Westhal Noumenal Causality PDF

Canadian Journal of Philosophy
Noumenal Causality Reconsidered: Affection, Agency, and Meaning in Kant

Author(s): Kenneth R. Westphal
Source: Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Jun., 1997), pp. 209-245
Published by: Canadian Journal of Philosophy
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CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 209
Volume 27, Number 2, June 1997, pp. 209-245
Noumenal Causality
Reconsidered: Affection,
Agency, and Meaning in Kan
KENNETH R. WESTPHAL
University of New Hampshire
Durham, NH 03824-3574
USA
I Introduction
The lead question of Kant's first Critique, indeed his whole Critical
Philosophy is 'How is Metaphysics as a Science Possible?'1 Neo-Kantian
and recent Anglophone interpretations of Kant's epistemology have
concentrated on the 'Transcendental Analytic' of the first Critique, and
have taken Kant's positive and legitimate sense of metaphysics to con-
cern the necessary conditions of our knowledge of mathematics, natural
science, and of course, our common sense knowledge of a spatio-tempo-
ral world of objects and events. However, in the 'Canon of Pure Reason'
in the first Critique Kant indicates quite clearly that, although two of the
leading sub-questions of metaphysics - 'What should I so?' and 'What
may I hope?' - cannot be answered on theoretical grounds, they may
be answered on practical grounds (A804-05=B832-33). Those practical
grounds are elaborated and supplemented (mainly) in the latter two
1 Prolegomena §60 IV 365.7. I cite Kant's individual works with the initials of their
(German) titles. I also cite the first Critique by the usual designations of its two
editions, 'A' and 'B.' Occasionally I cite Kant's works by the volume, page, and line
numbers of Immanuel Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, Koniglich Preufiische (now
Deutsche) Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: G. Reimer, now De Gruyter 1902-),
usually referred to as 'Akademie Ausgabe.' The volume and page numbers from
this edition have been carried over into all recent translations. Translations have
been revised without notice.
210 Kenneth R. Westphal
Critiques and the Religion. In each case, however, a definite and positive
answer to a metaphysical question involves giving 'objective reality' to
a concept, e.g., the concepts of freedom or immortality. 'Objective reality'
involves possible reference to an object, where 'possible reference' in-
volves more than merely describing a logical possibility. It requires
establishing that there are objects to which the concept in question can
be referred. Kant states this quite clearly in the Preface to the Second
Edition of the first Critique:
To know an object I must be able to prove its possibility, either from its actuality as
attested by experience, or a priori by means of reason. But I can think whatever I
please, provided only that I do not contradict myself, that is, provided my concept
is a possible thought. This suffices for the possibility of the concept, even though I
may not be able to answer for there being, in the sum of all possibilities, an object
corresponding to it. But something more is required before I can ascribe to such a
concept objective validity, that is, real possibility; the former possibility is merely
logical. This something more need not, however, be sought in the theoretical sources
of knowledge; it may lie in those that are practical. (B xxvi note; tr. Kemp Smith)
Now a scientific Kantian metaphysics must be systematic, for in the

absence of direct empirical data systematicity plays the decisive role in
justifying a metaphysics (cf. B xxiii, A710-ll=B738-39, A832-33=B860-
61). This requires Kant to integrate his Critical practical and theoretical
metaphysics. Kant's metaphysics, of course, is based on his transcenden-
tal idealism and its distinction between appearances and their supersen-
sible basis. These two points converge most graphically in a passage near
the end of the published Introduction to the third Critique:
Through the possibility of its a priori laws of nature the understanding gives a proof
that nature can only be known to us as appearance. Thereby it also indicates a
supersensible substrate of nature, though it leaves this completely undetermined.
Through its a priori principle for judging nature according to possible particular
natural laws the power of judgment gives [verschafft] its supersensible substrate (in
as well as out of us) determinability through the intellectual power. But through its
practical a priori law reason gives that same substrate determination. And thus the
power of judgment makes the transition from the realm of the concept of nature to
the realm of the concept of freedom possible. (KdU, V hi)
This is a challenging passage, to be sure. It is not my aim here to explicate

it, but only to use it as a reminder of the importance of systematicity and
the distinction between sensible appearances and their supersensible
basis within in Kant's Critical philosophy. Disregarding the systematic
character of Kant's philosophy has led to some serious misunderstand-
ings of the role of transcendental idealism in answering metaphysical
questions, and even to some serious misunderstandings of the nature of
Noumenal Causality Reconsidered: Affection, Agency, and Meaning in Kant 211
that idealism itself. This has been the case especially regarding the role
of noumena in Kant's account of sensory affection.2
II Noumenal Causal Affection of Sensibility
The debate about Kant's views on things in themselves, empirical intui-

tions, and the affection of our sensibility has been heated. The idea that
noumena or things in themselves causally affect our sensibility, and thus
provide us with sensations, has been widely criticized on two basic
grounds. First, it seems unintelligible because it requires making a
distinction between appearance and reality according to which things in
principle cannot appear as they really are. Second, it seems non-Kantian
because it requires applying the concept of causality trans-phenome-
nally, which contradicts Kant's own Schematism. How then are we to
understand Kant's doctrine of transcendental affection? Near the end of
his summary of the problem of affection, Hans Vaihinger poses the
following trilemma concerning Kant's view of the objects which affect
our sensibility:
(1) If the things which affect our sensibility are things in themselves,
then Kant must contradict the fundamental doctrine of transcen-
dental idealism, according to which the categories of substance
and cause can only be applied within the bounds of sensible
experience; they cannot be applied transphenomenally to things
in themselves as causes of sensory affection.
(2) If the things which affect our sensibility are objects in space (and
time), then Kant's view faces the contradiction that the very same
appearances which result from sensory affection should also
produce sensory affection.
(3) If things in themselves affect the transcendental ego, in parallel to

spatio-temporal objects affecting the empirical ego (double affec-
tion), then Kant's view faces yet another contradiction: what is a
representation for the transcendental ego serves as a thing in itself
for the empirical ego, and produces for the empirical ego a further
2 The systematic character of Kant's metaphysics is analyzed by Gerd Buchdahl in

Kant and the Dynamics of Reason (London: Blackwell 1992). I have criticized his
positive account elsewhere ('Buchdahl's "Phenomenological" View of Kant: A
Critique/ Kant-Studien [forthcoming]). Here I contend that 'noumenal causality' is
a coherent notion. Buchdahl's positive account is based on its not being coherent.
Thus the present essay aims to remove his interpretation's point of departure.
empirical representation of one and the same object. (Hans Vai-

hinger, Commentar zu Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft [Stuttgart,
Berlin, Leipzig: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft 1892], II 53;
paraphrased)
Prior to posing this trilemma, Vaihinger had favored the third option.3
'Double affection' is a kind of parallelism; Vaihinger grants here that the
parallelism cannot be maintained, since making the doctrine of 'double
affection' conform to Kant's texts requires phenomenal effects of
noumena. However, Vaihinger overlooks the fact that 'double affection'
also involves a transphenomenal use of the categories of causality and
substance, in this case, regarding the supposed relation between things
in themselves and the 'noumenal ego.' If the first problem could be
solved, as 'double affection' also requires, the parallelism of 'double
affection' would thus be otiose. The supposed doctrine of double affec-
tion has been widely, and I believe rightly, rejected by recent interpret-
ers.4 I won't discuss it further here. As Vaihinger notes, the second option
was widely favored by neo-Kantians; he names Lange, Cohen, and
Natorp, among others (Commentar, II 50f.). A position very close to and
strongly influenced by this neo-Kantian interpretation was taken by
George Schrader ('The Thing n Itself in Kantian Philosophy,' rpt. in
Robert Paul Wolff, ed., Kant: A Collection of Critical Essays [New York:
Doubleday 1967] 172-88). This interpretation, however, must count as
neo-Kantian, since it requires paring off a portion of what appears to be,
strictly and literally, part of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, namely, a large
number of passages in which Kant states that things in themselves,
noumena, or 'the transcendental object,' causally affect our sensibility.
Consequently, it would be much preferable on scholarly grounds (at
least) to avoid this kind of surgical editing of Kant's text. However,
keeping Kant's text intact appears to leave only the first option. That
option was criticized immediately in Kant's own day, most famously by
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, but also by Schulze ( Anesidemus), Beck, and
Fichte. Jacobi charged that without the presupposition that things in
themselves causally affect our sensibility it is impossible to enter Kant's
3 Commentar, II 52. 'Double Affection7 was developed by Erick Adickes (Kants Lehre
von der doppelten Affektion unseres Ich als Schliissel zu seiner Erkenntnistheorie [Tubin-
gen: J.C.B. Mohr 1929], esp. 46-59).
4 See, e.g., Moltke Gram ('The Myth of Double Affection/ in W.H. Werkmeister, ed.,
Reflections on Kant's Philosophy (Gainesville, FL: Florida State University Press 1975)
29-63. Another problem is that Adickes's view requires inserting a substantive sense
of 'appearance in itself (e.g., 49) into Kant's view, where it has no place.
system, and with that presupposition is it impossible to remain within

it. It is, he thought, not possible to remain within Kant's system with this
presupposition because within Kant's system it is (supposedly) impos-
sible to give any sense to the notion of a non-sensible cause of sensible
appearances (David Hume tiber den Galuben oder Idealismus und Realismus
[Breslau: Loewe 1781], 222-4). (Vaihinger points out that Jacobi's objec-
tion hits the nerve of the issue; Commentar, II 38). The idea that Kantian
categories can only be 'applied' to, and so only can be used with regard
to, sensed particulars remains even today the main stumbling block to
understanding Kant's views on the sensory affection of things in them-
selves (Commentar, II 35-48). In Anglophone Kant-interpretation, Peter
Strawson gave most forceful expression to Jacobi's objection to the idea
that sensory affections are caused by non-spatiotemporal things in them-
selves (The Bounds of Sense [London: Methuen 1966], 38-42, 250-6).
Strawson's interpretation is professedly a philosophical reconstruction
of Kant's doctrines, and it stands squarely in the neo-Kantian tradition.
Recently, Gerold Prauss has argued that this whole debate has rested
on a failure to understand correctly Kant's view of transcendental reflec-
tion, and consequently, to understand Kant's metaphysical and episte-
mological views about the conditions which make experience possible
(Kant und das Problem de Dinge an Sich [Bonn: Bouvier 1974], esp. §§7, 10).
Prauss agrees with Jacobi that no sense can be made of noumenal
causality (196-7). According to Prauss, causal affection only holds be-
tween spatio-temporal empirical objects and our sensory organs (204).
This is a necessary material condition of human experience (73). In
transcendental reflection on the necessary conditions for the possibility
of our experience, these actual causes of sensory affection must be
considered 'in themselves,' in abstraction from human sensibility; ac-
cordingly they are described collectively as 'the thing in itself (192, 197,
202). On Prauss's view, Kant's distinction between the 'two aspects' of
things, as appearances and as things in themselves, involves only (what
I will call) a 'dual description' of things, where things are described
differently depending solely on whether we describe them as occurring
in actual experience or whether in transcendental reflection we only
describe them quite generally as a condition of knowledge (197). Prauss
thus seeks to retain the insights of the neo-Kantian view of transcenden-
tal affection, and ascribe that view to Kant himself. To do this, Prauss
distinguishes pointedly between the text of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
and the substance of Kant's Critical system (68-9, 195-6). On this basis,
he disregards the passages in which Kant describes transcendental af-
fection in causal terms (198-200). Prauss alleges that those passages show
Kant's own lack of full clarity about his own view of transcendental
reflection (192, 199-201, 203). This is a bold interpretation, but it is only
warranted if sense cannot be made of noumenal causality. I shall argue
that Prauss is mistaken about this, and thus that his 'dual description'
view of transcendental affection is mistaken.
Gerd Buchdahl has noted adroitly that Jacobi's objection, that tran-
sphenomenal causality is unintelligible because Kant's Critical philoso-
phy only justifies causal judgments within the phenomenal realm, is so
obvious that Kant would have been aware of it and therefore must have
had a different view of transcendental affection (125, 137-8). I agree with
Buchdahl that Kant must have had a different view about transcendental
affection than has been ascribed to him by his legion of critics. (Jacobi's
objection has become virtually a dogma among Kant's interpreters.) I
grant further that many troubling passages can be made to fit Prauss's
(or Buchdahl's) interpretation. However, I believe there are some that
cannot.
I contend that Kant's view is not subject to the objection of Jacobi (et
al.) because the objection misunderstands Kant's views on three closely
related topics: transcendental reflection; the transcendental thoughts
involved in recognizing the causal affection of our sensibility by non-
spatiotemporal things in themselves; and the kinds of causal judgments
licensed and proscribed by Kant's epistemology. When these points are
clarified, we can recognize how Kant can speak legitimately of transcen-
dental affection in causal terms. If this is so, then the supposedly prob-
lematic passages about noumenal causality and transcendental affection
of our sensibility can and must be retained in a proper understanding of
Kant's transcendental idealism.
Furthermore, those passages must be retained because without them,
Kant's theory of free action is scuttled. Some of these passages ascribe a
causal effect to the non-sensible substratum of an appearance. Others
ascribe a causal effect to practical reason. The difficult questions concern
how to understand these passages: Do they merely express (1) how we
are constrained, for whatever critical reasons, to think of these putative
causal agencies? Or do they express (2) how we can and must think (but
not empirically know) them to be on transcendental or moral grounds?
I argue that Kant intends these passages in this second, much stronger
sense, namely, that there is noumenal causality, including the special
case of rational agency, and further that this stronger interpretation is
legitimate within Kant's Critical framework. If these passages are not
taken in this stronger sense, then Kant's account of free rational action
fails.5 1 turn now to some of the controversial passages.
5 In defending this stronger interpretation of sensory affection by things in them-

