Philosophy and Philosophers - an Introduction to Western Philosophy - Chapter 6
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CHAPTER SIX
Transcendental idealism: Kant
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 into the
midst of the European Enlightenment. The Enlightenment meant
different things in different countries, but certain common features can
be discerned. Kant referred to the Enlightenment as European man’s
coming of age; the assurance with which man had known his place in
the universe was being destroyed for ever. This did not mean the
replacement of one doctrine by another in which man could at least
find a place, no matter how unpleasant it might be; man was cast
adrift in a void, there to be dependent only on his own resources. The
Enlightenment questioned the right of anyone at all to claim a
monopoly of truth; this throws the decision as to what is the truth back
on the individual. The abandonment of authority as the source of truth
leads to a profound search as to the origins and justification of our
beliefs. The eighteenth century is marked by many embarking on this
search full of hope, confident that human reason has the capacity to
provide answers and discover truths. It led many thinkers who were
intelligent and honest in their deliberations to scepticism; an inability
to see how claims to human knowledge can be justified.
Developments in astronomy, with the work of Copernicus in the
sixteenth century, had already begun to undermine the medieval
edifice which gave man his defined place in the universe. The Great
Chain of Being, with God at its summit, stones at its base, and men
and angels in between, was dismembered. The Sun, not the Earth, was
the centre of our planetary system, situated in a universe of
unthinkable immensity and man was denied his privileged place in it.
Newton’s synthesis of the astronomy of Copernicus and Kepler, and
the terrestrial mechanics of Galileo, gave no one a privileged position;
laws of nature are objectively and uniformly true in all places. There
was also no need for a God to maintain the activity of the universe
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since it was relatively autonomous, like a clock, and perhaps only
required someone to wind it up periodically; but this diminished
God’s influence to a point where He could be dispensed with, even if a
highly religious man such as Newton did not wish to do so. The
religious scientist must now serve God through the humble task of
uncovering the wonderful order bestowed upon the universe by the
Creator at its inception. However, a tension had now emerged in
discoveries that appeared to reveal the magnificent workmanship of
God’s universe, but that at the same time made belief in God optional,
since God’s intervention in the universe, except perhaps at the very
beginning, of which we knew nothing, was not required in explanation
as it had been before.
Out of the Enlightenment we may evolve a criterion separating the
religious from the non-religious, a criterion based on a more
fundamental notion than the existence and authority of God. This can
be based on whether it is thought that the universe has some special
place or concern (negative or positive) for human beings. It is a
universe unresponsive to all human values, one to which human
values are simply not applicable, an amoral universe, that gives rise to
the crisis begun for man in the Enlightenment. Some reject this aspect
of the Enlightenment and continue in acceptance of God, although for
many it can never be quite the same; others embrace the idea of an
entirely amoral universe, and suffer the problems of discovering what,
if anything, can then have value; still others act merely as if the
universe still responds to human values; they live under the shadow
cast by a figure that has already left the scene.
It would be wrong to think of all the most revolutionary intellectual
figures before and during the Enlightenment as free-thinking atheists;
some of the most important figures were Copernicus, Descartes,
Locke, Spinoza, Newton, Leibniz, Berkeley, Kant, and all were
religious men to varying degrees and in different ways, men often
profoundly worried about where their thought seemed inexorably to
be taking them; this sometimes forced them to take rearguard action
against the consequences of their own thoughts. They all contributed
to the complete change in man’s world-view, whether they intended
to or not.
Kant both benefited from, and went beyond, the Enlightenment (die
Aufklärung). After an initial immersion in the rationalist philosophy of
Leibniz, Kant could no longer accept it; under the influence of Hume,
and the German Crusius, Kant says he was woken from his dogmatic
slumbers. Another powerful influence on Kant was Newton. Before
devoting himself to philosophy, Kant had been a scientist; he saw the
effect that a Newtonian view of the universe was going to have on
morality, God, and our freewill. For if Newtonian views were
universally and rigorously applied, they left little place for God, and
undermined morality in fundamental ways: a Newtonian universe was
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an amoral mechanical system in which objective values seemed to
have no application; man himself was an entity subject to the universal
remorseless laws of nature, whose actions were absolutely determined
by events that had already occurred, and which were thereby always
outside his control; whatever we may feel about the matter, we are not
free to choose, and where there is no freedom there is no responsibility
for action, and thus there can be no moral evaluations. A tree is not
free to choose, despite being alive; so when it falls on someone, the
event is neither moral nor immoral, it is amoral, just something that
happens. Human actions were now in danger of becoming just things
that happen.
