temporal order (that is, the
standard interpretation of transcendental idealism) also undermines Kant's
treatment of the Third Antinomy. For if the succession of appearances were
not constituted by causal relations, it would be independent of them, in which
case, the fact that the regress of causes is in indefinitum would not of itself
entail that the regress of predecessors could not go on in infinitum. Nor
could this be remedied by reference to Kant's treatment of the First Antinomy,
since that Antinomy is only mathematical, not dynamical, that is, it does not
concern a regress of existents (namely, events). In other words, the standard
interpretation presents us with a regress of existents (say, states of conscious
ness, as in Leibniz) which, as prior to and independent of the regress of
causes, is not bound by the limits intrinsic to causal synthesis.
97 Although one can only speculate, a distinction between a subjective past
present-future series of perceptions (relative to individual self-consciousness)

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANTS ANALOGES 103
C. The Solution in the Third Analogy. The Second Analogy ad

dresses the question of the possibility of events; only in the Third Anal
ogy does Kant offer an explanation of the possibility of enduring
things, in the form of a community of dynamically interacting sub
stances. Crucial to his argument is the introduction of space into the
statement of the principle, "All substances, insofar as they can be per
ceived as simultaneous in space, are in thoroughgoing interaction."98
His reasons for doing so are unclear. At one level, it may be because
different substances, owing to their permanence and status as time
proxies, cannot exist in different times without violating time's unique
ness; hence, an interactive community of substances is possible only
if substances exist in different parts of space.99 At a more basic level,
however, it should kept in mind that, for Kant, pure space is itself only
a form of synthesis in imagination, and so just as formal and ideal as
pure time; hence, far from advancing matters, its inclusion in the Third
Analogy is actually a broadening of the problem to which conceptual
exponents, being able to endow pure intuition with objective sense
and an objective earlier-simultaneous-after series of experience (relative to uni

versal self-consciousness) seems implicit in Kant's philosophy.
98 CPR, B256 (though space is not mentioned in the A edition version of
the principle, it is presumed throughout, as its proof at A212/B259 makes
clear). I have departed from Kemp Smith by rendering "zugleich!' as "si
multaneous" rather than "coexistent." His liberties of translation do more
harm in the Second Analogy (for instance, "Wirklichkeit" as "event" rather
than "reality" or "actuality," "erkenne" as "apprehend" instead of "know" or
"cognize," the bracketed insertion of apprehension at A194/B239 which con
tradicts the sense of successive existence that is in question, and the persist
ent bracketed insertion of "field of" before "appearance"). Still, his prefer
ence for "coexistence" hinders understanding of the Third considerably. It
introduces the notion of existence into what is merely a formal (not a real)
predicate of perceptions. Kant's task in the Third Analogy is to account for
the objectivization of simultaneity relations through necessary connections,
the outcome of which is then real coexistence, that is, to explain how the
formal predicate "simultaneity" can be supposed to hold a priori not merely
formally of our intuition of appearances but of the reality (actuality) we
perceive in them as well. His solution is founded on the category of reci
procity, which, when provided with its schema, makes possible a community
of dynamically interacting substances, and thence simultaneous existence.
99 Only the simultaneous can interact, but interaction requires that the
acted upon reality be external to the reality acting upon it. Since being
external in respect of time means existing in different parts of one and the
same time and therefore being nonsimultaneous, the externality of interactive
realities must be defined in terms of space, not time, that is, they must exist
in different parts of space and the same part of time. (Allowance should be
made, however, for the possibility that we might have had other forms of
intuition than these.) See esp. CPR, B291ff. and A381.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
104 WAYNE WAXMAN
and signification, are the solution. Thus, the only way the realities of
perception may be set into relations of space (that is, endowed with
existence in space) is by means of a principle of necessary connection,
and in particular a principle constitutive of an objective simultaneity
distinct from and independent of the successiveness of apprehension.
That is, while the pure space intuition alone can render such simul
taneity representable, nothing save a principle of necessary connec
tion from which simultaneity may be inferred can objectify space (see
section II-D above).
While the Third Analogy is as much an account of objective space
as of objective time, Kant chooses to restrict his focus mainly to the
latter since time alone is a form of all appearances, outer no less than
inner (space enters into the account of universal self-consciousness
only insofar as its objectivization is a condition for that of time). Now,
prior to empirical thought and the introduction of a principle of nec
essary connection, simultaneity relations, like the modes of time con
sidered in the previous Analogies, apply only to the form of our ap
prehension of appearances (their intuition as simultaneous in
imagination),100 not to the appearances themselves (their existence as
realities of perception). The Third Analogy is therefore not a principle
of empirical laws enabling us to discover the unknown simultaneity
relations that appearances already have (that is, in which they sup
posedly already exist), but a principle of laws originally constitutive
of these relations (as derivable from laws of necessary connection).
What sort of principle is required? Just as unidirectional neces
sary connection forms the basis of objective succession, bidirectional
necessary connection, according to Kant, is the basis of objective
simultaneity. That is, there must be reciprocal determination mini
mally, a circle of determination (community) maximally: X and Y are
simultaneous substances if at least one state of each is an effect of the
other; even if this is not the case, if a state of each is an effect of some
other substance at least one state of which is itself an effect (direct or
indirect) of the other. Either way, it is crucial that the causal de
pendence go in both directions so that at least one state of X and
one of Y is directly or indirectly dependent on a state of the other,
as only reciprocity of determination permits inference to objective
simultaneity.
100 See CPR, A30/B46 (time as form of Zugleichsein of sensations).

