§55. Intuitions without Concepts Are Blind

In a memorable passage ofthe Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes, “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind......................................................

two powers or capacities cannot exchange their functions. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing.” The senses cannot think be­cause thinking requires concepts and we cannot acquire concepts from sense perception, which presupposes them. Empiricism, as Kant understands it, is a theory on the origin of concepts, which are born of sensory data empir­ically synthesized by imagination on associationist principles, an argument Kant refutes by demonstrating that mere conscious perception presupposes the special concepts he describes as categories of understanding.⁴⁵

The refutation of empiricism in Kant’s Transcendental Deduction begins with the question of how goings-on entirely within consciousness support reference to something that transcends consciousness. The ever-changing flow of sensation cannot stabilize into the Vorstellung, the presentation, of an external spatiotemporal body, without some model, some analogy, some anticipation of such a body given in self-consciousness. The object is not merely an object—it is mine. The ever-changing sense fragments are moments in what Kant calls the synthesis of apprehension. I apprehend this series as my perception, and my self-unity is the model for the unity imaginatively imputed to the unseen cause of sensible intuitions. “The ob­jective unity of all (empirical) consciousness in one consciousness (of orig­inal apperception) is thus the necessary condition even of every possible perception.”⁴⁶

The objectivity of experience is therefore guaranteed in principle, though Kant goes further. The aboriginal categories by which this intrin­sically unified subject primordially conceptualizes sensuous intuitions must be at once self-representations of this subject’s unity and neces­sary predicates of the object.

Kant may be right that we require concepts to judge experience, since judging is predicative thought, so concepts must be in play. But why is judgment decisive? Do we require judgment merely to enjoy object-ori­ented experience? That was a Neoplatonic idea: perception is incom­plete without rational judgment. For instance, Simplicius: “Our rational faculty reaches up to perception... perception is rational.” He echoes Plotinus, for whom sense perceptions are not passive affections but “ac­tivities and judgments concerning affections.” Plotinus says that “percep­tion (aisthesis) of sense objects is for the soul or the living being an act of apprehension (antilepsis), in which the soul grasps the quality (poiotes) attaching to bodies and takes the impression of their forms (eide).” That requires a source of concepts for judgment, preexisting ideas in the soul being the usual solution, and Kant's theory of categories a later version of the same assumption.⁴⁷

Aristotelians approach the problem another way. We do indeed have to supplement sensations if we want objects and concepts, but the sup­plement is memory. It is sensation remembered, recollected, reflected upon, related, analyzed, and synthesized—in a word, experience—from which concepts and empirical knowledge are born. Experience does not presuppose concepts, it presupposes memory; Kant did not prove that empiricism is untenable, only that it is not Platonism. Sensations do not require an intellectual synthesis before they inform thought. The synthesis happens in time and with memory, as memory, with experience, which is a matrix for concepts because memory is a medium for the synthesis of sensations. Experience conceptualizes as it discovers problems and becomes perplexed, motivating thinking, hypothesis, and the empirical birth of concepts.