Bonaventure and Kant: Metaphysical Psychology and Transcendental Schema

The aim of this essay is to illustrate the metaphysical psychology of Bonaventure and the transcendental schema of Kant by comparing and contrasting the two systems.

Bonaventure (1221-1274) was a Franciscan monk and theologian. He would rise to become the Minister of the Franciscan order. Like all medieval thinkers, Bonaventure would hold the doctrine of the passive and active intellects; this doctrine was held by almost all medieval thinkers in some form. According to Bonaventure we are all born in a state of nudity before experience. Bonaventure rejected innate ideas but did not reject innate abilities. Bonaventure regarded the passive and active intellect as two sides of the same substance or individual. Averroes and Alfarabi regarded the passve and active intellects as two different substances or individuals. The active intellect was regarded as an emanation from God by the Islamic Neoplatonists-this is why they were regarded as monopsychists in the West. As stated before, the human intellect was thought to be in a state of nudity before nature. Objects act upon the sense organs and this produces a sensible species. The sensible species in turn act upon the faculty of sensation, where at last we have a perception of the object. This is known as a particular object. This is not yet a reflective judgment; we have not yet moved to the active intellect. The passive intellect, individual sensations of color , hardness, etc. are put together to form a particular object. This creates subjective knowledge of an object. For the medieval mind, subjective referred to the material realm. Objective knowledge was the stuff of mental objects. (similar to mind v.s. body.) Particular objects are then preserved in the imagination- like a form in God's mind. What the medievals called imagination, moderns call consciousness. The imagination is the everyday stream of consciousness. When we see an object, we are reminded of similar objects, or feelings and emotions associated with it. An example should prove illustrative. A man walks down the street and sees a car. If he sees one that is the same make and model as one he used to own, he is reminded of his old car, and the memories and emotions associated with his old car.

The active intellect then takes over, still working with the passive intellect. The particular object is compared with other objects, in turn coming up with categories and universals. This is possible through natural reason. Bonaventure defines natural reason as the capability to identify pleasure and pain. From our natural reason we develop formal reasoning and logic, enabling us to turn particulars into universals. This is known as abstraction. For example, a articular red, sweet tasting sphere becomes an apple. It has now become universal and objective. It becomes objective because even though particular apples vary in size, taste, color, etc. the universal idea of an apple is the same for everyone. It is important to note here that to Bonaventure, universals are real, not merely linguistics. We must now take a short detour to another Franciscan: Duns Scotus. He serves to help us understand Kant. Scotus laid down a criteria for a universal. A universal existing cannot violate the law of non-counterdiction and it must be used as a middle term in syllogisms.

We return to Bonaventure. For Bonaventure universals are real, not just linguistic entities. If universals are real, are we directly perceiving the Forms in God's mind or are they a reflection of the divine Forms? The former position is ontologism and the latter explanation is exemplarism. Bonaventure chose exemplarism, the orthodox Christian view. The universals in our minds are analogies of the Forms in the divine mind. Bonaventure held that when the analogies become close enough, we would receive illumination from God, giving us certainty of our knowledge.

We now move to Immanuel Kant. (1724-1804) We shall see if Bonaventure's metaphysical psychology can shed some light upon Kant's transcendental schema. Kant sets up a duality of what can be known and what cannot be known. We begin with what cannot be known: 'things in themselves'. We cannot directly experience how things are in themselves, instead experience is built up by the subject;the object is unknowable, although we do know there are things independent 'things in themselves.' This process of building or constructive experience is the transcendental schema. We begin with the transcendental aesthetic. The transcendental aesthetic is a form of perception. It differs from the categories of the transcendental analytic in that it is passive. The reason for this is because the form of perception is not dependent on the law of non-counterdiction. The form of perception is space and time; we must perceive everything in a spatial way and a temporal way. This grants every sensation a location and a duration. This spatial-temporal data Kant calls intuitions. Space and time are what they are, They are not proven by the law of non-counterdiction. They are instead a given, they are space and time a priori. So far, this sounds like the passive intellect, but with the twist of space and time not in the object, only in the subject. This demonstrates a break between the transcendental aesthetic and the transcendental analytic. To examine an example of Kant's, a man is walking through the snow and spies a cabin. Upon approaching the cabin, he feels heat. After feeling the heat, he sees a stove. What Kant is saying is that we are still at a subjective state in the transcendental aesthetic. Feeling the heat before locating its source is the subjective feeling. The category of causality is not yet operative.

The transcendental analytic is active; it is where we find the categories Kant is famous for. These would be causality, reciprocity, and so on. The reason the transcendental analytic is operative is because the categories are dependent on the law of non-counterdiction. The categories act as a series of syllogisms that experience is put through to come up with universals. Now the reader should understand why a detour to Duns Scotus was taken. Kant has made Duns Scotus' criteria an innate power in the subject. To the modern reader, this seems odd that formal logic is regarded as innate in human minds. The first question one asks is, “how did the categories come about?” Kant answers by a transcendental deduction. In other words, Kant announces that they are because he needs them. This seems even stranger to a modern reader, but Kant was writing for an audience that had no knowledge of Darwin and evolutionary theory. Instead, his model was Issac Newton. Newton's announcement of gravity is much like the announcement of transcendental deduction. Newton does not tell us how gravity came to be.

We return to the transcendental schema. The spatial-temporal subject of the categories give us objective universals much like Bonaventure's active intellect. We have reached the fork in the road of reality that Bonaventure reached with exemplarism and ontologism. Kant regarded both as examples of the transcendental dialectic. The transcendental dialectic is illusion. Illusion is produced when we go beyond our observations, so Kant rejects them both. Instead, he finds a third tine in the fork: universals are what our everyday experience is constructed through. It is the world of science, the transcendental schema is universal to all subjects. This is the objective world of science and everyone. These universals have no metaphysical reality, they only belong to appearance. They do not exist as a thing in itself. Here is Kant's Copernican revolution. Reason and logic do not lead us to higher realms (them ind of God) , instead they only construct the everyday world of experience. Emotional sentiments lead us to the Real.

Where Copernicus flipped the place of the sun and the Earth, Kant flipped the place of reason and emotion.