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANTS ANALOGES 105
The Third Analogy, like the First, concerns substances, not their
states: bidirectional causal determination (reciprocity) makes possible
an inference from objectively successive states to the objective si
multaneity (coexistence) of the substances to which they pertain; it
does not permit us to conclude anything as to the simultaneity of dif
ferent states.101 The fact that Kant did not include a principle of the
simultaneity of states in his system of principles suggests that he did
not deem it a condition for objectifying synthetic unitary time and
space. Three Analogies apparently sufficed: one conceptual surrogate
(exponent) for the permanence of time, another for time-order (suc
cessiveness), and a third to ensure its uniqueness; for if any two per
manents failed to be determinable as simultaneous, there would be
two unconnected time-surrogates, and thence two distinct times.
Since this is all that Kant deemed necessary for the constitution of
objective time and space, and since these are all he deemed necessary
for the unity of apperception and the possibility of experience, the
transcendental philosopher has no brief (nor remaining categories) to
formulate a principle of the simultaneity of states; this has instead to
be discovered in actual experience through reliance on empirical con
cepts and laws.102
101 That Kant's concern was the simultaneity of substance is clear from
the formulation of the principle in each edition and from his conclusion to
the B edition proof: "Thus the simultaneity of substances in space cannot be
cognized in experience save on the assumption of their reciprocal interac
tion"; B258. It is, moreover, a necessary consequence of the fact that the
category of community, on account of the logical function from which it is
derived, is not subordinative like that of cause and effect, but coordinative.
For this means there can never result from this category anything but a com
munity of equals, independent of one another; it thus can only apply to sub
stances, never to their states (which, in the Second Analogy, are subordinated
to their predecessors). See CPR, Bl 12-13.
102 It is worth remarking that since the Third Analogy is concerned not
with the simultaneity of transitory things but that of absolutely permanent
substances, it may well be reconcilable with the relative (and empirical)
space and time of twentieth-century physics. Indeed, the same seems to be
true of the Second Analogy as here interpreted. For in science too cause
and effect relations are generally thought to determine time-order and not
vice versa; and even if (contrary no doubt to Kant's own expectations) such
relations fail to yield a single, fixed, universal time series, this poses no prob
lem for Kant's system so long as (1) both the uniqueness and unicity of space
and time are preserved and (2) there remains only a single dynamical com
munity of (permanent) substances. So far as I am aware, nothing in contem
porary science either postulates or implies the absence of such a community;
indeed, insofar as all present-day matter is traced back to a "Big Bang" (not