selves, I in part defend the position taken by Herbert J. Paton (Kant's Metaphysics of
Experience 2 vols. [London: George Allen & Unwin 1936]). The view I set out and
III Some Problematic Passages
At A359 (cf . A360), Kant states that the unknown substratum of matter
affects our senses, thus bringing forth the intuition of something ex-
tended. On the preceding page he states that whatever grounds outer
appearances affects our sense in such a way as to acquire (zukommen)
representations of space, matter, form, etc. (A358-59). At A494=B522
Kant speaks forthrightly of the non-sensible cause of spatio-temporal
representations. Similarly at A390-91 (cf . A288-89=B344-45) Kant speaks
of the transcendental cause of our spatial ('outer') representations, ap-
parently maintaining that there is one, though that is all we can know
about it. At A278=B334 Kant remarks on the non-sensible cause of
appearances, which we would love to explore, but cannot. Twice in the
Prolegomena Kant explicitly identifies things in themselves as the causal
ground of sensory affection.6 When he turns to moral agency Kant
affirms that human reason shows true causality, because through it ideas
become efficient causes (A317=B374, A328=B385). Freedom is the uncon-
ditioned causality of a cause within appearances (A419=B447). The
causality of an agent can be considered in two regards, as intelligible
causality of the agent in itself in its actions, and as sensible causality in
the effects of those actions as appearances in the sensible world (A538-
39=B566-67).
defend is also very close to the main strand of Henry Allison's view of transcenden-
tal affection (Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense [New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1983], ch. 11). Allison recognizes most of the
positive grounds I offer for my interpretation. However, his view is ambiguous, if
not equivocal, for there are passages where he retreats to a 'dual description' view
like Prauss's or Buchdahl's. I shall defend the stronger, more metaphysical strain in
Allison's view, and I shall defend it against some objections he does not address.
When Allison summarizes Kant's view and attempts either to avoid or to respond
to criticisms of Kant's idealism, he tends to disregard the ontological aspect of Kant's
forms of intuition and to reduce Kant's distinction between things in themselves
and appearances to a 'methodological' matter of different descriptions, empirical
and non-empirical, of one set of things. See, e.g., Kant's Transcendental Idealism, 240-1,
250 (last I); also H. Allison, Transcendental Idealism: The "Two Aspects" View,'
in Bernard den Ouden and Marcia Moen, eds., New Essays on Kant (New York: Peter
Lang 1987), 170; and Kant's Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press 1990), 44. These ambiguities are largely resolved in his Idealism and Freedom
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), ch. 1.
6 Prol §13 Anm. II, §32 (IV 288.34-289.14, 314.33-315.6). The accuracy and reliability
of the Prolegomena can be contested on points of important detail, but I shall show
below that these passages do in fact accurately summarize Kant's view in the first
Critique.
Judging by these passages, Kant would seem clearly committed to the

existence of trans-phenomenal causality and to the legitimacy of our
talking and thinking about it, in connection with transcendental ac-
counts of both sensory experience and moral agency. This then raises
two crucial questions. Is it legitimate for Kant to speak or to think of
trans-phenomenal causality? If so, what is the existential import of such
considerations? In the next two sections I consider and criticize the main
reasons for thinking that Kant can give no legitimate positive answer to
these questions.
IV Verif icationist Interpretations of Kant and the

Transcendental Significance of Concepts
Strawson's interpretation of Kant marks the confluence of neo-Kantian-

ism and positivist verificationism. His interpretation would put short
shrift to both of the above questions. According to Strawson, Kant's
principle of significance is that 'there can be no legitimate, or even
meaningful, employment of ideas or concepts which does not relate
them to empirical or experiential conditions of their application' (The
Bounds of Sense, 16). However, Strawson does not consider the details of
Kant's theory of concepts, categories, their schematization, or especially,
Kant's alternative practical strategy for giving concepts 'objective real-
ity' in the second Critique (see §XI). A more detailed treatment of Kant's
theory of meaning, to much the same effect, is given by Eric Sandberg
('Thinking Things in Themselves,' in Gerhard Funke and Thomas See-
bohm, eds., Proceedings of the Sixth International Kant Congress Vol. II/2
[Lanham, MD: University Press of America 1989] 23-31). Sandberg cites
Kant's remarks that the categories are 'mere rules of synthesis' and are
'empty titles of concepts without any content' and thus lack both sense
and meaning (Sinn und Bedeutung) when abstracted from their condi-
tions of application to experience (26). He infers from these remarks that
'the unschematized categories have no content whatsoever apart from
the conditions of our intuition' and thus cannot serve to think about
anything at all (ibid.). Unfortunately, Sandberg overstates what is im-
plied by these remarks. If the categories were utterly devoid of content,
there would be no difference between any two of them, and thus it would
be quite mysterious why one supposed category became schematized as
causality, and another as modality, or indeed that any three of them
could become schematized as three distinct modalities, etc. This is to say,
in order to be 'rules of synthesis' at all, the categories must retain content
from the functions of unity whence they come (they share these functions
of unity in common with judgments; A79=B104-05), and they must
acquire some further bit of content by being brought to bear on the a
priori manifold of sensibility, set out in the transcendental aesthetic

(A76-77=B102). Whatever Kant says of the erstwhile 'emptiness' of the
categories must be understood in the context of these considerations.
This point can be reinforced by considering briefly Kant's notorious
'Metaphysical Deduction' of the categories. In this section of the Critique,
Kant purports to show that the basic kinds of logical judgment reflect
the basic categories of cognitive judgment required for empirical knowl-
edge. Kant's view is based squarely on his theory of sensation, which is
a version of 'sensationism.' According to sensationism, sensations are
non-intentional mental states which do not, of themselves, present ob-
jects to the mind. Although such sensations provide the sensory basis of
empirical knowledge, they themselves are non-intentional and non-ref-
erential. On this view, the 'objects' we experience and to which we refer
must be (re)constructed, where some properties of those objects derive
from constituent sensations and others derive from synthetic mental
activities. This view is fundamental to Kant's Critical philosophy, since
only this view provides the context for the character and the centrality
of the question Kant formulated in his famous letter to Herz.7 In the
Critique he asks it this way: 'How does it come about that we posit an
object for these representations, or attach to them, beyond their subjec-
tive reality as modifications, some kind of an objective reality?'
(A197=B242)8 Here once again is the key phrase 'objective reality,' which
concerns the possible reference of concepts to objects. On Kant's view,
the synthesis which brings about the referential and representational role
of sensations must be a function of the kinds of judgments we as human
beings can make, simply because there is no other possible source of such
synthesis.9 If there were a Table of basic Logical Judgments, it would be
7 The question is this: 'On what ground rests the relation of that in us which is called
representation to the object?' (X 130.6-8; Kant Selections, Lewis White Beck, ed. and
trans. [New York: Macmillan 1988], 81).
8 On Kant's sensationism see Rolf George, 'Kant's Sensationalism/ Synthese 47 (1981 )

229-55, esp. 230, 246.
9 By mentioning 'synthesis,' I have raised a larger topic than I can explore here. Kant's
views on synthesis have long been castigated as part of an 'imaginary science' of
transcendental psychology, as Strawson put it (The Bounds of Sense, 32). Paul Guyer
has argued persuasively that Kant's transcendental psychology is a legitimate
enterprise, resting on 'not a psychological claim but a basic constraint on any system
for synthesizing data that are only given over time' ('Psychology and the Transcen-
dental Deduction,' in Eckart Forster, ed., Kant's Transcendental Deductions [Stanford:
Stanford University Press 1989] 47-68, at 65; cf. 58, 67). Guyer's analysis persuaded
Strawson, who admitted that his original designation was 'rude' ('Sensibility,
Understanding, and the Doctrine of Synthesis: Comments on Henrich and Guyer,'
very plausible to suppose, as Kant does, that the concepts used in those
judgments must fill out a Table of basic Categories of Thought. Kant
insists that there are different kinds of synthesis, according to the differ-
ent kinds of judgments we can make, where these different judgments
involve different categorial concepts. The topic of Kant's schematism
and its relation to the pure categories, and their relation in turn to the
forms of logical judgment, is intricate and cannot be explored further
here. (Paton devotes ten chapters of Kant's Metaphysic of Experience to
these topics.) However, the basic points of doctrine I have stressed are
not especially controversial.10 There has been great controversy about
Kant's Tables of Judgments and Categories. That controversy cannot and
need not be settled here (see Michael Wolff, Die Vollstandigkeit der kanti-
schen Urteilstafel [Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 1995]). All that mat-
ters to my present point is Kant's basic view that the categories, as basic
concepts involved in judgments, each have a logical significance, cata-
loged in the Table of Categories, which is (at least analytically) distinct
from their empirical significance, which they have only as schematized
and applied in determinate cognitive empirical judgments. Kant's denial
that categories have 'significance' when used transphenomenally must
be understood as the denial that they have full, cognitively determinate,
empirical significance, and thus can be related to given particular ob-
jects.11
in Eckart Fdrster, ed., Kant's Transcendental Deduction 68-77, at 74-7). Patricia Kitcher
(Kant's Transcendental Psychology [Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990]), Andrew
Brook (Kant and the Mind [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994]), and
Robert Howell (Kant's Transcendental Deduction [Dordrecht: Kluwer 1992]) devote
sustained attention to Kant's views on synthesis.
10 See Allison (Kant's Transcendental Idealism), 115-22, 173-94; Paton, I 245-8, 260-2,
304-5, II 21-4, 31-2, 42-65, 68-9; and J. Michael Young ('Functions of Thought and the
Synthesis of Intuitions/ in Paul Guyer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Kant
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992] 101-22), 112-13. Young's analysis
makes plain both that there are two components to the meaning or the significance
of categories, and that Kant is willing to speak, unqualifiedly though imprecisely,
of concepts being 'without sense ... [or] meaning' when not tied to sensory intuitions.
11 This is how Kant puts his point at B150-51, III 119.4-24 and A244-24, IV 160.21-161.17.
Hoke Robinson (Two Perspectives on Kant's Appearances and Things in Them-
selves,' Journal of the History of Philosophy 32 [1994] 411-41) proposes another view
of the relation between appearances and things in themselves, in terms of two
perspectives (God's and ours) on things, and according to which we project empiri-
cal objects. His positive proposal unfortunately remains very sketchy. For discus-
sion see Allison, Idealism and Freedom, 12-16.
V Buchdahl's Objections to Noumenal

