In philosophy, two approaches can be distinguished: describing categories that are already established, and investigating how categories arise through the activity of consciousness. The object of criticism here is the presentation of form as something originally given, in which its genesis remains outside the scope of consideration.
The Category as a Ready-Made Classification
In encyclopedic presentations, a category often appears as an already existing structure:
- a class of entities;
- a form of thought;
- a mode of being;
- a logical classification.
All that remains is to define these structures, enumerate them, and arrange them within a system. This produces an image of philosophy as a catalog of universal foundations.
An objectifying presentation assumes that essential relations already exist in reality and that philosophy must express them in maximally general concepts. The category then appears as the result of classifying what already exists, while its formation through the activity of consciousness is left unexamined.
The Question That Precedes the Catalog
A genetic investigation turns to more fundamental conditions:
- how a distinction arises;
- how it is established and maintained;
- how memory and repeated recognition operate;
- how different cases are condensed into “one and the same”;
- on what grounds generalization arises.
Here the category is a later product of a sequence of acts of consciousness, not an initial element.
Aristotle and Kant in Standard Presentations
In standard presentations, Aristotle’s categories appear as the most general ways of speaking about beings: substance, quality, quantity, relation, and others. Such a presentation can easily be read as a conception of a world that is already divisible into universal types.
In presentations of Kant, there is a turn toward the subject: categories are supplied by the understanding for the synthesis of experience. Yet even here their set may be presented to the reader as already given and complete.
Therefore, the formula “the world supplies the categories” is not sufficiently precise for all the presentations under consideration. What they have in common is something else: categories are presented as existing structures, whether of the world, thought, or being. The criticism is directed at a mode of presentation that skips over their genesis.
A Working Scheme for the Formation of a Category
A genetic reconstruction can be represented as a sequence:
- An act of distinction.
- Establishment of one side of the distinction.
- Retention of that establishment in memory.
- Repeated recognition as the same thing.
- Unification of different cases into a type.
- The category as a stabilized result.
In this model, a category represents a condensed history of the work of consciousness.
Two Philosophical Tasks
The philosophy of the catalog describes ready-made universals, constructs classifications, and answers the question of which categories exist.
The philosophy of the genesis of experience investigates the formation of forms and the origins of identity, repeatability, and generalization. Its question is how categorization itself became possible.
Moving to the second task requires reconstructing the origin of a ready-made form before accepting it as the initial foundation of an explanation.
