Kant on Representation and Objectivity

ion upon those sensible forms.1 This doctrine, in which the human mind becomes formally identical with the object of cognition, was accused of being unintelligible mystification by the ‘New Philosophy’ of the seventeenth century. Leibniz, for example, in the preface to his New Essays, writes scornfully of the Scholastics’ ‘ “intentional species” which travel from objects to us and find their way into our souls’. ‘If that is acceptable,’ he writes, ‘ “everything will now happen whose possibility I used to deny” (Ovid)’.2 Kant repeats this stock rejection in § 9 of the Prolegomena, where he writes that it is ‘incomprehensible how the intuition of a thing that is present should allow me to cognise it the way it is in itself, since its properties cannot migrate over into my power of representation’ (4:282). Such ‘migration’ of properties is precisely what was supposed to occur in the Scholastic account. In the new representationalist view of cognition, it was thought instead that all we have immediately available to our consciousness is the internal effects of objects upon our senses – that is, our ideas, impressions or representations.3 Descartes’s treatment of ideas combines many themes, but the ontological core of his view is that ideas are modes of the mind.4 This Cartesian terminology is echoed in Kant’s own usage. He writes, for example, that ‘modification of our sensibility is the only way in which objects are given to us’ (A139/B178), and (as pointed out above) repeatedly talks of representations as being ‘modifications of the mind’ (see, e.g., A97) or equivalently as ‘determinations of the mind’ (see, e.g., A34/B50). These internal modifications or determinations are then the immediate objects of awareness. The following analogy may help in understanding this jargon. Imagine a hollow globe of soft opaque plastic. The exterior surface of the globe is acted on by external forces and in response takes on various shapes. In the Cartesian and Kantian terminology, each particular shape the globe comes to take on is a mode or modification of its capacity to receive shapes (its ‘receptivity’, as it were). This receptivity is a capacity or faculty in the Aristotelian sense of being a range of potentialities that can be actualised (in this case, by 1 For an overview of Scholastic accounts of cognition, see E. Stump, ‘The Mechanisms of Cognition: Ockham on Mediating Species’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, ed. P. V. Spade (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 168–203. 2 G. W. F. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 61. 3 For useful accounts of the motivation for representationalism, see J. P. Carriero, ‘The First Meditation’, in Descartes’s Meditations, ed. V. Chappell (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), pp. 1–31, and M. Ayers, Locke, vol. i (London: Routledge, 1991), part 1. 4 On the complexities and ambiguities of Descartes’s notion of an idea, see R. McRae, ‘ “Idea” as a Philosophical Term in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas 26 (1965), 175–90, and N. Jolley, The Light of the Soul (Oxford University Press, 1990), ch. 2.