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
106 WAYNE WAXMAN
Crucial to correctly comprehending the Third Analogy is to un

derstand why the possibility of experience demands a principle that
only the category of community, derived from the form of disjunctive
judgments, is capable of furnishing. Consider first what would follow
given a plurality of substances without any causal links between them.
Bearing in mind that for Kant the very a priori objective validity of the
concept of substance rests on its status as a surrogate for time in
appearance, the absence of such connections renders it impossible to
say of any one of these substances that it is simultaneous with any
other?despite the fact that the existence of each is of permanent
duration. For what is there then to justify the claim that rather than
individually constituting a multitude of different, entirely disjoint
times, these permanents?lacking necessary connections as they do?
together constitute a single, unitary time? If time were a perceptible
reality and not merely an ideal form of intuitive apprehension, there
would be no difficulty in the matter since we could then, simply by
perceiving the time containing them, directly read off their simulta
neity (or lack thereof) without regard to necessary connections be
tween their states. Even granting that the imperceptibility of time
and that substantiality (that is, permanence of existence) cannot be
known empirically, it might still be thought possible to determine the
simultaneity of the substances through a determination of the simul
taneity of their states. But this, of course, Kant could never allow: it
requires that these states belong to one and the same experience, and
since unity of experience is possible only given the uniqueness and
unicity of objective time, the substances to which these states belong
must be assumed to exist in (that is, stand proxy for) one and the same
objective time; this, however, presupposes precisely what was to be
demonstrated! For Kant, therefore, the imperceptibility of time, to
gether with the postulated absence of all necessary connections be
tween these substances (from which time relations might alone be
inferred), implies that these substances must be altogether devoid of
conceived as an absolute, that is, transcendental, beginning of time), such a

community seems to be a tenet of recent cosmology (of course, from Kant's
point of view, any theses pertaining to permanent substances are presuppo
sitions, not part, of natural science). By contrast with transcendental phil
osophical principles of nature, however, both Kant's metaphysics of nature
and transition to physics, insofar as they import eighteenth-century empirical
concepts of matter and force into their a priori (but not pure) synthetic cog
nition, are incompatible with contemporary science. See note 115 below.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANTS ANALOGES 107
real, objective relations of simultaneity; accordingly, each permanent

must be supposed to demarcate a distinct time of its own, utterly un
connected with any of the others. For the transcendental idealist,
however, this is but to render experience impossible: with many times,
there can be no a priori synthetic unity of the manifold in sensibility,
and, therefore, no transcendental apperception. So, in the eventuality
of there being more than one substance, the possibility of experience
requires a principle of pure understanding to provide for laws of nec
essary connection whereby to preserve the uniqueness of time.
Nevertheless, one may wonder why a new category of relation,
distinct from cause and effect, is necessary to yield such a principle.
After all, according to Kant, "only that determines the place of the
other in time which is its cause, or the cause of its determinations";103
where the existents concerned are substances of permanent duration,
would not a connection running simply in one direction suffice to place
any two in the same time (that is, to constitute a simultaneity relation)?
Yet, unidirectional causal connection would suffice to permit the in
ference to simultaneity only if time had an objective reality in appear
ance all its own, distinct from and independent of substances, and
were not wholly a function of their causal relations. For if, instead
of being constitutive of temporal relation, causal connections were, as
interpreters commonly suppose, merely its markers, then the mere
existence of a causal connection one way or the other between two
permanent existents would, of course, suffice for simultaneity (that is,
imply coexistence). Causal connections, however, are not mere
markers of temporal relation for Kant. For him, real objective simul
taneity of substances (as distinct from the apprehended variety) is
nothing over and above the necessary connections that constitute it;
and since the absence of causal connections running both ways would,
therefore, not suffice to yield a bidirectional relation like simultaneity,
an additional pure concept of the understanding?the category reci
procity?proves necessary for the constitution of objective time.104
103 CPR, A212/B259.

