On the understanding as the faculty of synthesis in Kant’s pre-critical thought

Abstract

Kant’s definition of the understanding as the spontaneity of cognition is a cornerstone of his transcendental philosophy. In the Critique, Kant presents the understanding as a discursive faculty that brings forth the synthesis of intuitions according to a priori rules; yet he does not make explicit why spontaneity and synthesis are identified within this characterization. To clarify this implicit connection, this article examines Kant’s intellectual trajectory regarding the faculty of the understanding: from a faculty of distinct cognition to the spontaneous source of synthetic unity. Drawing on Kant’s early theoretical writings and marginalia in Baumgarten’s Metaphysica, this analysis traces three pivotal stages of Kant’s pre-critical conception of the understanding: 1) the rejection of the law of identity as the universal formal ground of cognition in the 1760s because of its inadequacy to account for real grounding relations; 2) the consequent distinction between two irreducible forms of cognition, synthetic coordination versus analytic subordination, each governed by distinct formal principles; and 3) the account for a priori synthetic laws in terms of pure fundamental concepts, later the categories, which are grounded in the spontaneity of the understanding. Following these steps, in the mid-1770s Kant arrives at the novel conception of the understanding as the faculty determining the objective synthetic form of cognition, and of its spontaneity as the highest principle of the synthetic unity of experience.