and metaphysics, following his conception of transcendental logic, most if not all of our most fundamental understandings about the world must ultimately be keyed to knowledge of this kind.
As knowledge that lies somehow between apparently mutually exclusive onto-epistemological categories, Kant's synthetic a priori plainly turns in the direction of nondualism. Such a turning is implicit in his revolutionary understanding that far from being wholly independent of us, the external world conforms to the categorical structures of mind, or, in other words, that that world is given form by us. Nevertheless, for all its revolutionary force, Kant's synthetic a priori not only falls short of nondualism, but also managed to put dualism on a more sophisticated intellectual footing than had previously been the case. Although he aims to critique reason, his deductive appeal to transcendental logic rather than to experience (in this word's dynamic sense of ‘practice’) leaves reason, in the last instance, in command.
Kant argued that although synthetic a priori truths are not analytically—and thus tautologically—necessary, they must be the case if human life is to be thinkable. In other words, asking himself what are the conceptual categories necessary to conceive of the human world, he deduced certain constituting concepts. Thus, he found that although spatio-temporal concepts such as, for example, ‘object’ and ‘cause’ are neither, strictly speaking, analytic nor empirically learned, they are presupposed in all human experience. As such, they and their like are necessary and universal, presenting themselves as the categorical begetters of human existence.
Plainly, Kant's notion of the synthetic a priori runs contrary to Hume's skepticism, according to which our knowledge of the external world can never really be rationally justified. Hume's skepticism followed naturally from his coupling of radical empiricism with ontological dualism, a combination that guarantees that what we know by experience to be the case can be established psychologically but not logically. Nevertheless, Kant's notion served in at least two crucial ways to reinforce rather than refute ontological dualism. One way concerns the fact that Kant, in an important sense, and despite his anti-Cartesianism, embraced the Cartesian cogito or ‘I think’ (Heidegger 1978: 45, 367). In Kant's argument, the self is rendered as, although emphatically not, as in Descartes’ discourse, a ‘thinking stuff’ or substance, certainly timeless—something akin to a transcendental ego. “There can be in us,” Kant writes (quoted in Walsh 1967: 312),
no items of knowledge…without that unity of consciousness which precedes all data of intuitions, and by relation to which representation of objects is alone possible. This pure original unchangeable consciousness I shall name transcendental apperception…[U]nity of consciousness would be impossible if the mind in knowledge of the manifold could not become conscious of the identity of function whereby it synthetically combines it in one knowledge. The original and necessary consciousness of the identity of the self is thus at the same time a consciousness of an equally necessary unity of the synthesis of all appearances according to concepts, that is, according to rules.
In other words, subjectivity is still presented by Kant as ontologically utterly distinct from the objective world. Indeed, for Kant, the subject is not part of the ‘real’ world. Instead, it obtains in the transcendental logic (the realm of the ideal) that makes it possible to experience a world at all. To be sure, Kant's depiction of consciousness as active rather than passive serves, in a significant way, to link the subject to the object. But that dialectical linkage is predicated on a logically formal and complete distinction between form and content, by virtue of which what we give to the world is not empirical substance but shape alone. (“The identification of the a priori with the formal is the fundamental error of Kant,” observed Scheler [cited in Dufrenne 1966: 57].) As a consequence, the linking remains no less ontologically problematical than in the philosophy of Descartes, who found it necessary to appeal to divine omnipotence to account for the obvious fact that he never met a mind and then a body but always the twain as one. It is not surprising, then, that Kant concluded—ironically deepening Hume's empiricist skepticism by refuting it with idealism—that things in themselves, unconditioned things, or, as he called them, ‘noumena’ (by contrast to phenomena, or things that may be known by their worldly appearance) were indeed inaccessible to human knowing.2
A second way in which Kant's synthetic a priori promoted rather than undermined dualism is this. Correlative to his preservation of an absolute distinction between subject and object, that is, between an inside or mental world and an outside or physical one, is the consideration that his argument continues to predicate a reason that is autonomous and pure. Although by definition it is not analytic, the synthetic a priori is nonetheless conceptual before it is experiential. Indeed, even while it moves to criticize reason by referring it to the evidence of experience, Kant's synthetic a priori proposes that that evidence is not exactly given but intellectually constituted. As Burke puts it (1969: 191), for Kant “experience derives its appearance from the nature of consciousness (the ‘I think, or ‘transcendental synthesis of apperception’).” That is to say, instead of starting with human experience (in the mediatory middle, so to speak), he starts with reason qua reason (transcendental or not), arguing that the human world is begotten conceptually (categorically). Thus, he ends up with such universals as ‘cause’ and ‘object’, that is, with relative but determinate notions that he universalizes, rather than with ‘universals’ that are basically—and paradoxically—conditioned or not specifiable outside of their particular manifestations.3
At this juncture, I can make explicit that the philosophical notion of the a priori is connectable to anthropology at the very core of the latter's scholarly enterprise. As the notion of the a priori directly implicates the idea of universals, so it bears squarely on the question of cultural relativism. Indeed, the deployment of this philosophical notion has powerful implications for anthropological inquiry, from—to sum up broadly the direction of this inquiry—nineteenth-century evolutionism to twentieth-century relativism.
Since empirical statements can always be refuted by further observation, their truth (what indeed it is usual to call synthetic truth) is essentially contingent. But in a manifest sense, so is the truth of analytic statements, since it is dependent on the truth of the other such statements that go to make up the particular system of logic by which truth of this nominal—or, if you like, pure—kind is defined. Moreover, the truth of analytic statements may be regarded as finally necessary or a priori rather than contingent or a posteriori only when the system of logic from which they derive is itself necessarily universal rather than particular (as Kant [1963], in line with his transcendental idealism, professed is in fact the case with classical Western logic [see also Evens 1983]).
Obviously, then, since neither synthetic nor analytic knowledge in itself can support a claim to the epistemic superiority of one culture over another, both are compatible with cultural relativism as opposed to (the Enlightenment idea of) progressive cultural evolutionism. Kant's synthetic a priori, however, which, by virtue of the so-called transcendental deduction, makes some specific concepts both necessary and universal, certainly can offer such support. This helps explain why Kant paid virtually no attention to the role of culture and society in his philosophy of reason and knowledge. To be sure, in picturing consciousness as active rather than passive, Kant made room for cultural activity. By insisting, though, that the synthetic a priori is universal in the received sense (the sense defined by dualism or absolute division between the universal and the particular), and hence according to the epistemological principle of certainty rather than that of basic ambiguity, he could not take advantage of this ethnological opportunity. On the contrary, by defining humanity primarily in terms of reason—a reason whose purity had been critically cut, but only to be further and sublimely rarefied by transcendental distillation—Kant made it possible to conclude (and here I anticipate the interpretation of the Holocaust in chapter 4), whatever his own opinions in such matters, that any peoples who could be shown to fall short of such reason were backward, inferior, or less than human.
Toward True Synthetic a Priori: Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty
