Kant´s Notion of a Transcendental Schema. Lara Scaglia

³³ Ideas are sensible traces of the objects and it is only through the use of language that abstract thought and universalisation are possible. In this view, the soul can be compared to a musician that plays on the brain (siege de l’ame) but lies in itself beyond any empirical evidence:

“[…] the seat of the soul is a little machine, prodigiously composed and very simple in its composition. […] It is possible to represent this admirable instrument of the operations of our soul with the image of a harpsichord, an organ, a clock or that of another, more composed machine. […] the soul is the musician, which performs on this machine different tunes or judges those that are played and that he repeats.” (Bonnet 1755, Ch IV,9, transl. L.S.)³⁴

      However, in order to better understand Tetens’s conception of schemata, whose importance for our purposes lies on his influence on Kant, a deeper inquiry of his doctrine of cognition is needed.

1.3.1 Tetens’s conception of schema

      In order to clarify the meaning of the notion of schema in Tetens’s Philosophische Versuche, it is important to focus on his account of the cognitive process.←34 | 35→

      In my analysis I will concentrate on three main aspects of his viewpoint: 1) the distinctions among three main faculties; 2) the activity and passivity as characteristics of the cognitive process; 3) the dualism between body and soul, which is expressed by two main claims, namely that there is a correlation between psychological and physical changes and that the soul has an independent and own activity.

Tetens underlines in the opening of the first Essay the distinctions of the three main faculties: “The soul feels, has representations of things, properties and relations and thinks.” (Tetens 1777, I, 1, transl. L.S.)³⁵

These faculties are: Gefühl (the faculty of feeling), Vorstellungskraft (the faculty of representation) and Denkkraft (the faculty of thinking). Feeling is something hard to grasp in itself. It is a complex manifestation of the activity of the soul, which cannot be explained fully: “Then, what is to perceive or to feel? Here I have to confess my inability to explain it. It is a simple manifestation of the soul, which I am not able to divide into more subtle manifestations.” (Tetens 1777, I 170, transl. L.S.)³⁶ Since it is impossible to provide a direct and conclusive characterisation of feeling, Tetens proposes to clarify the characteristics of this basic faculty through an analysis of its objects: impressions, that are, first of all, actual modifications of the subject. We can feel only something that is present and characterised by intensity, duration and extension. Therefore, he agrees, although only partially, with the traditional view of sensibility as a passive faculty:

“What is immediately felt is always, where this modification of the soul could allow itself to be observed, something passive […]. It is never the activity in itself, never the effort itself that we immediately feel; it is a durable consequence of something that is not produced from our spontaneous strength [capacity], but that has been already be produced when it is the object of a feeling; […]” (Tetens 1777, I, pp. 173–174, transl. L.S.)³⁷

      This capacity of being affected does not consist only in a mere passivity, but it is at the same time, a kind of activity similar to a reaction. As the body reacts ←35 | 36→to external stimuli, so does the soul as it receives impressions. Each impression modifies the soul, thus leaving a sort of trace, a representation, regarded as a sensible sign of the impressions of the objects affecting our senses:

“[…] these are representations of other objects; modifications, which represent something else and, when they are present, they allow us to see and know not only themselves but also their objects.” (Tetens 1777, I, p. 15, transl. L.S.)³⁸

      Since representations are based on impressions, the representational theory of Tetens does not part from the traditional, associative empiricism. However, the associative view of mental activity is only the starting point of his research. Primary sensations represent the objects in the way in which they are perceived (facultas percipiendi). Yet, the soul can exercise an activity through these first representations, since it can reproduce (fantasia) and combine them in new ways (facultas inventiva). Moreover, imagination owns a particular productive power: while its reproductive side can only call upon past impressions; its productive one can provide data of experience with a new order. It acts on impressions comparing them to each other and analysing, breaking down each one into its elements in order to produce simpler representations, which are not evident at first sight of the complex given perceptions. In this process, past representations (phantasmata) can be recalled but they are not sufficient to determine objects of thought (ideas), regarded as unities related to each other through thinking and reasoning. However, the representations provided by imagination are in themselves only a sort of matter provided by sensations and they still lack form:

“Representations turn into ideas and thoughts, but considered in themselves, they are not. The image of the moon is only the material for the idea of the moon; it still lacks form: the idea contains, beyond the representation, a consciousness, perception and distinction and presupposes comparisons and judgements, when regarded as an idea of a certain object.” (Tetens 1777, I, p. 26, transl. L.S.)³⁹

      This leads us to the second main aspect of his account: a superior faculty, the understanding, is needed to unite the representations as a whole, providing them with an intelligible and objective character.←36 | 37→

The faculty of imagination, according to Tetens, places itself between sensibility and understanding, between passivity and activity, therefore sharing similarities with the view of Kant. However, their accounts are not fully identical because Kant asserts that the productive imagination is a synthetic a priori function. As de Vleeschauwer underlines: “[…] the reproductive function is […] examined in its constitution and psychological activity and it is distinct from the way in which Kant dealt with it, mostly for the absence of the reference to a synthetic capacity.” (de Vleeschauwer 1934–1937, II, p. 97, transl. L.S.)⁴⁰

      Moreover, through his doctrine of the constitution of knowledge, Tetens opposes empiricism, relying on non-sensory functions (understanding, the soul, and apperception) as necessary conditions for developing an objective knowledge and unifying ideas: sensible data provided by experience need a common referent, an understanding, in order to be united and compared. Since this obscure unity is not in itself an impression, but a core unity to which all the impressions are referred, it has to be thought of as something immaterial, which holds an obscure feeling of awareness of its permanence, of its identity:

“[…] the idea or representation of my ´I` is not a collection of individual representations that our imagination might have turned into a whole just like it unifies the individual representations of soldiers into a representation of one regiment. That unification lies in the impression itself, in nature, and not in a combination that makes itself. For this reason a representation of ne subject with different features arises, that is, a representation that immediately arises from the impression, must be thought in this way and turned into an idea such that the common human understanding actually does from it in this way.” (Tetens 1777, pp. 394–5, transl. Watkins 2009, pp. 370–1)⁴¹

      Through his doctrine of the ‘I’, Tetens distances himself from empiricism. As Thiel declares, three notions of the self can be distinguished in Tetens’s account. Firstly, the empirical, psychological self of the inner sense; secondly, the metaphysical