104 Accordingly, the only way to understand how a pure concept of rec
iprocity can be necessary to an account of objective time is to conceive the
realities of perception as originally lacking temporal determinateness alto
gether, and so as needing (for the sake of possible experience) to be endowed
with existence in time. Posit for time the least independent objective real
ity?even if only as the super-imaginative form of sensations (as on the stan
dard interpretation of transcendental idealism)?and any principle founded

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
108 WAYNE WAXMAN
So, because there are no imagination-independent, objective time re

lations by which to infer that substances with any causal connection
at all are in the same time, each substance must instead put every
other in the same time with it through bidirectional necessary con
nections, direct or indirect, with at least one of the other's states.
Where the interaction is direct, "reciprocity" is the more appropriate
expression, where indirect, "community"; either way, the category
necessary for a possible experience in which there is more than one
substance is that founded on the logical form of disjunctive judgments.
When conceived according to the form of disjunctive judgments,
predicates are regarded as mutually exclusive, as exhausting all the
possibilities relevant to a given cognition, and so as together demar
cating a sphere within which the truth of that cognition lies?for in
stance, "The world exists either through blind chance, through internal
necessity, or through an external cause."105 When substances are con
ceived in accordance with this form, they are thought of as reciprocally
determining one another, and thereby constituting a whole (a system,
or nexus). Of course, there is no implication that the nexus they
define is itself a real individual?something actually containing these
substances, of which they are parts or constituents; for since the cat
egory by itself has no meaning beyond the sheer logical form, it does
not suffice to define a real individual, merely a conceptual sphere.
(For instance, regarding "male" and "female" as mutually exclusive
does not imply that the things of which each predicate is true are parts
or constituents of a single individual; it simply means that objects con
ceived as falling within the sphere they jointly define must be thought
of as one or the other). There is, however, a single exception where
the sphere demarcated through the use of the disjunctive form of judg
ment assumes the status of a real individual: insofar as the community
established through the causal interaction of substances is constitutive
of objective synthetic unitary time, the sphere thus demarcated will
have all, and precisely, the features of the unique variety of individu
ality attributed in the Transcendental Aesthetic to pure time and space
(that is, uniqueness and unicity). Of course, since the individuality of
objective time and space is based entirely on dynamical relations of
on the category of reciprocity is thereby rendered redundant (that is, unable

to be deemed constitutive of possible experience).
105 CPR, A73-4/B98-9.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANTS ANALOGES 109
necessary connection, it remains merely a qualitative unity?a com

munity of dynamically interrelated realities (denominated "nature")?
rather than a quantitative whole?an aggregate sum of parts (denom
inated "world").106
IV
By way of conclusion, let us see if we can make sense, in light of

the above, of Kant's claim that his transcendental philosophy, in dia
metrical opposition to the monadology of Leibniz, demonstrates that
objects consist entirely of relations (that is, that substance, as phe
nomenon, contains no intrinsic denominations).107 This claim may
seem problematic. For if it so happened that nature contained only
one substance (time-proxy), then that substance would be entirely de
void of external relations (temporal as well as spatial), and so could
not be conceived as having any extrinsic denominations at all. Nor
could we make sense of how this one substance might consist entirely
of relations by referring it to space and time; for if, as maintained here,
Kant holds that objective space and time are constituted through sub
stance, substance surely cannot be thought of as originally consisting
of spatial and temporal relations. (In fact, his pure concept of sub
stance contains no objective content at all, merely the logical form of
categorical judgment.) This difficulty, however, has a quite simple
106 "Together [the Analogies] therefore say: all appearances lie, and must
lie, in one nature, because without this a priori unity, no unity of experience,
and thence no determination of objects in experience, would be possible";
CPR, A216/B263. Kant distinguished "world" from "nature," with the former
designating the quantitative whole, or magnitude, of the real, the latter the
qualitative whole, or dynamical unity, of the real; see CPR, A418-9/B446-7.
In his view, the world has no magnitude, and, therefore, is neither infinite nor
finite but indeterminate (see A503-4/B531-2 and A518-23/B546-51); thus,
while the sphere of reality is a qualitative unity of apperception (see B131),
it is not a quantitative unity (only that contained within the world, which must
be conceived as extensive magnitudes, has determinate quantitative unity).
107 See CPR, B67, A265/B321. Intrinsic denominations refer to proper
ties founded in the thing denominated; extrinsic denominations to properties
outside the thing denominated (that is, to relations). Leibniz, in his meta
physics, reduces all relations to properties of objects, while Kant, in his tran
scendental philosophy, reduces all properties to relations. (Only the reality
corresponding to sensations may be deemed an exception, but this cannot be
cognized a priori beyond the principle of the Anticipations of Perception it
self; see CPR, A175-6/B217-8.)