Causal Affection
Before turning to Kant's positive development of these doctrines in the

next section, it is important to consider a new objection raised by Buch-
dahl against a causal account of transcendental affection. Several times
Buchdahl cites the first edition of the Fourth Paralogism, where Kant
repudiates representational theories of perception because they inevita-
bly lead to skepticism about the alleged outer causes of our repre-
sentations. Buchdahl quotes the following passage:
For if we regard outer appearances as representations produced in us by their

objects, and if these objects be things existing in themselves outside us, it is indeed
impossible to see how we can come to know the existence of the objects otherwise
than by inference from the effect to the cause; and this being so, it must always
remain doubtful whether the cause in question be in us or outside us. (A372;
Buchdahl, 137; cf. 125, 72, 143, 154)
Though Buchdahl thinks this passage provides an 'even more weighty

objection' to causal accounts of affection than those of Jacobi and
Strawson, his discussion of it is too brief to make the case he needs (137,
143). Indeed, on closer inspection, the paragraph from which this quo-
tation comes provides some support for a causal account of transcenden-
tal affection. The skepticism about 'objects which exist in themselves
outside us' as causes of our representations ( A373) to which Kant objects
is the skepticism of his transcendental realist contemporaries (A372),
who regard things existing in space as real unto themselves, but who are
driven to skepticism or empirical idealism by their representational
theories of perception.12 Kant's transcendental idealism is designed to
refute skepticism about empirical, spatio-temporal objects. In this very
paragraph he insists equally that one can allow 'that something, which
may be outside us in the transcendental sense, may be the cause of our
outer representations' (A234) where something is 'outside us in the
transcendental sense' if it 'exists as a thing in itself distinct from us'
(A373). Kant insists here that skepticism about such a 'transcendental
object' is altogether distinct from skepticism about empirical, spatio-
12 A 'representational7 theory of perception, in the relevant sense, holds that the direct
objects of our perception are mental representations, which indirectly represent the
objects which (allegedly) cause them. Although the view goes back to the Stoics (at
least; see Sextus Empiricus [Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Works Vol. 1. Rev. R.G. Bury,
trans. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1933), II §72-75]), Locke is now
the classic example.
220 Kenneth R.Westphal
temporal objects (A373), and earlier (in his discussion of Phenomena and
Noumena) he endorses theoretical skepticism about such noumenal,
transcendental objects. After distinguishing phenomena and noumena,
and distinguishing negative and positive senses of the term 'noumenon,'
Kant states: 'doubtless, indeed, there are intelligible entities correspond-
ing to the sensible entities' which we experience (B306-09, cf . A254=B310,
A288=B344). Further, I shall argue (in §XI) that this skepticism is an
integral part of Kant's aim 'to deny knowledge in order to make room
for faith' (B xxx), where this 'faith' in fact amounts to practical knowledge
of the reality of freedom and of God. This knowledge invokes practical
grounds to give 'objective reality' to the concepts of freedom and God.
Consequently, Buchdahl cannot take Kant's repudiation of the skepti-
cism and 'empirical idealism' of his representational realist contempo-
raries as repudiation of a causal account of transcendental affection.13
To support this contention Buchdahl also cites Kant's remarks about
the subjective nature of sensory qualities (B44). Kant's views clearly
derive from modern theories of perception. However, it is important not
to assume that Kant holds Locke's views on secondary qualities. Al-
though Buchdahl thinks that Kant adopts 'more or less' Locke's view
about secondary qualities (158), he ultimately recognizes that Kant
rejects two of Locke's key assumptions, viz., that passively received
sensory elements present (in some sense) images of objects, and that
there is an issue about whether these images 'correspond' to the sup-
posed real objects which cause them. Accordingly, Buchdahl recognizes
that on Kant's view, without the use of a priori functions, no object can
be represented at all, whether accurately or inaccurately (198-9). How-
ever, Buchdahl overlooks what Rolf George has pointed out, namely,
that Kant held a 'sensationist' view of sensations. On this view, sensa-
13 Indeed, Buchdahl recognizes that he can only remove the support this passage
would provide for a causal account of transcendental affection by reinterpreting
Kant's apparently causal terminology in non-causal ways (73, 154). Buchdahl
recognizes a wide array of passages in which Kant describes transcendental affec-
tion in causal terms (70-1, 129-31, 136, 153-4, 161, 164). Rather than attributing them
to Kant's confusion about his own method (as Prauss did), Buchdahl seeks to retain
those passages by showing that the apparently causal terms Kant uses in those
passages ('ground/ 'affect,' and 'determine') do not necessarily carry causal conno-
tations. Buchdahl is right that Kant occasionally uses the term 'affect' in a non-
causal, purely logical sense, e.g., when Kant speaks of understanding affecting inner
sense (B154, A152/B191, A77/B102, B155, B191-92, A555/B583; Buchdahl, 139,
160-1). This does not, however, entail that Kant uses the terms 'affect,' 'ground,' or
'determine' in a non-causal sense when speaking of the stimulation of our sensibility
by things in themselves.
tions are caused (typically) by objects and events in one's environment,

though this causal relation does not suffice for sensations to represent
objects. Indeed, Kant refers quite clearly to this sensationist thesis by
distinguishing sensations from intuitions within the very paragraph
from which Buchdahl quotes (B44). The problem with Buchdahl's use of
this passage is this: Precisely because Kant's sensationism disjoins rep-
resentation from causation, the fact that Kant believes that sensations as
such are not representational does not entail that Kant rejects a causal
account of the aetiology of sensations.14 1 conclude, therefore, that the
passage Buchdahl cites from the Transcendental Aesthetic (B44) also
does not support his non-causal interpretation of Kant's doctrine of
transcendental affection.
VI Transcendental Reflection and the

Transcendental Significance of Concepts
Three points need to be recognized in order properly to understand

Kant's position. First, Kant does grant that pure concepts have a logical
significance independent of their schematization. Second, this logical
significance is insufficient for determinate judgments about particular
objects. (This is why traditional rationalist metaphysics is impossible.)
14 Kant provides a concise taxonomy of kinds of representation at A320=B376-77, III

249.37-250.14. In support of his view that Kant's discussion of transcendental
affection of sensibility is simply (what Buchdahl calls) a 'phenomenology' of the fact
that we happen to have certain sensations, Buchdahl repeatedly cites Kant's discus-
sion in the Transcendental Aesthetic of the subjective basis of sensory qualities, viz.,
the idea that the 'matter' of sensation is a function of our subjective constitution
(B44; Buchdahl, 118, 142, 158, 161). Buchdahl takes Kant's view to be that the sensory
qualities we happen to find ourselves with are due exclusively to our own nature
as sentient beings, and he takes this passage to concern transcendental affection.
However, the fuller discussion in the first edition makes quite plain what is
reasonably clear from the shorter discussion in the second edition from which
Buchdahl quotes, namely, this passage concerns the ascription of secondary quali-
ties to objects regarded as appearances (see A28-39, IV 34.35-35.8, regarding secon-
dary qualities). Kant insists mat there is nothing either necessary or a priori about
the particular sensory qualities he mentions, and so there is nothing transcendentally
'ideal' about their analysis. This is in express contrast to space (and time), which
though 'subjective' are necessary a priori conditions of our experience of objects.
Because this passage concerns even those sensory affections which count as subjec-
tive, 'secondary' qualities, this passage in fact reiterates that the matter of sensation
is not simply a function of our subjective constitution. It is, pace Buchdahl, also a
function of the source of sensory affection (cf. Paton, 1 139-40; see §IX below about
the metaphysical status of empirical objects).
Third, the logical significance of pure categories can be enriched into a

transcendental significance by relating pure concepts to the sensible
manifold provided by our forms of intuition. Kant's expressions may
seem to obscure these three points somewhat because, on the one hand,
he condemns rationalist metaphysical claims in terms of an illegitimate
'transcendental use' of pure concepts, while on the other hand, his own
Critique requires what he calls 'transcendental reflection' on the a priori
conditions of knowledge. This kind of reflection is discursive and must
rely on the 'transcendental significance' of pure concepts. The use of pure
concepts in transcendental reflection on the a priori conditions of knowl-
edge could well be called a 'transcendental use' of those concepts.
However, Kant does not call it that, and it is important to recognize that
when he repudiates the 'transcendental use' of pure concepts, he only
rejects rationalistic metaphysics, and not his own use of those concepts
in transcendental reflection. This kind of reflection can only be based on
the transcendental meaning of pure concepts.
Kant repeatedly rejects the transcendental use of concepts for tradi-
tional metaphysical purposes. However, in rejecting that use, he ac-
knowledges, sometimes more explicitly than others, that pure concepts
do have a transcendental meaning. Typical of such passages is the
following one from Kant's discussion of Phenomena and Noumena:
Thought is the act of relating given intuition to an object. If the kind of this intuition
is not at all given, then the object is merely transcendental, and the concept of the
understanding has none other than transcendental use, namely, of the unity of the
thought of a manifold in general. Now through a pure category, from which is
abstracted all condition of sensible intuition (which is the only [kind] possible for
us), no object is determined; instead, this only expresses the thought of an object in
general according to diverse modes. Now to the use of a concept there also belongs
a function of judgment by which an object is subsumed under it; this involves the
at least formal condition under which something can be given in intuition. If this
condition of judgment (schema) is lacking, then there is no subsumption, since
nothing would be given which could be subsumed under the concept. The merely
transcendental use of the categories is thus in fact absolutely no use and has no
determinate object, and none which is determinable with regard to form. It follows
from this, that the pure category also doesn't suffice for any synthetic principle a
priori, and that the principles of pure understanding are only of empirical use, but
never of transcendental use; but beyond the field of possible experience there can
be no synthetic principles a priori. (A247-48=B304-05)
This passage explicitly proscribes both empirical and synthetic a priori

knowledge of particular objects beyond the bounds of sensory experi-
ence. This is to say, the 'transcendental use' of categories Kant proscribes
here is their use in rationalist metaphysics. While the passage states that
a 'merely transcendental' use of categories is 'in fact absolutely no use,'
the full sentence indicates that this lack of use is lack of use for determi-
nate judgments about particular objects; that is, the transcendental use
affords neither empirical nor synthetic a priori knowledge of particular
objects. This is clear from the specific context, though Kant himself added
in his Nachtrage the further clarification that this use is no real use 'to
know something' (XXIII 48.16-17, my trans.). Similarly, he clarified the
meaning of no object being determined in the absence of the condition
of sensible intuition by adding 'thus nothing is known' (XXXIII 48.14).
The transcendental use of pure categories affords no knowledge, either
empirical or synthetic a priori, of particular objects. This is the 'transcen-
dental use' of pure concepts Kant repeatedly criticizes and repudiates in
his Critique of Pure Reason, for this is the nerve of his critique of rationalist
metaphysical pretensions to knowledge.15
However, near the beginning of the passage Kant indicates that there
is a transcendental use to pure categories that rests on their logical
content as functions of unity. This 'logical content' at least partially
constitutes what Kant elsewhere calls the 'transcendental meaning' (Be-
deutung) of pure concepts (A147=B186, A248=B305, A254=B309; cf. B148-
49, A181=B224). Proscribing the use of pure concepts, with their
transcendental meaning, for rationalist metaphysics is, however, com-
patible with a different use of pure categories in transcendental reflection
on the passivity of our sensible forms of intuition, in order to recognize,
e.g., that in general, something distinct from us ('outside us in the
transcendental sense,' A373) must stimulate our sensibility if we are to
have any intuitions of particulars. This, in brief, is Kant's doctrine of
transcendental affection, and it is based on his transcendental reflection.
Though Kant describes transcendental reflection only very briefly in
the first Critique, it is nevertheless fundamental to his whole Critical
project, for the whole Critical system is an exercise in transcendental
reflection on our cognitive sources and capacities. In the Appendix to the
15 It has been suggested that Kant misstated his view by proscribing a 'transcendental/
rather than a 'transcendent/ use of the categories. While Kant might have made his
meaning plainer to subsequent readers in this way, his use of the term 'transcen-
dental' in this connection is drawn from the metaphysical tradition's concern with
the 'transcendental' categories of ultimate reality and the attempt to use such
transcendental metaphysical categories to prove the existence, e.g., of a divine first
cause. Kant denies there is any such legitimate use of the categories, and he used
the right term to make his meaning clear to traditional metaphysicians. As he says
in connection with the distinction between phenomena and noumena, 'The tran-
scendental use of a concept in any sort of principle is this: that it is used in connection
with [auf . . . bezogen wird] things in general and in themselves' whereas the empirical
use of a concept is in connection 'merely' with 'appearances, that is objects of possible
experience' (A238=B298 III 204.10-14).
Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection, Kant describes transcendental

