THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

The “two sides” connected in judgment are concepts, the concepts that take the subject
and the predicate place in judgment. Hegel argues that concepts do not precede the
formation of judgments. Concepts do not have an “independent existence apart from the
combination.” In more general terms, this means that the distinctions and abstractions
required for judgment do not exist independently from the unity implied in the judgment.
This conception of judgment, as the synthesis of independent features, rests upon
a false conception of experience as the presentation to the mind of immediately
articulated or differentiated features. Experience, even in the most basic forms of
perceptual awareness, always involves implicit conceptual activity. This conceptual
activity articulates and distinguishes what would otherwise be a sheer manifold. 137 Here
137 There are two distinct claims here. First, there is the claim that even minimal perceptual
experience already involves conceptual activity. Second, there is the claim that some analytic cognitive
activity always precedes synthetic cognitive activity. What Hegel calls our naïve conception of judgment
assumes that perceptual experience presents us with a pre-conceptual stratum of given plurality. This naïve
conception rejects both of these claims. However, someone might accept the first claim without accepting
the second one. (Though, it should be noted, the second claim implies the first. If all synthesis requires
prior analysis, then there is no plurality prior to analysis. Since even the most basic forms of perceptual
awareness present us with plurality, such awareness must include, at the very least, the cognitive activity of
analysis.) Here Kant provides a good example. Kant clearly admits that apparently immediate perceptual
awareness already involves some form of non-conscious, at least quasi-cognitive, synthesis. Though Kant
gives less attention to imagination in the B-Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, even there he makes it
clear that the pre-conscious synthesis of the imagination precedes the conscious and explicitly cognitive
acts whereby we form judgments. Thus at A78/B104, Kant says: “Synthesis in general is, as we shall
subsequently see, the mere effect of the imagination, of a blind though indispensable function of the soul,
without which we would have no cognition at all, but of which we are seldom even conscious.” So Kant
clearly recognizes some form of synthesis – and thus mental activity in the broadest sense – in what we
might otherwise naively take to be the basic givenness of perceptual awareness. However, for our present
purposes, it is more interesting to note that Kant clearly denies the second claim. For instance, at
A78/B103, He says: “The synthesis of a manifold, however, (whether it be given empirically or a priori)
first brings forth a cognition, which to be sure may initially be raw and confused, and thus in need of
analysis; yet the synthesis alone is that which properly collects the elements for cognitions and unifies them
into a certain content; it is therefore the first thing to which we have to attend if we wish to judge about the
first origin of our cognition.” Kant says that synthesis always precedes analysis. More importantly, he
claims that synthesis presents the “first origin of our cognition” – that there is no analysis prior to synthesis.
Unless Kant allows for some wholly non-cognitive analysis, it follows that Kant assumes that intuition
presents us with a discrete plurality that must simply be unified. (The note at B160 complicates the issue
somewhat. In this note, Kant speaks of a pre-conceptual “unity” that “belongs to space and time, and not to
the concept of the understanding.”) By contrast, Hegel argues that intuition provides us with an
undifferentiated manifold that must first be analyzed before it can be unified.
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