Customer Reviews

Kant's Analytic

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Of the two reviews on this page which precede this one, one awards one star, the other five. I would like to propose a test which will help you decide to which of those two to give more credence.

The first sentence in the Kemp Smith translation of the Critique of Pure Reason reads: "In whatever manner and by whatever means a mode of knowledge may relate to objects, intuition is that through which it is in immediate relation to them, and to which all thought as a means is directed."

If that sentence fills you with a thrill of anticipation, then you should take the one star review very seriously and approach Bennett's book with a lot of scepticism.

If, on the other hand, the sentence makes you immediately suspicious that that you are going to be subjected to a lot of very misty thinking from which useful insights can only be drawn after much hard work and making grudging allowance for bad writing and imprecise thought....well, then you should pay attention to the five star review and, more particularly, to the second of the Editorial Reviews listed above.

Bennett does a wonderful job of subjecting Kant's work to critical review, teasing out the possible meanings which might be attributed to his often very vague prose, and then making clear which of those possible meanings should be taken seriously and which should be discarded as mistaken or meaningless.

I would like to add my enthusiastic agreement to the editorial review's summary: "This is splendid, and a necessary corrective to that extraordinary isolation in which Kant tends to be islanded, partly indeed, by his own unique qualities, but partly by oceans of the wrong kind of respect. Bennett, continuously engaging his great antagonist, shows the right kind."

Comments between reviewers are generally an undesirable distraction, but the review below by "malenor" is so egregiously unethical that it demands comment. The problem is that the reviewer, as he admits, HAS NOT READ THE BOOK he is reviewing! Any such "review" deserves only to be utterly disregarded or, better yet, removed from the Amazon website. What malenor did was to read the few pages available on Amazon, then arrogantly to proceed to write his "review." The result, predictably, is farcical.

Malenor's insulting contention that Bennett, a Kant scholar of the first rank, does not understand Kant's analytic-synthetic distinction is preposterous on its face. The problem, of course, is that malenor does not comprehend what is at issue in Bennett's treatment of it. Bennett questions Kant's claim that `7 + 5 = 12' is a synthetic proposition because that claim does not allow for chains of inference within a deductive system, but instead relies on what seems to be a psychological account to support the original distinction. That is a cogent, serious, and productive line of criticism. There is much more of similar quality to be found in this book, and malenor should consider someday taking the trouble to read it.

For over a year now since I started on this forum I have
been reading great things about one Kant critic named
Jonathan Bennett. Today I finally managed to gather
up enough curiosity to find out what is so great about
this author. So I surfed on over to Amazon.com where
I knew they sometimes offered pages of excerpts from
books, and sure enough, Bennett's "Kant's Analytic"
was there to be perused just as if I were in a real book
store cracking open real books and sampling the
treats waiting inside the covers.

So far I am finding that Bennett's treatment of Kant
borders on the disdainful. You will find him pooh-poohing
the Transcendental Aesthetic as a minor work that
Kant makes too much out of: "Considered as a source
of cogent, detailed argument from true premisses to
interesting conclusions, the Aesthetic is not impressive" (4).
Nevertheless, Bennett declares that is necessary to
pay attention to the Aesthetic because it is "required
for an understanding of the *more mature and fruitful*
parts of the Critique." (Emphasis mine.)

Bennett's argument can be dealt with on so many levels
that it is hard to know exactly where to begin, and at
the same time build a coherent counterpoint. I often
encounter this problem when I come across a criticism
that is so off the mark about Kant that it requires a
whole restructuring of the person's intellectuality from
the foundations on up. Interestingly, this is exactly how
Kant proceeds in the work in question, from the foundations
of our intellect to the highest apex of reason. And so if
someone like Bennett fails to grasp the significance of
the Aesthetic, the foundation of our very intellectual
knowledge, then all I can do is throw my hands up in
the air and recommend that he start all over again from
scratch.

What exactly has Bennett missed in the Aesthetic? Kant's total
reversal of the Newtonian metaphysics of time and space
which had held sway during that time and which had
led to extremes of metaphysical skepticism and dogmatism.
The key is in distinguishing transcendental realism from
transcendental idealism. Realism holds that space and
time are real entities whose function is to contain all the
objects of the universe. Unfortunately, this makes space
and time "more real" than the reality of our experience,
and implies a metaphysics in which reality is constructed
in dream-like fashion from basic unproven postulates, and
an epistemology in which our knowledge of things becomes,
at best, a confused representation of some "true reality" lying
just out of reach of our experience. It is to place science and
its inductive proofs in the place of common experience, and
since science is ever-changing and hypothetical, with theories
that are merely established over time through evidential
reasoning often only to be knocked down again, then our very
direct experiences of reality that we take for granted everyday
are then to be categorized in the same hypothetical light. But is
the computer monitor in front of you a mere hypothesis, or at
best a theory that was established over time and is generally
accepted by your cultural community? Kant would say, "No."