reflection as follows:
Reflection (reflexio) does not concern objects themselves in order to derive concepts
from them. Instead it is the state of mind in which we first set ourselves to discover
the subjective conditions under which we arrive at concepts. It is the consciousness
of the relation of given representations to our various sources of knowledge,
through which alone their mutual relations can be correctly determined. The first
question prior to any further treatment of our representations is this: in which
cognitive power do they belong together? Is it the understanding, or is it the senses,
by which they are connected or compared? ... all judgments, indeed all comparisons
require a reflection, that is, a differentiation of the cognitive power to which given
concepts belong. The act by which I bring together the comparison of repre-
sentations in general with the cognitive power to which they belong, and by which
I distinguish whether they are to be compared as belonging to pure understanding
or to sensible intuition, I call transcendental reflection. (A260-61/B316-17)
This passage gives Kant's general characterization of transcendental

reflection. He insists that transcendental reflection is an unavoidable
duty for anyone who will make a priori judgments about things
(A262=B319). Thus it is especially regrettable that he did not thoroughly
develop his account of it. 6 It suffices to note that transcendental reflec-
tion is a discursive procedure; Kant cannot have rejected intuitive meta-
physical and empirical knowledge so strongly only to take recourse to
intuitionism while conducting his Critique. To be sure, Kant does not say
directly that we learn that our sensibility is passive, etc., by transcenden-
tal reflection, but he has no alternative doctrine about this matter, and
he shouldn't have an alternative: almost the whole Critique is an exercise
in transcendental reflection, and the transcendental aesthetic plainly
exhibits the structure of what in this passage he explicitly calls transcen-
dental reflection.17
16 To be sure, he does say more about it in connection with his immediate topic, the
Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection, but its range is much wider than that,
since it concerns any and all judgments a priori about things. Prauss (75, n. 15) notes
that Kant alludes to it in the Second Analogy (A190=B236, III 168.33-34) and in the
resolution of the Third Antinomy (A295=B573, III 370.17).
1 7 For discussion of Kant's view of transcendental reflection, see Herbert Schna delbach
(Reflexion und Discurs: Fragen einer Logik der Philosophic [Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp 1977]), 87-133. He points out that transcendental reflection is the very
method Kant employs in the Critique of Pure Reason. Also see Dieter Henrich, 'Kant's
Notion of a Deduction and the Methodological Background of the First Critique/ in
E. Forster, ed., Kant's Transcendental Deductions, 29-46, at 40-6. Paton, Prauss, Buch-
dahl, and Allison recognize the importance of transcendental reflection to Kant's
undertaking, though they do not investigate Kant's account of it in any detail. Paton
If transcendental reflection is discursive, then there must be concepts

that are sufficiently specific and significant for Kant to engage in tran-
scendental reflection. This is indeed the case, given Kant's view of the
logical significance of pure categories and the transcendental signifi-
cance they obtain when they are related to the a priori manifold provided
by our two forms of intuitions, space and time. This accords exactly with
the elements of Kant's complex theory of meaning. As noted above, Kant
directly states that the categories retain a logical significance, even when
divorced from sensibility, and this logical significance suffices to give
the categories a transcendental meaning (Bedeutung).
There are (at least) three additional indications of the presence and
importance of the transcendental meaning of pure concepts. First, only
because pure concepts have transcendental meaning can we think (but
not theoretically know) about noumena or things in themselves. Once in
his text, and twice in his marginal comments in his own copy of the first
Critique, Kant insists that noumena can only be thought but not known,
and Kant emended his copy of the first Critique at seven places to stress
just this point.18 If the categories were utterly devoid of any content when
divorced from sensibility, noumena could not even be thought. (This is,
in effect, Sandberg's thesis, but it is contradicted by Kant's direct state-
ments to the contrary.) Second, this distinction is crucial to his entire
practical philosophy and philosophical theology (see §XI). Third, there
must be some minimal transcendental sense to the categories if Kant's
advance over traditional ontology is even to be formulated. Traditional
treatises on ontology began with the distinction between the possible
and the impossible; Kant held that this division presupposes a higher
genus to be divided, which he formulates as 'an object in general,' a
problematic concept ranging over the species of being and non-being
(A290=B346, A845=B873; see Eckart Forster, 'Kant's Notion of Philoso-
refers to 'transcendental knowledge' (I 226-32), Allison refers to it only in passing

(Kant's Transcendental Idealism, 67, 143-4, 241, 243, 275; cf. 268), while Buchdahl (74,
79-83, 114) and Prauss (66-85, 213f.) develop their own versions of transcendental
reflection.
18 A155-56=B195, III 144.17-20; the two marginal comments at issue were written at
the beginning of Kant's chapter on the distinction of objects into phenomena and
noumena (A235=B294-95). They are Reflexionen Nos. CIV and CVI from the
Selbstandige Reflexionen im Handexemplar der KdrV (A) (XXIII 34.14-17, 34.27). Kant's
emendations are reproduced in the same volume of the Akademie edition, 46.18 (re:
A147, IV 104.30), 48.14 (re: A247, IV 162.5-6), 48.16-17 (re: A247, IV 162.13-14), 48.25
(re: A251, IV 164.6), 49.17 (re: A259, IV 168.34-35), and 49.23 (re: A286, IV 183.36).
Note, too, that Kant's claim that noumena can only be thought but not known, is
made within and holds of the theoretical perspective.
phy,' Monist 72 [1989] 285-304). Precisely because this concept is so

general, its meaning cannot be empirical or otherwise bound to the
intuitive conditions of theoretical reference to particulars; its meaning
must be transcendental.
The transcendental meaning of the categories is crucial to Kant's
Critical philosophy as a whole, for only on that basis can Kant distin-
guish in various contexts between what can be simply an object of
thought and what can be known empirically (e.g., B xxvi, B146, B309,
A248-50). Neither Strawson nor Sandberg considers the implications of
these doctrines for the remainder of the Critical philosophy, nor do they
consider how Kant could possibly formulate or know the radical empiri-
cist cum verificationist claims about meaning that they ascribe to Kant
(cf. Paton, 1 261). This point further reinforces the distinction Kant makes
between the transcendental significance of categories and their (full)
significance in synthetic a priori and in empirical judgments. There must
be a suitable range of epistemic concepts that have sense and can be used
independently of particular sensible intuitions, or else Kant could not
even formulate his transcendental analysis of knowledge, much less
demonstrate it to be true. Were there no such concepts, Kant could not
purport to offer transcendental knowledge of the a priori aspects of our
knowledge of objects (B25, A56=B80-81); there would only be general
logic and empirical psychology, but no specifically transcendental logic.
Transcendental logic is investigated by transcendental reflection, and
transcendental reflection relies (in part) on the logical meaning of un-
schematized categories. Consequently, on Kant's theory of meaning, the
categories are available, even without their full schemata, for transcen-
dental reflection on an object in general, whether in a merely logical
context or in a transcendental context (concerning the conditions of
knowledge). Kant's views of transcendental reflection and the logical
meaning of unschematized categories are crucial for understanding the
basis and the intelligibility of Kant's view of things in themselves affect-
ing (causally stimulating) our sensibility.
VII Kant's Transcendental Reflection on Sensibility
Kant holds that on the basis of transcendental reflection we know that

our modes of sensibility are passive (A19-21=B33-35, A50-52=B74-76).
They are passive, that is, merely receptive, not spontaneous; their acti-
vation requires stimulation by something else.19 Since space and time are
19 BuchdahTs blanket way of speaking of the 'activation' of sensibility, understanding,
forms of our intuition, the stimulus comes to have specific spatial and
temporal characteristics in our intuiting it (A358, 359). Therefore, gener-
ally speaking, the stimulus must have the capacity to affect our forms of
intuition, and it must not otherwise have the spatial and temporal
characteristics we intuit it as having. This much Kant purports to dem-
onstrate on the basis of transcendental reflection on our sensibility. This
reflection requires use only of a minimal concept of causality, no more
specific than that of a relation between agent and patient, or indeed
between ground and consequent.
In this regard, one might urge that Kant ought to speak only of the
thing in itself as 'grounding/ but not as 'causing/ sensory affection. This
is a nicety Kant does, and I believe, can, overlook; Kant does use the term
'cause' in such contexts, as well as the term 'ground.' What matters more
than the term is whether the term is used in a context in which determi-
nate empirical judgments are possible. No such judgments are possible
in the context of reflecting transcendentally on the source or nature of
sensory affection. So long as this basic point is kept in mind, either term
can be used indifferently, which is what Kant does.
The important point here is that this use of this minimal concept of
causality merely requires thinking carefully about our (supposed) forms
of sensibility and the general transcendental conditions of its stimula-
tion. It does not require a schematized concept of causality, and it does
not require subsuming intuitions of particulars under concepts. The
trans-phenomenal 'application' of concepts Kant proscribes is the pur-
ported subsumption of un-sensed particulars under non-schematized
concepts in determinate, theoretically cognitive judgments (A247-
48=B304-05). If there are other legitimate ways of identifying particulars,
whether singly or in kind, then these particulars can be legitimate objects
of Kantian thought, of transcendental knowledge (of a necessary mate-
rial condition of experience), or of what Kant calls 'practical knowledge/
despite the fact that they cannot be determinate objects of 'theoretical'
knowledge (where 'theoretical' knowledge includes both synthetic a
priori and empirical knowledge of particular objects).20 Kant's practical
and the categories tends to obscure Kant's important distinction between the
passivity of sensibility and the spontaneity of thought. Though occasionally he
remarks on Kant's distinction between the passivity of sensation and the activity of
thought (128, 148, 162), typically he lumps them together and stresses the need for
these conditions to be 'activated' (68, 82, 102 n. 33, 115, 155, 156, 285, 322-4).
20 Much havoc has been inadvertently wrought in the literature by uncritically assum-
ing that any Kantian use of concepts must count as application of those concepts,
where application is a matter of subsuming intuitions of particulars under schema-
postulates are designed to be just such a way of identifying particulars

- God, free agents, and immortal souls - and thus giving to these
concepts 'objective reality/ Kant's term of art for (possible) objective
reference.21 (See §XI, below.)
tized categories. Strawson made this mistake, if implicitly in his assertion of Kant's
alleged principle of significance. Most recently it is made explicitly by Walter Patt
(///rrhings in Themselves" and "Appearances/" in Gerhard Funke, ed., Akten des 7.
internationalen Kant-Kongress Vol. II.l [Bonn: Bouvier 1991] 149-57), 151, 152. Also
see, e.g., Robert E. Butts ('The Methodological Structure of Kant's Metaphysics of
Science,' in Robert E. Butts, ed., Kant's Philosophy of Physical Science [Dordrecht:
Reidel 1986]), 165, who states this as point 4 of the supposed 'Central Tenets of
Kant's Programme'; his later puzzlement about whether moral agents are just useful
fictions is an ineluctable result of this mistake (175 n. 6). Butts disregards Kant's
view that practical reason has primacy over theoretical reason.
21 In connection with the distinction between phenomena and noumena, and in

