Dear Dr. Ross, ..... Immediate non-intuitive knowledge does the job of unification. But I would like to ask if you agree with this. ... Kant wants to show that our intuitions [things that we see or hear] can only have unity if the categories (where, how, when) unite them. But the doubt is how does this work? If I go into a field and collect flowers and put them into a basket, the basket puts them together-- but does not make them a unity.
Kant answers this question by showing that intuitions have to have the capability to be able to be united by the categories. And he shows that the categories can only unite concepts and intuitions but not make them out of scratch. So he shows that both require the other. The categories and the intuitions are dependent one on the other.
The question is this still seems to leave the flowers in the basket. So I am thinking that this must be one of reasons for the principle that there is a deeper source of knowledge, non intuitive immediate knowledge that unites the categories with the intuitions. [That is the idea of the Kant-Friesian School]
Dear Mr. Rosenblum,
Kant's idea of unity involves the categories, but only because the categories are used in synthesis. So the unity of consciousness, or the unity of experience, is the result of an activity. When the activity stops, then consciousness and synthesis stop. As in sleep.
Sleep is an issue overlooked by all the Rationalists and Empiricists. Only Locke seems to have noticed, when he answered Descartes by saying that he had not "thought" at all last night. But even that wasn't enough. Sleep would stop the flood of sensory input, but neither Locke nor any Empiricist addressed how that would happen. Indeed, nobody could explain how you could be hearing the refrigerator running all night, but normally not be aware of it. Even while you're awake. That the mind choses, preconsciously, what to admit to consciousness is a psychological truth never noticed by philosophers.
Not even by Kant. But, because of Kant's theory of synthesis, an explanation was ready at hand, if needed.
Non-intuitive immediate knowledge is really a different issue. To the extent that "categories" like cause or substance are known non-intuitively, then they are in fact available for what Kant wants in synthesis. But Kant was not very clear how that works. He was emerging from his earlier thinking that synthesis was a conscious activity, involving concepts. However, consciousness is produced spontaneously, and the forms that it embodies are used without awareness. We notice things like time, cause, or the duration of substances on reflection.
"Concepts" and "intuitions" do not on the ground need to be united, because synthesis has united them already. Further action, consciously, will match further concepts to experience, but that is a fallible process.
[I should add here that Kant has the imagination is what is causing synthesis. [CPR 78/B103]--I think that is where it is. [Might I suggest that is a round about way to talk about the soul.] (This in Kant is the level that is before or under consciousness]. It is imagination in Kant which produces consciousness.]
I also wanted to add that the categories are exactly what Fries thought were not apriori but empirical and subject to revision. And that left him vulnerable to the attack of "psychologism." That attack missed him, Still this accusation continued even up to Leonard Nelson who also was attacked for the same reason.