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
110 WAYNE WAXMAN
solution. A solitary substance would necessarily be devoid of any

causal connections to other substances, and so would lack that pre
cisely which is necessary to yield objective relations of succession and
simultaneity. Since it would then not suffice to constitute objective
time and space, the concept of substance would lose relation to that
alone which can give it a priori objective validity: possible experi
ence.108 The objective validity of the category of substance as a con
dition of possible experience thus goes hand in hand with that of com
munity; community is not just necessary to possible experience under
the condition that there happens to be more than one substance, but
is necessary to it unconditionally (that is, if experience is to be possible
at all).109 Accordingly, the relations of which objects of experience
consist are one and all relations of necessary connection, given to
inferential empirical thought alone, which, thanks to schematism, are
the same as the objective relational nexuses of space and time.
Does the position here ascribed to Kant conflict with his supposed
attachment to Euclideanism? It might seem so. For if space, like
time, is constituted by inference from necessary connections between
substances, and the being of these substances is constituted wholly by
such connections (contrary to Leibniz's view), does this not threaten
to revive Kant's long since discarded precritical position, in "Thoughts
on the True Estimation of Living Forces" (1747), that the nature of
space is contingent on the necessary connections which happen to
hold, or not to hold, among existing substances (such that, say, there
might have been an inverse cube law instead of an inverse square
law)?110 The answer seems to me to be no. The necessary connec
tions of the theory of experience laid down in the Analogies obtain
their sense and significance vis-?-vis the objects of sensibility via their
schemata, which are nothing more than determinations of pure syn
thetic unitary space and time (see section II-D above); hence, the em
pirical spaces and times determined by these connections are subject
a priori to conditions of the uniqueness and unicity of space and time
108 See esp. CPR, A737/B765 and note 63 above.

109 "Each substance . . . must therefore contain in itself certain deter
minations in the other substance, and at the same time effects of the causality
of that other; that is, the substances must stand, immediately or mediately,
in dynamical community, if their simultaneity is to be cognized in any possible
experience"; CPR, A212/B259.
110 See Immanuel Kant, "Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living
Forces," ?? 9-11; KGS, vol. 1.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANTS ANALOGES 111
(and so of original apperception and possible experience). In other

words, in contrast with Kant's early precritical view, the relations that
constitute objective space and time are themselves subordinate a
priori to the pure space and time which, in the critical system, as
the basis of the apriority of mathematics, ensure that whatever ax
ioms and propositions hold of mathematics will likewise apply to
appearances.
Of course, one might well question whether Kant's system entails
the truth of Euclideanism, either in respect of pure or empirical intu
ition. Kant himself made quite clear that the transcendental space of
the Aesthetic is not to be equated with the space of geometry (which
presupposes it)111 and that the Axioms of Intuition are not themselves
mathematical axioms and do not imply or entail any mathematical
proposition.112 Kant thus seems to have left himself no way of man
dating, by transcendental philosophy alone, what may or may be not
be constructed in pure intuition.113 Indeed, despite many appearances
to the contrary, it was perhaps never his intention to espouse a narrow
Euclideanism at all (or to commit himself to any position in what we
today call philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of physics). We
should be careful not to read into the words of a philosopher of an
other age the concerns of our own, however much they may seem to
imply a given position on a topical subject. In the modern sense of
the issue, Kant never explicitly took a stand on, or even so much as
addressed the question of, the mathematical (not to be confused with
the logical) possibility of non-Euclidean geometry. His abiding con
cerns regarding mathematics during the period of the critical philos
ophy (all inseparably bound up with transcendental idealism) were
these: (1) to show that mathematics is not empirical, an affair of re
productive imagination; (2) to show that mathematics is not analytic,
an affair simply of concepts and logic (with no role for sensibility);
and (3) to show that whatever might be proved a priori in mathematics
has necessarily to be valid of appearances in intuition. I doubt that
it was ever his intent to utilize transcendental philosophy to prescribe
or limit what specific pure intuitions geometers and other mathema
ticians may or may not construct, or to regulate which mathematics a
physicist may or may not employ.
111 See esp. KGS, vol. 20, p. 419; quoted in KMM, 81-2.
112 See CPR, A733-4/B761-2.
113 See note 93 above.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
112 WAYNE WAXMAN
It should not be forgotten that, in Kant's day, no one had suc