support of his general thesis, that the categories and the principles defined in their
terms can only be given 'real' definitions by specifying the conditions under which
objects can be given to which those concepts and principles can be applied, Kant
says the following about the category of causality: 'If I omit time, in which something
follows on something else according to a rule, I would find nothing more of the
concept of cause in the pure category than that it would be something on the basis
of which the existence of something else can be inferred. However, on that basis not
only could cause and effect not be distinguished, but also because this capacity to
infer [Schliefienkonnen] of course at once requires conditions about which I know
nothing, the concept would have absolutely no determination for it application to
any object' (A243=B301, III 206.10-17). Notice that Kant does not say here that,
abstracting from time, there would be no difference between cause and effect; he
does not retract his asymmetrical characterization of the category of causality as
'The relation of causality and dependence (cause and effect)' (A80=B106, III 93.8-12).
He only says that the inference from one thing to the existence of another would be
symmetrical. That is, we could as well infer the existence of the cause from the effect,
if only we could identify either one of them.
Transcendental reflection on the conditions of sensibility does not enable us to
apply the concept of cause to any particular objects, but it does enable us to recognize
the passivity of our sensibility. That suffices to determine that our sensibility would
remain inactive, and we would have no particular sensible intuitions, unless our
sensibility were stimulated by something other than ourselves. I grant that Kant
does not say enough about transcendental reflection, or how such reflection enables
us to use concepts in determining various important parameters of our cognitive
powers, but if we do not grant him at least this much, then he cannot even formulate
his specific brand of transcendental idealism, which holds that we supplying the
form, while something else supplies the matter of experience.
It may also be worth mentioning that reflecting transcendentally on the pas-
sivity of our sensibility, and on that basis inferring that there must be something
distinct from us which stimulates our sensibility, is quite distinct from a cosmologi-
cal inference to a first cause, because transcendental reflection doesn't concern any
series of causes and effects among objects within space and time, and so cannot
I include the qualifier 'possible' here, not to equivocate, but to stress

that Kant's transcendental enterprise is concerned with establishing the
necessary conditions under which alone we can determinately refer to
and know particular objects and events. If Kant can establish such
conditions, then he can establish the legitimate possibility of our using
certain concepts to refer to and to judge those particulars. Actual occa-
sions of such reference and judgment require, in addition to the transcen-
dental conditions of judgment, empirical or moral conditions of
judgment about the particulars in question. Those conditions are pro-
vided by observations of objective states of affairs (theoretical judgments
resulting in empirical knowledge), by our context of deliberation about
agents' behavior (practical judgments resulting in moral prescriptions
or evaluations), or by the conditions for moral action (the postulates of
practical reason concerning freedom, immortality, and God). I suggest
that Kant's transcendental reflection on sensibility is, in effect, another
way of generating 'objective reality' for the concept of a noumenal cause
of sensory intuition. Further explanation of this is not possible, nor, in
Kant's view, desirable; it is an explicit aim of the Critical philosophy
forever to foreclose on the prospect of a materialist (which, in the Modern
period, would be a causally deterministic) explanation of the mind.22
concern the origin of any such series. Individual sensible intuitions are not objects
of consciousness, in Kant's view, and so are not objects of any attempt to explain
them. To say that they are caused by something other than ourselves is a (supposed)
fact, but hardly an explanation. It would be helpful to be able to say something more
specific about the different kinds of judgment involved in these two cases, but Kant
does not, I believe, spell out his account of transcendental reflection sufficiently to
answer such questions.
22 A383, IV 240.1-3; B419-20, 421, III 274.9-15, 274.36-275.3; KdU §89, V 460.20-32; see
Kenneth R. Westphal, 'Kant's Critique of Determinism in Empirical Psychology/ in
Hoke Robinson, ed., Proceedings of the 8th International Kant Congress Vol. II pt. 1
(Milwaukee: Marquette University Press 1995) 357-70. The view I urge here is quite
close, if not identical, to that advocated by Nicholas Rescher ('On the Status of
"Things in Themselves,"' Sy these 47 [1981 ] 289-300), though I have tried to give more
substance to Kant's transcendental basis for thinking of the sensuous manifold 'as
the product of a mind-external reality that somehow impinges upon our mind ab
extra' (Rescher, 293). My view is also very close to Manley Thompson ('Things in
Themselves,' Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 57
[1983] 33-48), except that I give more credence to the idea that at the transcendental
level there is a role in Kant's theoretical philosophy for regarding things in them-
selves as causes of our sensory manifold. In part this is because the location of an
effect is determined by the location of what is acted upon, not necessarily the
erstwhile location of the cause (contra Thompson, 42). This can be admitted while
agreeing with Thompson that things in themselves play no role for Kant in explain-
ing particular experiences (43). (Thompson's insistence that a cause must be spa-
Notice that this view does not require a doctrine of 'double affection'
(the idea that a noumenal thing in itself affects our noumenal ego in
tandem with a phenomenal object affecting our empirical sense organs).
As Kant notes in connection with the immateriality of the soul, matter is
not a thing in itself, but only our way of representing certain spatio-tem-
poral material determinations which constitute only a state of the thing
in itself, while the thing in itself would have a different nature than this
(A360). An (unspecified) thing in itself causally affects our forms of
sensibility, and we experience this affection as specific spatio-temporal
representations (A288-89=B344-45). There is no need to assume that this
involves two realms of objects (noumenal and phenomenal), nor that
there is any numerical isomorphism between things in themselves and
phenomenal objects.23 (See §IX, below, regarding Kant's analysis of
phenomenal objects.) We only need to recognize that the causal affection
of things in themselves, which are only generically specifiable in tran-
scendental reflection, has a complex effect on us due to our forms of
sensibility.
VIII Noumenal and A-temporal Causality
Strictly speaking, this view does require a-temporal causality. However,

this does not have the untoward consequences usually alleged against
it.24 Kant often speaks of things in themselves as not spatial or temporal,
tially located in order to be effective at that location is an instance of transcendental

illusion; see below, 231.) Finally, my view is similar to Kent Baldner's ('Causality
and Things in Themselves/ Sythese 77 [1988] 353-73). However, I give more credence
to the genuinely causal connotations of Kant's locutions about things in themselves
as causes of appearances, in part because my case is based less on a general view of
intentionality and more on the specifics of Kant's own transcendental reflection on
sensibility. Also, I have misgivings about Baldner's equating things in themselves
with the intentional objects of our experience, but this cannot be gone into here.
23 The idea that Kant believes there are two realms of objects, noumenal and phenome-
nal, where noumenal objects (somehow) cause phenomenal objects, has been
dubbed a 'two worlds' view. I am as opposed to this interpretation of Kant as are
Prauss, Buchdahl, and Allison. However, as I point out below, this is because
'phenomenal objects' are constructs, whereas noumena are real (see §IX).
24 Allen Wood ('Kant's Compatibilism/ in Allen Wood, ed., Self and Nature in Kant's
Philosophy [Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1984] 57-101) presents the most coura-
geous and adequate attempt yet to make sense of the a-temporal causality appar-
ently required by noumenal causality. In reply, Jonathan Bennett ('Kant's Theory
of Freedom/ in A. Wood, ed., Self and Nature in Kant's Philosophy, 102-12, at 102)
because they are not 'in' our forms of intuition, space and time. However,
once space and time are regarded as forms of intuition, it is possible
(logically and metaphysically) that things in themselves have some
inherent characteristics that are analogous to (subjective) space and time.
For the sake of discussion, let's call them 'r-spatiality ' and 'r-temporality '
('r-' for real, or independent of our forms of intuition), and let's focus on
the more important case of the time-analog, r-temporality.25 It suffices
for Kant's view to hold that things in themselves do not have the
temporal characteristics we intuit them as having; they may have other,
to us unimaginable, r-temporal traits. If there is some such time-analog
in the noumenal realm, then the r-temporal aspects of noumena can
support the 'happening-analog' involved in noumenal causal episodes.
We may not be able to articulate this position further, and it may not be
lucid, but it is a possible position, and Kant has very strong reasons for
regarding it as obscure, namely, that our imagination (and in some
regards the determinate use of our understanding) is limited by our
forms of intuition. To object that there is only time and there can be no
noumenal analog to temporality, such as r-temporality, would be a
prime instance of transcendental illusion, for this objection rests on
supposing that something subjective, time as one of our forms of intui-
tion, holds objectively of things in themselves;26 either time holds of them
or nothing does. This objection displays exactly the kind of dogmatic
confidence that our concepts apply to or hold of reality in itself against
which Kant incessantly argues. This is to say, to reject the puzzling
notion of a noumenal time-analog, which I have called 'r-temporality,'
out of hand as incoherent or excessively obscure would be to beg the
question flatly against Kant.
contends that a 'making to begin' that is not itself a 'happening' is a contradiction.

Cf. Howell, 56.
25 Kant is explicit that there is a 'transcendental' sense of things being 'outside use/
according to which those things are things in themselves that are distinct from us,
though this involves no spatial determinations (A373, IV 234.21-23).
26 A297=B353, III 236.19-29; A396, IV 247.24-25. For discussion of transcendental

illusion, see Michelle Grier, 'Illusion and Fallacy in Kant's First Antinomy,' Kant-
Studien 84 (1993) 257-82. Allison notes that Kant's remark about a supposed object
of a non-sensible intuition, whose 'duration is not a time' (B149 [III 118.23]) suggests
'that Kant might not rule out all noumenal analogues to our sensible forms' (Idealism
and Freedom, 185 n. 18).
IX Kant's 'Double Aspect' Idealism
The view I have sketched and attributed to Kant is, I submit, intelligible.
It may be false or insupportable - that depends on the soundness of
Kant's arguments (primarily) in the Transcendental Aesthetic and the
first Antinomy - but it is not incoherent or unintelligible.27 Strawson's
objection, that any intelligible contrast between appearances and reality
vanishes in the case of Kant's distinction between appearances and
things in themselves, would be pertinent only if Kant were trying to
draw a distinction among appearances between veridical and illusory
appearances.28 Kant of course does retain that distinction within the
empirical realm, but at the transcendental level his distinction is between
objects as they appear to us as we intuit them, and objects as not intuited
by us. Objects are none the less real; Kant merely claims to distinguish
between two broad classes of their aspects (B69-71 & note, B278-79;
A376-77).
Kant expressly states this 'double aspect' view of things in a note to
the second edition Preface:
... it is only feasible [to make an experiment to test the principles of pure reason]
with the concepts and principles which we assume a priori, namely, insofar as one sets
them up such that the same objects can be regarded on the one hand as objects of the
senses and of the understanding for experience, but on the other hand as objects which
one merely thinks, at least for reason by itself [isolierte] which strives to overstep the
bounds of experience; thus [objects] can be regarded from two distinct sides. Now
if it is found, that when one regards objects in that doubled perspective, there is
accord with the principle of pure reason, but with a single perspective there occurs
an unavoidable contradiction of reason with itself, then the experiment is decisive
for the correctness of the above distinction. (B xviii note; cf. B xxv-xxvii, III 16.30-20)
The question concerns whether this double perspective on one and the
same objects is purely methodological, or instead relies on metaphysical
views about the contrast between things as appearances (or objects of
experience) and things in themselves (or objects of pure reason). I
contend that, to be faithful to Kant's view, the double-aspect view cannot
simply be two ways of thinking about or describing objects; those two
ways of thinking about objects must be based on the distinct charac-
teristics objects have as intuited by us and as not intuited. For example,
27 The most subtle and insightful analysis known to me of how Kant's view of space
and time as a priori subjective forms of human intuition goes awry is in Wilfrid
Sellars, Science and Metaphysics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1968), 230-8.
28 Buchdahl responds to Strawson's objection somewhat differently (78-9).
Kant plainly is committed to it being the same object, or the same being,
whom we regard alternately as a human body and as a rational agent,
as he indicates directly in his treatment of this topic in the Antinomies
(A538=B566), in his analogical argument for ascribing rational freedom
to human behavior, and in the second Critique (see §XI). However, he
holds that the distinction between phenomena and noumena is not
simply one of description, but concerns objects as intuited by us and as
not intuited, or, more specifically, those states of an object that occur or
are evident as we intuit them and the other, non-intuitable states of the
object.
Kant states this view many times in the Critique, perhaps most suc-
cinctly when he presents his transcendental idealism as the key to
solving the Antinomies:
Our transcendental idealism ... allows that the objects of outer intuition, even as they
are intuited in space, and as their changes in time are presented in inner sense, are
also actual. For since space is just [schon] a form of the intuition, which we call outer,
and without objects in space no empirical representation would be given: thus we
can and must accept extended beings in space as actual; and the same holds also for
time. But that space itself, together with time, and along with both of them all
appearances, are of course in themselves not things, but rather nothing but repre-
sentations and they utterly cannot exist apart from our mind.... (A490-91=B520)29
Kant does hold a 'double aspect' view of things; but the 'double aspect'
things have is not due simply to two ways of describing them. It is due
to two ways of regarding things, where those two regards are tied to an
idealist metaphysics. According to Kant's idealism, space and time are
forms of the way in which we intuit things, or have immediate cognitive
relation to them. The spatial and temporal characteristics of our empiri-
cal representations of things are generated through our forms of intui-
tion.
This doctrine is central to Kant's 'Copernican Revolution,' according
to which a priori knowledge of objects is only possible 'if the object (as
object of the senses) must conform to the constitution of our faculty of
intuition,' rather than our intuition conforming to objects (B xvii). This
contrast is not simply a contrast between descriptions (as Prauss and
Buchdahl would have it); it is a contrast between the kinds of properties
'of things as intuited by us and as not intuited by us; Kant's epistemol-
ogy (and his account of 'epistemic conditions') is rooted in his highly
metaphysical views about space and time as forms of human intuition,
29 Cf. A30=B45, B306, B307, B308-09, A254-55=B310, A287-88=B344-45, A491-92=B520-