Kant's Aesthetic (small as it may be in comparison to the rest
of the Critique) is significant in thoroughly overturning such
unfortunate results of Newtonian metaphysics. It may be
poorly written, who knows? It may be badly argued. It does
not really start out well, I'll grant that much at least. But I don't
know which interpretation Bennett was working with, or if
he was translating the original German. Just recently on
another group I found myself arguing with somebody who
took issue with a paragraph in the Aesthetic, and my
solution was merely to bring in my own translation which
had removed a key ambiguity in the text. (Thank you,
Pluhar.) Bennett offers no textual support for his criticisms,
so the reader is left with the belief that there is only one
truth about Kant's Aesthetic, and that is Bennett's.
Fortunately, this is far from the case.

Next, Bennett takes issue with a very basic concept
in Kant's metaphysics, and that is the analytic-synthetic
distinction. He attacks this distinction in propositions on
two or three fronts. After giving a brief overview of Kant's
own meaning of the terms (without, however, explaining
why it was a significant distinction for Kant to make), Bennett
places it in terms analogous to "tennis-racquets." We
should not, according to Bennett, distinguish between
"the 'tennis-racquet' is right-handed" and "the 'tennis-racquet'
is left-handed" because all "tennis-racquets" are the same.
There are, however, differences between left- and right-
handed golf clubs. The distinction, declares Bennett, is
therefore contingent, either customary or utile, but not
necessary.

Bennett then imagines Kant's counterpoint to be something
along the lines that it is a distinction in judgments, not between
mere propositions in general. He then develops a counterpoint
to this imaginary point. Ho hum. I sincerely doubt that Bennett
has any idea what a true Kantian counterpoint would be.

On the second main front, Bennett attacks Kant's distinction
in propositions by means of self-contradictory statements
such as "all squares are circular." He asks, rhetorically, is this
statement analytic or synthetic? But the reason that there is no
answer this question and therefore must be considered a
significant attack on Kant is simply due to the fact that Bennett
does not understand the distinction to begin with. Nowhere
in his brief explanation does he show the root of the distinction,
and that is: analytic propositions do not need to be verified in
intuition, synthetic propositions do. Instead, he considers
the addition of the predicate to a concept to be arbitrary,
and 'therefore' Kant is guilty of an oversight by neglecting
the possibility of false propositions. Bennett's solution to
this "oversight" is to derive a third class of distinctions
to deal with false propositions.

Let's return in the text to Bennett's primary examples,
the ones used by Kant: 1. All bodies are extended,
2. The body is heavy. We do not, always consider
weight to be in the manifold of the concept "body,"
therefore, Bennett declares, the latter proposition is
synthetic.

Perhaps it is Kant's fault for the confusion, because
at least in this part of his explanation he does not
bring in the element of intuition (as I recall). He does,
however, bring it up when discussing the status of
the proposition 7 + 5 = 12. It is necessary, Kant
states, to appeal to intuition in determining that
7 (sticks) added to 5 (sticks) equal 12 (sticks, or
fingers or whatever). The same goes for a
proposition such as "the body is heavy." For in
determining this, we do not simply attach any
old predicate that is not in the manifold that is always
present in the concept; that truly would be arbitrary.
Rather, we lift the "body" (say, a 50 pound sack of
onions) and, granted that this is a difficult task for us,
declare the body to be heavy. Granted this is a
different sort of proposition than the mathematical one,
but the important fact is that both are verified
in intuition (even if the latter example is sometimes
dependent on your own strength; but then simply
imagine, in intuition, things that are heavy to
everybody...). And more importantly, the point that
intuition is important to the distinction between synthetic
and analytic judgments is completely overlooked in
Bennett's analysis.

It cannot actually be Kant's fault,however because
as I read later on Bennett does bring up the example
from mathematics. He quotes the relevant passage
from Kant, but somehow omits the reference to
intuition *which is contained in the very next sentence
after the material Bennett quoted!* To wit, "We must
go beyond these concepts and avail ourselves of the
intuition corresponding to one of the two [either 5 fingers
or 5 dots]" (B15, tr. Pluhar).

Bennett... is NOT good. I do not recommend this
his unthought-out approach to Kant's CPR.