The Unity of Cognition, or, How to Read the Leitfaden (A79)

Abstract

The Unity of Cognition, or, How to Read the Leitfaden (A79) IntroductionIn an illuminating essay 'Die Einheit des Erkenntnisvermögens bei Kant' (Conant 2017a), James Conant critically addresses what he argues is a widespread assumption in modern philosophy, namely, the assumption that our rational capacity to know is a capacity that is somehow 'added' or tacked on to the capacity that we humans share with other animals, that is, our receptive capacity for sensations, our sensibility. This is the so-called 'additive' 57 theory of cognition, more specifically, of the relation between sensibility and the understanding. He addresses this assumption by looking at the main argument of Kant's 58 Transcendental Deduction. Let me say upfront that I think Conant's paper is one of the very few long-form pieces on the central thrust of the Deduction that I have read from the last twenty years or so, if not longer, that are as rhetorically strong as they are, on the whole, both interpretatively and philosophically appealing. I believe it is one of those papers that will, or at any rate should, be seen as a standard reference in the same way that Dieter Henrich's influential article on the 'two-step' procedure of the B-Deduction has been (Henrich 1969)-Conant indeed also refers to Henrich's now famous 'two-step' proposal, but thinks that his own construal avoids what, in Conant's view, can be seen as the delusive nature of Henrich's A longer English version of Conant's paper was published in the journal Philosophical Topics under the 57 somewhat generic title 'Why Kant is not a Kantian' (it says that it is published in 2016, but to my knowledge the article came out only in 2017), and a shorter version appears in the volume Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: A Critical Guide, edited by James O'Shea (O'Shea 2017) under the more apt title 'Kant's Critique of the Layer-Cake Conception of Human Mindedness in the B Deduction' (Conant 2017b). When I wrote the material that now makes up this chapter, I relied on the German published version, which came out first in January 2017 in a Suhrkamp volume (see Conant 2017a). Insofar as the German version and the longer English version (Conant 2016) overlap, in most cases I shall provide the English quotations from Conant (2016) with the German version (Conant 2017a) in square brackets. Conant calls it thus in the German version of the article, on which I relied. In the English version, he refers, 58 somewhat confusingly, to both the conjunctivist and disjunctivist conception of the relation between sentience and sapience. It is however the latter which is the additive view that he rejects. ! 92 © Dennis Schulting, 2021overall framework, which suggests that there are indeed two independent, separably intelligible 'steps in a proof' (Conant 2016:111).I quite agree with the general tenor of Conant's paper, namely that the Deduction should not be read as if the two stems of knowledge, sensibility and understanding, were connected in the way suggested by what he aptly calls the 'layer-cake conceptio...