21, A492-94=B521-22.
that is, his view that space and time are formal features of the way in
which we intuit things and events, or the way in which we receive
sensory stimulation, i.e., sensory affection.30 We are entitled to describe
objects in these two fundamentally different ways - in themselves or
spatio-temporally - due to the (supposed) metaphysical fact that our
forms of intuition, space and time, generate this second aspect of things
insofar as we intuit them (cf. Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism, chs.
1,5).
The metaphysically tricky point in Kant's analysis is that when he
grants (in the above quotation) that 'objects of outer intuition ... are
actual' or (in the first edition Transcendental Aesthetic) that 'light affects
our senses in certain ways' which result in colors, is that this holds only
of objects 'considered as appearances.' Spatio-temporal 'objects' are
'actual' if they accord with the material conditions of experience, which
presupposes that they also accord with the formal conditions of experi-
ence (A218=B265-66). It suffices, according to Kant, for something to be
actual that it stand in relation to an actual perception in accord with the
analogies of experience (A225=B272). However, in the 'Analogies of
Experience,' indeed, right in the midst of the 'Second Analogy' concern-
ing the rule-governedness of causal relations - a cornerstone of Kant's
empirical realism - Kant makes quite clear that empirically real, actual
spatio-temporal objects exist only in our representing them. The passage
must be seen to be believed:
Now although appearances are not of course things in themselves and yet just the
same are all that can be given to us to know, I should show what kind of connection
in time the manifold in the appearances itself obtains, such that the representation
of it in apprehension is always successive. Thus e.g., the apprehension of the
manifold in the appearance of a house which stands before me is successive. Now
the question is whether the manifold of this house itself would be successive unto
itself, which of course no one grants. But now as soon as I raise my concepts of an
object up to transcendental significance, the house is absolutely no thing in itself,
but only an appearance, that is, representation whose transcendental object is
unknown. What do I thus understand by the question, how the manifold itself may
be connected in appearance (which of course is nothing in itself)? Here that which
lies in the successive apprehension is regarded as representation, although the
appearance which is given to me - despite the fact that it is nothing more than a
totality [Inbegriff] of these representations - is regarded as the represented object
with which my concept, which I draw out of the representations of apprehension,
should correspond. One soon sees that [...] appearance, as opposed to the repre-
30 Recognizing that Kant relies on two ranges or kinds of properties of things does not,
however, require ascribing to him a 'two world' ontology, which invites the fabri-
cation of the doctrine of double affection.
sentations of apprehension, could be represented as their object distinct from them

only if they [the representations of apprehension] stand under a rule which distin-
guishes them from any other apprehension and which makes one kind of connection
of the manifold necessary. That in appearance which contains the condition of this
necessary rule of apprehension is the object. (A190-91=B235-36)
Though much in this passage is challenging, and much concerns issues

lying beyond the bounds of the present essay, Kant is quite plain about
one point which is very important here. Appearances of objects are
distinguished from our apprehension of them only insofar as sensory
representations are connected in rule-like ways which require a particu-
lar kind of order of apprehension. Only insofar as we judgmentally
integrate our sensory intuitions in such rule-like ways can we represent
appearing objects. Since the appearances which are given to us consist
in sensory representations,31 apparent objects exist only in their being
represented by us, or in their (in principle representable) relation to
31 Per Kant's remark about the given appearance of a house being an 'Inbegriff of
representations of apprehension. Robert Howell (38-40) and Hoke Robinson (419-
20) cite an array of passages in which Kant appears to identify appearances with
representations. They hold that these passages are counter-evidence to Allison's
dual aspect interpretation of Kant's distinction between appearances and things in
themselves, and Howell contends that they provide evidence for an appearance
theory and against the appearing theory of this distinction, which would include
the interpretation developed here. These issues are complicated; they cannot - and
need not - be fully disentangled here. It suffices for my purposes to show that an
appearing theory provides a basis for a coherent interpretation of noumenal causal-
ity. If that is possible, that provides grounds for emphasizing those passages which
favor an appearing theory. However, something much stronger can be said: If one
keeps Kant's sensationism in mind, then it is clear that any 'representations' which
can be 'appearances' of empirical objects or events must be generated by conceptu-
ally synthesizing complexes of sensations. The objects of such representations
appear to us through those complexes. This entails that appearances and repre-
sentations of appearances have a mind-dependent intentional existence and it
entails that they are functions of the contents (the 'objective reality') of the concepts
and sensations which generate them. (Kant's use of the term 'Inbegriff quoted above
may well only refer to the content of the complex of concepts and sensations
involved in representing the appearance of the house, and not to a numerical
identity of the appearance of a house and the sensations and concepts which
generate it.) This provides representations and appearances all the 'mind-depend-
ence' Kant ascribes to them in the passages cited by Howell and Robinson. However,
this does not require that what we are aware of as objects are our sensations or 'ideas'
(in Locke's or Berkeley's senses) or complexes thereof. I think Kant may be guilty
of hasty and misleading expression, but not of inconsistency or (sub specie Transcen-
dental Idealism) falsehood. Also see Allison's response to Robinson on this count
(Idealism and Freedom, 12-14).
objects we represent. Kant is quite express about this analysis of 'object'

elsewhere, too (e.g., A494=B522).32 To speak of 'causal relations' among
'phenomenal objects' is thus common-sense shorthand for (at least pos-
sible) representations of certain rule-like relations among appearances
32 This passage should counter any temptation to read the last line of the above quote
from the second Analogy differently. In this essay I defend what Howell, following
Prichard, calls an 'appearing theory' of Kantian objects of empirical knowledge
(Howell, 37-52). Howell argues that this interpretation faces an insuperable di-
lemma. I agree with Howell in taking the metaphysical aspects of Kant's idealism
seriously, though I believe he has not taken them seriously enough: Recognizing
the radical implications of Kant's doctrines of space and time as forms of intuition
provides grounds for restricting some of the premises in Howell's objection in ways
which dispel his dilemma. Howell argues that an appearing theory cannot consis-
tently maintain that a thing in itself is identical with a thing as it appears to us in
space and time, while also maintaining that things as they exist in themselves are
nonspatiotemporal and unknown by us. Howell takes the example of someone (H)
with forms of sensibility and judgment like ours who knows that a tree is conical.
Kant accepts the judgmental or propositional form our kind of knowledge of the
tree takes:
(0 (P) H knows that the tree is conical.
Howell further contends that Kant accepts the principle
(ii) (Q) If H knows that p, then p.
Howell also contends that (Hi) our states of knowledge, the intuitions and concepts
via which we know, and we ourselves as knowers, exist in themselves (cf. ibid.,
26-36). These three points allegedly generate a dilemma. The first two points entail
that any world or realm at which (P) holds is a world at which (R) is true:
(R) the tree is conical.
By point (Hi), '(P) expresses a state of knowledge that exists in the world W of objects
as objects exist in themselves. Hence (P) must itself hold true at world W. And
consequently (R) must hold true at W (ibid., 42-3). This result, however, is flatly
inconsistent with the central doctrine of Kant's transcendental idealism, that things
in themselves are not not spatio-temporal. (Although Howell uses the terminology
of 'two worlds' or 'two realms/ he does not use those terms to mean what Adickes
et al meant by two numerically distinct sets of objects; cf. ibid., 349 n. 29.)
Howell overlooks the fact that one major implication of Kant's idealism is to
qualify (Q) so as to restrict empirical 'knowledge' of particulars to determinate
judgments about intuited spatio-temporal objects and events. Kant accepts the
inference within the phenomenal realm. Howell is right that Kant 'does not think that
a claim about anything's appearing to be the case is part of the content of our, or of
H's, ordinary knowledge of the shapes of things' (ibid., 47). However, this point is
not decisive; quite the contrary. Kant's distinction between appearances and things
in themselves can be made only in transcendental reflection on the nature and a priori
conditions of human knowledge. (This is quite clear in the passage quoted earlier
from the Second Analogy; A190-91=B235-36, above, 234-5.) This transcendental
distinction isn't part of the content of our ordinary conception of knowledge; it
couldn't be - that conception developed before Kant made philosophy Critical by
reflecting transcendentally on the supposed transcendentally ideal, necessary a
priori conditions of human knowledge. Kant contends that such transcendental
reflection reveals that 'the object' of knowledge is systematically ambiguous be-

tween noumenal and phenomenal senses. To insist that this phrase must be univo-
cal, as Howell does, is another instance of transcendental illusion (on which see
above, 231). For these reasons, I do not believe Howell takes the radical nature of
Kant's claims seriously enough, in part because he does not appear to appreciate
the potentials of Kant's account of transcendental reflection. (I say 'potentials'
advisedly; Henrich has done much to suggest what Kant can say on behalf of
transcendental reflection; see above, 224f .) In part, Kant's account of transcendental
reflection is to explain the kind of knowledge propounded by the first Critique, since
that knowledge is not gained in the way Kant contends empirical knowledge is
gained, namely, by subsuming intuitions of particulars under our conceptual forms
of judgment. In his concluding Observation on the first edition Paralogisms Kant
states explicitly the important implication of his analysis of the conditions of
determinate cognitive judgments about objects and events, namely, that those
conditions which are necessary to know an object at all cannot themselves be known
as objects (A402, IV 250.34-35). Kant's distinction between appearances and things
in themselves concerns primarily knowledge of, that is, determinate cognitive
judgments about, particular objects and events. However, because Kant didn't
develop his account of transcendental reflection thoroughly, he did not adequately
address issues about the 'objects' or subject matter of transcendental knowledge,
namely the nature and status of concepts as functions of judgment or of intuitions
as states of the cognizing subject. In medieval terms, Kant concentrates so much on
his radical innovations regarding the representational character or 'objective reality'
of our representations (concepts, intuitions, and forms of intuition) that he says far
too little about their formal reality - the way in which they exist as states or
capacities of the subject, or about how we come to recognize or know about their
formal reality and representational character (objective reality) through transcen-
dental reflection. Consequently, it is no surprise to find Howell claiming, in effect,
that since neither the cognizing subject nor its capacities or representations can be
mere appearances, they must be or exist in themselves (ibid., 28-35). I agree with
Howell that cognizant subjects are noumenal; however, in view of Kant's remark
in the Paralogisms, and in view of his retention of a substance/attribute/mode
ontology, it is much less clear that the capacities and representations of cognizant
subjects should be regarded as existing 'in themselves.' Be that as it may, when the
formal reality of intuitions, concepts, and empirical cognitions (Erkenntnisse) is
distinguished from their objective reality, then Howell's concluding inference,
quoted just above, is a non sequitur. By (Hi), (P) does express a state of knowledge
which obtains in the world W of objects as objects exist in themselves; in this case,
the relevant 'object' is the cognizant subject of knowledge. Hence it is true that the
noumenal subject knows a phenomenal tree is conical. That is not how the noumenal
subject, as engaged in knowing the tree, represents his or her knowledge; that is
how the noumenal subject's knowledge is represented by Critical philosophers in
transcendental reflection. If determinate empirical knowledge gained by judgmen-
tally subsuming intuitions of particulars under categorial and empirical concepts
of objects is restricted in the way Kant believes it is to things as they appear to us in
space and time, then Howell's premise (Q) holds within the phenomenal realm. To
keep nomenclature consistent, using primes to indicate principles holding in the
phenomenal realm, Howell's '(Q)' ought to be designated '(Q')'. Howell's principle
then has an analog (Q) which expresses Kant's transcendental account of (Q'):
(Q) If H knows that p, then something noumenal appears (phenomenally) to H
asp.
of objects and events, where those appearances in turn are also (at least
possible) representations of certain other kinds of rule-like relations
among sensorially apprehended representations (particular sensory in-
tuitions). Causal relations in the empirical realm are not self-sufficient;
they are nothing but relations constructable by us in our representing
apparent objects and events.33 This holds, too, for the 'causal' effects of
spatio-temporal 'objects' on our empirical sensory organs, that is, this
holds as well for the 'empirical affection' of spatio-temporal 'things' on
our sensory organs.
Consequently, HowelTs (R) ('the tree is conical') holds at the phenomenal world W,
not at the noumenal world W; it should be designated (R'). The noumenal analog
to (R') would be (R):
(R) Something noumenal appears as a conical tree.
This is metaphysically baroque, to be sure, and much could be done to refine (Q)
and (R) to reflect Kant's view of the modal necessities of appearances having a
certain kind of structure for certain kinds of cognizant subjects. However, further
elaboration is not needed here. Howell considers this kind of rejoinder as 'Option
(II)' (ibid., 47). His rejoinder is based on asserting a univocal principle (Q') (his (Q)).
That, I believe I have shown, is not a principle Kant did or would accept in the
unqualified form Howell ascribes to him, on the contrary, Howell's principle (Q)
rests on transcendental illusion. (I also think Howell's (Hi) tends to conflate act and
object, as is plainest in his summary of his objection; ibid., 46.) Though Kant's
transcendental idealism may be extravagant or even unjustified, it is not incoherent
and it is not subject to Howell's objection.
33 This is not to ascribe phenomenalism to Kant. 'Phenomenalism' requires the (essen-