ceeded in turning the idea of a non-Euclidean geometry into a credible
system of mathematics; there thus was nothing yet about which to
take a position, pro or con. Still, could he have been presented with
the writings of Riemann, I see no reason to believe Kant would have
declared them not to be mathematics. For Kant, mathematical insight
is not given to us through passive contemplation of the pure forms of
sensibility, space and time, for these themselves are utterly indeter
minate. Rather, it arises through the determination of pure intuition
by the understanding's utilizing concepts obtained by reflection on the
act of intuition.114 Unlike pure concepts of understanding (which are
in effect native to this faculty), mathematical concepts have to be fab
ricated, built up one mark at a time, through construction in pure
intuition. Mathematics is thus historical in a sense transcendental
philosophy is not: mathematicians take the concepts bequeathed them
by their predecessors and, by means of pure imagination, enrich them,
broaden their scope, and sometimes invent entirely new ones.115 It is
part and parcel of such a process of building from the ground up that
114 See Prolegomena ?38; KGS, vol. 4.; and CPR, A714-5/B741-2. Mi
chael Friedman argues, quite persuasively in my view, that Kant's notion of
pure intuition should not be construed as a kind of insight or seeing; see
Michael Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences (Cambridge: Harvard Uni
versity Press, 1992), pt. 1, esp. pp. 89-93. He fails, however, to consider the
possibility outlined here that we are, if not wrong, then without sufficient
warrant to read Euclideanism, or any definite position in what we would call
"philosophy of mathematics" and "philosophy of physics" into Kant's remarks
on geometry. I also differ with him on arithmetic and on logic. I believe
that, for Kant, the relation of arithmetic to pure time is essentially the same
as that of geometry to pure space. I hold too that Kant would have regarded
modern quantificational logic just as he did number: as presupposing the sche
matism of the category of quantity, and so as involving sensibility. He thus
would likely have deemed it a branch of mathematics rather than of pure
logic, which, in his sense, is delimited by the understanding taken in isolation.
I plan to develop these and related views in a future paper.
115 The historical conditionedness pertaining to mathematics holds also,
in my view, for Kant's applications of transcendental philosophy in the meta
physical first principles of natural science and the transition to physics. For
example, since its central concept of matter must be derived from actual
experience and so is a product of empirical reflection (see, for instance, CPR,
A847-8/B875-6), a metaphysical first principle can only be as good as the
concept of matter attained at a given time, and a different such work would
have to be written today from that of the seventeenth or eighteenth century,
or the fourth century b.c. As with mathematics, however, this does not com
promise its a priori necessity; it merely qualifies and restricts it.) See also
Buchdahl, Kant and the Dynamics of Reason, 35-6.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC
KANTS ANALOGES 113
what once seemed completely general and fundamental may be