tially Cartesian) thesis that each 'phenomenon' ('sensing strictly speaking/ 'idea,'
'sensory impression,' 'sense-datum,' etc.) be exactly what it seems or appears to be.
On Kant's view, only objects of judgments can be objects of consciousness. Kant's
view doesn't require any sort of infallibility or incorrigibility, though it does require
that if we're aware of an object at all, our judgment about it cannot be wholely false.
(Cf. Kant's logic lectures: 'AH judgments accord with the laws of the understanding,
all judgments of the understanding are thus true. Even in our mistaken judgments
the understanding must always have done something, and thus it can never happen
that everything in the judgment is false; instead there must always be something
true in it. It is completely impossible that a person completely errs, if he judges'
[Logik Blomberg XXIV 84.25-31, my trans.].)
I think there are some severe tensions between Kant's attempt to reduce causal
relations to representations-in-principle of causal relations and his claim that the
matter of experience is given ab extra (see Kenneth R. Westphal, 'Affinity, Idealism,
and Naturalism: The Stability of Cinnabar and the Possibility of Experience,'
Kant-Studien 88 [1997] 139-89). The deepest problem with the parallelism involved
in 'double affection' (one not explored by Gram), is that the supposed causal
relations among phenomenal objects are constructions; they are not self-sufficient
relations which could stand in parallel to supposed noumenal causal relations.
Adickes makes this error in his discussion of empirical affection (35-46).
X Noumenal Causality and Rational Agency
Kant's two-fold view of things, based on the distinction between things

as we sensorially intuit them and things as not sensorially intuited by us,
is central to his analysis of free action. The non-phenomenal states of an
object cannot be known empirically, they can only be objects of thought.
Kant's project in his practical works is to give us clear and convincing
grounds to think about the noumenal states of human agents in specific,
warranted ways.34 The issue is whether Kant's locutions about the
noumenal causality of free rational agents merely represent permissible
ways of thinking about agents and their behavior, or whether these
thoughts are supposed to be true. Passages cited at the outset support
the latter; some others suggest the former, weaker alternative. At B430-31
Kant remarks that our rational capacity to legislate a priori relates us to
an 'intelligible (admittedly only thought-of) world.' In connection with
our rational agency, Kant remarks that the requirements of physical
explanation, and in particular the principle of the causal connectedness
of appearances, is not at all infringed by the assumption that among
natural causes there are also found some causes which are only intelli-
gible - provided that this is merely a 'fiction' (A545=B573). Similarly,
in connection with reason having causality, Kant hedges by saying 'at
least we represent reason' in this way (A547=B575). Finally, Kant re-
marks that in connection with freedom we 'regard' reason itself as a
determining cause, and that the series of events initiated by an agent's
act is 'viewed as if (Kant's emphasis) it began from and with the agent's
resolve (A685=B713). These passages appear to contrast sharply with
those discussed at the outset, which show no such hedges. Where does
Kant stand? A full answer to this question cannot be given here. Let me
set one problem aside. One problem concerns Kant's belief in thorough-
going determinism in the phenomenal - including psychological -
realm. I agree with Henry Allison that this psychological determinism
cannot be retained along with Kant's account of freedom. Free action
involves choosing to adopt ends and motives (Allison's 'incorporation
thesis'). Because this choice is a free act, thoroughgoing psychological
determinism must be rescinded.35
34 Schrader recognizes that Kant's theoretical and practical philosophies must be

integrated (181-5). Unfortunately, his effort in this regard amounts to little more
than insisting that Kant's locutions in his practical works must conform to
Schrader's neo-Kantian view of Kant's theoretical philosophy.
35 Allison, Kant's Theory of Freedom, 39, 52, 55, 65, 241. 1 would, however, locate the
needed revision somewhat differently. Kant himself argues against the possibility
Setting this problem aside does not, however, settle the real issue here:
Is 'noumenal freedom' simply a rationally constructed fiction? If it is,
that would make interpretive life easy for Prauss's and Buchdahl's view
of affection. I don't think this is or can be Kant's view. From a theoretical
perspective, the noumenal freedom and causality of agents is a concep-

tual, theoretical possibility; freedom is a 'problematic concept,' we have
no theoretical grounds either to affirm or deny its reality, or to refer that
concept to any object or event. From a practical perspective, we have
grounds to attribute objective reality to this idea. This is to say, Kant's
practical philosophy is designed to give us grounds to conclude that we
are in fact free and causally effective agents. Why must this be Kant's
view? On the negative side, if Kant's view ultimately were that free
agency were simply a rationally constructed fiction, one which we were
theoretically permitted but practically required to entertain, this would
be even more wretched a subterfuge than Kant thought compatibilism
to be. On this interpretation of Kant's view, our actions would be as
thoroughly determined by natural causes as the compatibilist holds; we
would be no more free than a turnspit.36 Yet on this interpretation we
of deterministic psychology. Thus there is no problem granting Allison's 'incorpo-

ration thesis/ The problem lies instead in understanding how free (or, not known
to be determined) psychological acts are to be coordinated with, and understood as
causing, otherwise determined bodily behavior in space and time (see Westphal,
'Kant's Critique of Determinism in Empirical Psychology').
36 Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (hereafter 'KdpV) V, 95-97. Karl Ameriks ('Kant and
Hegel on Freedom: Two New Interpretations/ Inquiry 35 [1992] 219-32) urges a
revisionist, compatibilist reconstruction of Kant's views on freedom. He believes
that Kant's noumenal metaphysics is coherent (219), but finds that Kant's moral
theory doesn't sufficiently support recourse to incompatibilist noumenal freedom
(227) and that relaxing causal determinism in the phenomenal realm would 'cause
a fundamental revision of Kant's transcendental account of experience' (229).
(Ameriks rejects Allison's claim that practical freedom involves indeterminism at
the psychological level.) Against Ameriks, I suggest that incompatibilist freedom is
equally fundamental to Kant's practical views, and none of Kant's theoretical
arguments suffice to prove strict universal causal determinism, either. Conse-
quently, revising Kant's belief in strict determinism needn't involve revising much
if anything (apart from rhetoric) in his transcendental account of experience.
Ameriks has yet to explain how his proposed (but still undisclosed) 'sophisticated
compatibilism' is to deal with Kant's sharp argument in the second Critique against
compatibilism uberhaupt. In any event, unlike some other recent attempts at inter-
preting Kant's metaphysical views about freedom of the will in compatibilist terms,
Ameriks' attempt clearly recognizes that such efforts involve reconstructing Kant's
views, and not simply interpreting them. Most prominent among the recent com-
patibilist interpretations of Kant is Ralf Meerbote's work. Though I find this idea,
as an interpretation of Kant, unconvincing, I cannot undertake its detailed criticism
would be required by the Critical philosophy to think of ourselves quite

otherwise, in accord with the fiction of noumenal freedom. Kant's aim
to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith (B xxx) was not
supposed to justify our believing demonstrable falsehoods! Kant's
hedges, cited at the beginning of this section, are qualifiers needed within
the theoretical perspective in which those remarks are formulated. From
a theoretical perspective, we are only entitled to think of rational free-
dom as a fiction, strictly, as a 'problematic concept.' However, as noted
at the outset, a cardinal tenet of Kant's idealism is that the theoretical
perspective is only one of two, and indeed the practical perspective has
priority. I take up the positive case for viewing rational freedom as more
than a theoretically permissible fiction in the next section.
XI A Positive View of Noumenal Causality
Let me begin a positive plea to take Kant's statements about noumenal

agent causality seriously (and literally) with a general remark. Kant's firm
policy, tested by the censors, was not to publicize what he did not believe.37
Yet even after the publication of the first Critique, Kant lectured freely in
1 783-84 about God's causality - a noumenal cause if there ever was one.38
Similarly, Kant continued to base his lectures on metaphysics on
Baumgarten's Metaphysica even after Johann Schultz's handbook of
Kant's Critical philosophy became available in 1784. These facts strongly
suggest that Kant retained significant metaphysical views, and that his
criticism of traditional metaphysics is far more restricted than is often
supposed (cf . Ameriks, 'Kant and Hegel on Freedom') . Indeed, rather than
having been converted by Hume into a verificationist or proto-positivist,
Kant became a modified Leibnizian. Kant grants, that is, that Leibniz's
monadology would be true, if space and time weren't forms of intuition:
The understanding requires namely first, that something be given (at least in
principle), in order to determine it in a certain way. Hence in principle in pure
understanding matter precedes form, and thus Leibniz first assumed things (mo-
nads) and their internal power of representation, in order subsequently to ground
on that their external relation[s] and the community of their states (namely their
here. For discussion, see Allison, Kant's Theory of Freedom, 76-82.
37 Tugendlehre VI 433 note; Letter to Moses Mendelssohn of April 8, 1766 (X 69; A.