shown?in the light of subsequent work and without the a priori ne
cessity of the original construction being in any way compromised?
to be particular and conditioned. Such has proven to be the lot of
Euclidean geometry, and I see nothing that would prevent Kant from
accepting this situation while continuing at the same time to maintain
the theses both of the Aesthetic?that whatever geometry asserts it
asserts necessarily and a priori?and of the Axioms?that whatever
geometry asserts of pure intuition necessarily holds of empirical in
tuition as well.116
New School for Social Research
116 There is today considerable controversy regarding the nature and pur
pose of Kant's final, unfinished opus, the Transition to Physics, in KGS, vols.
21-2, especially the aether deduction. In my view, its relation with the work
of the 1780s, as elucidated here, is the following: Although the Critique of
Pure Reason furnishes a warrant for affirming a priori the existence of a
community of substances (given that the objectification of space and time is
a condition for possible experience), neither it nor the Metaphysical First
Principles of Natural Science (1786) permit one to say anything about the
nature of these substances, and, in particular, whether they are heterogeneous
matters or all one and the same kind of reality (quality). For the Anticipa
tions of Perception enable us to anticipate only that the empirically real has
a magnitude (and that this magnitude is intensive), but nothing as to the
quality of this reality (including its homogeneity or heterogeneity). How
ever, in the wake of Lavoisier, Kant came (temporarily, perhaps) to believe
that he could deduce a priori, as a condition of possible experience, the ho
mogeneous nature (as aether, caloric) of the substances that objectively re
alize space and time. Since this proof is not offered as part of transcendental
philosophy per se but only as a link between the system of nature outlined in
the Metaphysical First Principles and actual physics, it should, in my view,
be regarded as no less historically conditioned than the latter work (see pre
vious note); thus, transcendental philosophy does not stand or fall according
to the validity of the aether deduction. For a detailed study of the issues
involved and a somewhat similar approach to dealing with them see Fried
man, Kant and the Exact Sciences, pt. 2, esp. pp. 310-15.

82.8.37.134 on Mon, 01 Aug 2022 15:16:48 UTC

Waxman Kants Analogies

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Waxman Kants Analogies

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Waxman Kants Analogies

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

What Are Kant's Analogies about?

Author(s): Wayne Waxman

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20129454

This content downloaded from

iV claim that two hundred years of interpretation have missed the

1 Transcendental idealism is the basis on which Kant rests his entire

Review of Metaphysics 47 (September 1993): 63-113. Copyright ? 1993 by the Review of

This content downloaded from

Undoubtedly, the principal reason the Analogies have attracted

2 Although Hume is not mentioned by name in the Analogies themselves,

This content downloaded from

than other portions of the Critique, and even perhaps sufficiently in

This content downloaded from

Kant's attempt to surmount the challenge of Humean skepticism and

tion, "transcendental object" being best suited to the Analytic of Concepts

This content downloaded from

all that different, at bottom, from the Berkeleian or other varieties of

8 For instance, "Kant, as transcendental idealist, is closer to Berkeley

This content downloaded from

peculiar manner in which the imagination synthesizes sensations;

cepts (these being, in Kant's view, a very special sort of representation, re

This content downloaded from

forming a single continuous succession (while from confused percep

12 See KMM, Introduction and Part 1.

This content downloaded from

its implication that the existence of the cause necessarily precedes

13 A priori validity, as Kant understands it, betokens the necessary and

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

be reduced to an idle fiction, its pretensions to objectivity mocked by

18 In respect solely of what is given immediately in intuition and per

This content downloaded from

conception of transcendental idealism according to which appear

A. To comprehend Kant's problem in the Analogies with sufficient

tion of perceptions"; CPR, B219. In this, as in so much else, Kant is following

This content downloaded from

It is not where it ought to be, in the transcendental exposition of these

This remark, with its explicit reference to the Transcendental Aes

manifold of intuition; with them [results] an a priori principle of synthetic

This content downloaded from

synthesis of the understanding which underlies the empirical synthe

Space . . . contains a combination of the manifold given according to

24 CPR, B160n; corresponds closely to A99-100. Kant's reference to ?24

This content downloaded from

special relevance to the Analogies, is the following passage from the

This text bears directly on the Analogies because its focu

25 CPR, A121-2. This should be read in conjunction with sect

This content downloaded from

simply as a call for all appearances to stand together in a single

27 See CPR, A34/B50, B136n.

This content downloaded from

scenario is both the principal consequence of and the rationale for

relation to the "I think" as any other: an ordinary objective representation

This content downloaded from

a sensibility embracing a plurality of manifolds apprehended according

31 See Hume, Treatise, 252ff. Hume's commitment to the transcenden

This content downloaded from

themselves forming a time series, and the possibility of taking cogni

33 "The general principle of all three Analogies rests on the necessary