Zweig, ed. and trans., Kant: Philosophical Correspondence [Chicago: University of
Chicago Press 1967], 54); and Kant's Note given in XII 380 (1st ed., 406).
38 In the third section of the 'Religionslehre Politz' (XXVIII 2,2, pp. 1091-1117; A.W.
Wood, trans., Lectures on Philosophical Theology [Ithaca: Cornell University Press
1978], 131-159). I thank Karl Ameriks for mentioning them to me in this connection.
representations). Thus space and time were possible, the former only through the
relation[s] of the substances, the latter through the connections of their mutual
determinations as grounds and consequents. In fact that would have to be the case,
if pure understanding could be related immediately to objects, and if space and time
were determinations of things in themselves. But if they are only sensible intuitions,
in which we determine all objects only as appearances, then the form of intuition
(as a subjective characteristic of sensibility) precedes all matter (all sensations), and
thus space and time precede all appearances and all data of experience and indeed
first make these possible. (A267=B322-23)
Though full proof cannot be offered here, ultimately Kant's noumena are
his replacement for Leibniz's monads.39 Kant's account of space and time
as forms of intuition affords him both an empirical realism and a meta-
physical realism unavailable to Leibniz. This allows Kant to repudiate
both of the standard senses of idealism current, though not always
distinguished, in his day, according to which idealism is the denial of a
material spatio-temporal world or the denial of an immaterial world
'corresponding' to the represented material world.40 Although the only
theoretically permissible sense of noumenon is negative, namely, the
sense in which there must be a non-sensible ground of sensible experi-
ence, this theoretical perspective does not at all exhaust the philosophi-
39 I stress replacement; cf. the passages cited from the Prolegomena above, n. 6. Leibniz
is surely among the 'idealists' from whose view Kant there distinguishes his.
Adickes notes in passing that Kant's view has a monadological character (47),
though he assumes that all things in themselves must be 'spiritual.' This is an
overstatement. Just as there is no need to assume that every thing in itself or
noumenon is free (see n. 45), there is also no reason to assume that they are all
'spiritual'; at least some could be other sorts of abstracta. Adickes also greatly
overestimates the admissible degree of mapping between phenomenal appearances
to us and things in themselves (ibid.; cf. Ho well, 56-7). On the Leibnizian back-
ground to Kant's Critical epistemology, see Ernst Cassierer, Kant's Life and Thought,
J. Hagen, trans. (New Haven: Yale University Press 1981), ch. II §4; Gottfried Martin,
Kant's Metaphysics and Theory of Science, Peter G. Lucas, trans. (Manchester: Man-
chester University Press 1955), Introduction and ch. 1; Jill Vance Buroker, Space and
Incongruence (Dordrecht: Reidel 1981), esp. chs. 2 and 5; and the remarks on Leibniz
in Karl Ameriks, Kant's Theory of Mind (Oxford: Clarendon 1982), and Alison
Laywine, Kant's Early Metaphysics and the Origins of the Critical Philosophy (Atascad-
ero, CA: Ridgeview 1993).
40 These two senses of 'idealism' and the exploitation of the resulting ambiguity by
Leibnizians are discussed by Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique
of Pure Reason' (London: Macmillan 1923), 298-9, who follows Hans Vaihinger, 'Zu
Kants Widerlegung des Idealismus,' in Strassburger Abhandlungen zur Philosophic:
Eduard Zeller zu seinem siebenzigsten Geburtstage (Freiburg I.B. and Tubingen: J.C.B.
Mohr 1884) 85-164, at 107-11. 1 do not think that Kant's refutations of idealism are
contradictory in the ways Vaihinger contends, but that is a topic requiring separate
treatment.
cally legitimate grounds for ascribing characteristics to 'noumena/ Quite

the contrary (A248=B305, B306-09, A254-56=B310-12, A286-89=B342-45).
As noted earlier, one main aim of Kant's practical philosophy is to give
us grounds for assuming that certain ideas of reason, which cannot be
known theoretically to hold of any objects, can in fact refer to objects.
These ideas include, of course, freedom and God. Kant specifically takes
up the issues about meaning and reference this raises near the end of the
Dialectic of the second Critique. He insists there that no intuitions are
supplied for these ideas, and so no theoretical knowledge is generated
on their basis. However, Kant maintains:
The three aforementioned ideas of speculative reason are not themselves cognitions;
they are, nevertheless, transcendent thoughts in which there is nothing impossible.
Now through an apodictic practical law, they, as necessary conditions of the
possibility of that which this law requires to be made an object, acquire objective
reality. That is, they show by this that they have objects, but we cannot indicate how
their concept refers to an object.... (KdpV V 135.2-9)
Kant explicitly states that practical reason is able, through the arguments
set out in the second Critique, to give 'objective reality' to the ideas of
freedom and God, even in the absence of corresponding intuitions. In
this way, what must from the theoretical perspective be regarded as
mere Gedankendinge - merely 'problematic concepts'41 - are shown
from the practical perspective to be genuine thoughts with legitimate
possible reference to real objects. Earlier in the second Critique Kant states
this directly:
Now the concept of an empirically unconditioned causality is indeed theoretically

empty (lacking any relevant intuition), even though it is still possible and refers to
an indeterminate object; however, in the moral law, and consequently in a practical
connection, the concept is given meaning [Bedeutung]; thus I have no intuition which
would determine its objective theoretical reality, but it nevertheless has an actual
application, which can be exhibited in concreto in [agents'] characters [Gesinnungen]
or maxims; that is, its practical reality can be pointed out. This is sufficient to justify
the concept even with regard to noumena. (KdpV V 56.18-27)
41 A concept is 'problematic' if no theoretical grounds can be given to determine

whether an object corresponds to it (A254-55=B310-ll, A286-88=B342-44, A771-
72=B799-800).
42 For discussion of Kant's theory of character (Gesinnung), see Allison, Kant's Theory
of Freedom, 136-45. However, he treats 'character' as constitutive, whereas it is quite
clearly a regulative construct (see Westphal, 'Kant's Critique of Determinism in
Empirical Psychology').
These passages are unequivocal, and show the central importance of

Kant's moral theory to his (complete) theory of meaning and reference.
(Like Strawson, Sandberg disregards this fundamental facet of the Criti-
cal philosophy; see 28f .) Notice, conversely, that were Kant saddled with
the view that freedom was a mere fiction, we would be required on
practical grounds to think of something as actual that we knew on
theoretical grounds not to exist. This would directly contradict his
assertion in the previous passage that the thought of freedom, theoreti-
cally transcendent though it is, contains nothing impossible. This is why
freedom is a theoretically problematic concept, rather than a demonstra-
bly vacuous one.
The arguments of the second Critique, if successful, give objective
reality to the idea of, e.g., freedom. How do we get from the legitimate
possible reference of the concept of freedom to referring to particular free
agents? Kant relies, in essence, on an argument from analogy. The
Critical philosophy justifies the general principles needed for this
analogical inference, so when we observe behavior that can only be
explained by intentional purposiveness, we are entitled to ascribe sensi-
bility, understanding, and reason to the agent.43 Kant's argument by
analogy is instructive in this connection. Typically Kant scholars contrast
'the noumenal' and 'the phenomenal' realms in the generic singular.
Kant's argument by analogy underscores the fact that each of us has our
own sensory apparatus and understanding. They are of the same kind,
but they are distinctly instantiated in each of us (A363; cf. Paton, I
451-453). Consequently, we cannot and do not share experiences, nor do
we share spatio-temporal objects or events. Were there no noumenal
grounds for phenomenal appearances to each of us, there would be no
way (within Kant's ontology) to publish, distribute, read, or translate
Kant's first Critique. Nor would there be any basis for first- and third-
person experiences of the same human body. Since Kant analyzes em-
pirical objects in phenomenal terms, there must be a noumenal basis for
these phenomena if we are to share a world at all.44 Kant holds that in
both cases, in cases of mere empirical things and in cases of free agents,
a supersensible ground is responsible for the sensory appearances we
experience (A358-59). Sometimes experience warrants believing that
some supersensible grounds are more complex and morally significant
43 KdrV A546-7=B574-5, III 370.33-371.14; KdU 'Allgemeine Anmerkung zur Teleolo-

gie/V 484.7-19.
44 I do not say that Kant analyzes empirical objects in phenomenal^ terms. See n. 33
above.
than others, because some of them are spontaneous intelligent causes of

behavior.45
XII Conclusion
Kant's theoretical philosophy has been interpreted by means of various

antecedent verificationist, positivist, phenomenological, realist, or phe-
nomenalist predilections of his expositors. Using Kant in this way can
be and often has been a very fruitful enterprise philosophically. But
treating Kant as a philosopher in himself requires taking seriously his
theoretical aim to level the philosophical ground and render it suffi-
ciently secure for majestic moral edifices (A319=B375-76), his claim that
practical reason has primacy over theoretical reason,46 and his claim that
only the double-aspect metaphysics of transcendental idealism can rec
oncile theoretical and practical reason because it alone can reconcile
autonomous rational action with natural determinism (B xxvi-xxx). If
that requires countenancing noumenal causality, so be it. It is not an
incoherent idea, and Kant was, after all, a very sophisticated kind of
idealist.47
Received: March, 1993

Revised: August, 1994
Revised: May, 1995
Revised: March, 1996
45 Allison rightly points out (against Beck) that Kant's account of the noumenal ground
of phenomena does not entail that every phenomenon is transcendentally free; a
noumenal ground is only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition of transcendental
freedom. Transcendental freedom is only ascribed on the basis of actions that can
be understood only through the causality of reason (Kant's Theory of Freedom, 73-4);
cf. A545=B573.
46 B xxi, B xxix-xxx, A633-34=B661-62, A640-41=B667-68, A776-77=B804-05, A804-

31=B832-59 (The Canon of Pure Reason); KdpV V 50-57.
47 I gratefully acknowledge that the initial research on this article was supported by
an annual fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (USA, 1992)
and that revisions were made during a research fellowship from the Alexander von
Humboldt-Stiftung (Germany, 1995). A preliminary draft was presented to the
North New England Philosophy Association (1992). This paper has benefited from
the comments of two anonymous referees for this journal.

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Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Noumenal Causality Reconsidered: Affection, Agency, and Meaning in Kant

Now a scientific Kantian metaphysics must be systematic, for in the

This is a challenging passage, to be sure. It is not my aim here to explicate

II Noumenal Causal Affection of Sensibility

The debate about Kant's views on things in themselves, empirical intui-

(3) If things in themselves affect the transcendental ego, in parallel to

2 The systematic character of Kant's metaphysics is analyzed by Gerd Buchdahl in

empirical representation of one and the same object. (Hans Vai-

system, and with that presupposition is it impossible to remain within

5 In defending this stronger interpretation of sensory affection by things in them-

III Some Problematic Passages

Judging by these passages, Kant would seem clearly committed to the

IV Verif icationist Interpretations of Kant and the

Strawson's interpretation of Kant marks the confluence of neo-Kantian-

priori manifold of sensibility, set out in the transcendental aesthetic

8 On Kant's sensationism see Rolf George, 'Kant's Sensationalism/ Synthese 47 (1981 )

V Buchdahl's Objections to Noumenal

Before turning to Kant's positive development of these doctrines in the

For if we regard outer appearances as representations produced in us by their

Though Buchdahl thinks this passage provides an 'even more weighty

tions are caused (typically) by objects and events in one's environment,

VI Transcendental Reflection and the

Three points need to be recognized in order properly to understand

14 Kant provides a concise taxonomy of kinds of representation at A320=B376-77, III

Third, the logical significance of pure categories can be enriched into a

This passage explicitly proscribes both empirical and synthetic a priori

Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection, Kant describes transcendental

This passage gives Kant's general characterization of transcendental

If transcendental reflection is discursive, then there must be concepts

refers to 'transcendental knowledge' (I 226-32), Allison refers to it only in passing

phy,' Monist 72 [1989] 285-304). Precisely because this concept is so

VII Kant's Transcendental Reflection on Sensibility

Kant holds that on the basis of transcendental reflection we know that

19 BuchdahTs blanket way of speaking of the 'activation' of sensibility, understanding,

postulates are designed to be just such a way of identifying particulars

21 In connection with the distinction between phenomena and noumena, and in

I include the qualifier 'possible' here, not to equivocate, but to stress

VIII Noumenal and A-temporal Causality

Strictly speaking, this view does require a-temporal causality. However,

tially located in order to be effective at that location is an instance of transcendental

contends that a 'making to begin' that is not itself a 'happening' is a contradiction.

26 A297=B353, III 236.19-29; A396, IV 247.24-25. For discussion of transcendental

IX Kant's 'Double Aspect' Idealism

28 Buchdahl responds to Strawson's objection somewhat differently (78-9).

29 Cf. A30=B45, B306, B307, B308-09, A254-55=B310, A287-88=B344-45, A491-92=B520-

sentations of apprehension, could be represented as their object distinct from them

Though much in this passage is challenging, and much concerns issues

objects we represent. Kant is quite express about this analysis of 'object'

reflection reveals that 'the object' of knowledge is systematically ambiguous be-

33 This is not to ascribe phenomenalism to Kant. 'Phenomenalism' requires the (essen-

X Noumenal Causality and Rational Agency

Kant's two-fold view of things, based on the distinction between things

34 Schrader recognizes that Kant's theoretical and practical philosophies must be

perspective, the noumenal freedom and causality of agents is a concep-

of deterministic psychology. Thus there is no problem granting Allison's 'incorpo-

would be required by the Critical philosophy to think of ourselves quite

XI A Positive View of Noumenal Causality

Let me begin a positive plea to take Kant's statements about noumenal

here. For discussion, see Allison, Kant's Theory of Freedom, 76-82.

37 Tugendlehre VI 433 note; Letter to Moses Mendelssohn of April 8, 1766 (X 69; A.

cally legitimate grounds for ascribing characteristics to 'noumena/ Quite

Now the concept of an empirically unconditioned causality is indeed theoretically