Kant tried to respond to all these influences, and reconcile them in a
new synthesis. The empiricism of Hume had, it seemed to many, led to
scepticism about human knowledge, identity and freedom, and Kant
could not accept this. The rationalist view argued that there were
innate principles of the understanding or reason with which man
could a priori comprehend the basic nature of the world, although not
the world of appearances, but a real world that lies behind
appearances which ultimately explains those appearances. Hume
undermined this by showing that these principles either were
analytic—restating what, in disguised form, had already been
assumed—or went beyond being analytic and could not therefore be
justified by reason alone; but Hume found they could not then be
justified by experience either. There was no midway course for
empiricism.
Kant set out to show that these views could be reconciled; he tried
to show why the true nature of the relationship between experience
and the world is such that we can know things about the world of
appearances a priori—truths knowable independently of the evidence
of experience—although we can have no a priori knowledge of a real
world beyond appearances. Kant wants to show that we can know
certain truths a priori which are not trivial logical truths known
merely because of their formal structure. We can know the truth “If p
then q, p, therefore q” a priori precisely because we can substitute
uniformly any propositions we like for p and q; but for that same
reason such logical deductions can, independently of experience, tell
us nothing about the world. Our ability to know them a priori derives
precisely from the fact that they commit us to nothing about the
actual world. Kant thinks he can show how we can know universal
necessary truths a priori about the world as it appears, although not
the world as it is in itself.
Kant draws an analogy between his own revolution in philosophy
and that of the Copernican revolution in astronomy, but only in the
following respect: Copernicus had dared to suggest that some of the
motions of the heavenly bodies were only apparent and were as a
result of the motion of the observer. Similarly Kant suggests that
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some of the properties we ascribe to external objects are a result of
constructive mental processes to which appearances have to conform.
The philosophy propounded by Kant also attempts to be universally
valid in covering all self-conscious rational beings. Kant proposes
that our experience involves elements partly contributed by us, and
partly by the world; this does not mean our conception of the world
is merely subjective in being true only from a particular point of
view, or that it is absolutely objective, since the conception of the
world cannot be separated completely from ways that we experience
the world.
Kant
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was born in the Prussian town of
Königsberg, into a pietist Lutheran family; there he became Professor
of Logic and Metaphysics in 1770, at the age of forty-six.
Kant is frequently seen as almost a caricature of the popular
conception of a philosopher; outwardly his life was the very model of
the fastidious, studious, self-contained philosophical speculator. There
is no doubt that like many original people he was capable of great acts
of self-discipline. Yet he was not an unsociable man, or an
unentertaining lecturer; he was fond of female company, although he
never married. He never ventured many miles from Königsberg. His
life is therefore depicted as being, on the whole, dull and uneventful.
This may well be true; we should temper this somewhat patronizing
conclusion by reflecting that many of us do not have lives a great deal
more exciting. Near the end of his life, when he had already been
withdrawn from society for some time, Kant’s intellectual powers
crumbled; he failed to recognize friends, and he was virtually blind;
yet those closest to him still had glimpses of his good nature and will
power, and of the great philosopher behind the shell of the man that
remained.
A discussion of Kant’s epistemology and metaphysics naturally
centres upon the Critique of pure reason, his most complete thinking on
these subjects. An additional work on the same subjects is the
Prolegomena. Kant published many other works on science, aesthetics,
and on ethics.
Kant, to some extent, saw himself as solving the errors committed
by Hume and Leibniz. Hume’s philosophy has been interpreted by
some as collapsing into scepticism; central claims for human
knowledge, which are logically presupposed by natural science, are
found to be unjustifiable on the basis of his empiricist philosophy
whereby all such claims must be rationally justified either by pure
reason a priori or by the evidence of experience a posteriori. Neither is
found to provide such rational justification, although nature takes
160 Transcendental idealism
care that we nevertheless hold the required fundamental beliefs. Not
only did our common-sense beliefs about the world become
unsupportable, but the most powerful intellectual achievement of the
day, Newtonian mechanics, was also undermined. Newtonian
mechanics seemed to give a complete unifying explanation of the
workings of the universe; it was revolutionary in regarding the
universe not as operating under special laws for different regions, but
as being unified throughout under one objective set of laws. Kant saw
this as supremely worth defending against Hume’s scepticism.
Knowledge for Kant, as for Leibniz, had to be necessary and
universally valid. Hume undermined this, leaving us with knowledge
of the world, in so far as we could have any at all, which was
subjective, particular and contingent. The most important basic beliefs
about the world could not be justified by reason, but if we examined
closely what we actually experienced—the information provided by
experience—they could not be justified by experience either. The most
important basic beliefs in question were: the belief that the world
operates by necessary causal laws, so we can make inference beyond
what we presently perceive to unobserved cases; the belief that there
exist independent continuously existing objects; and the belief that
there is a continuous self. In short, empiricism, with its adherence to
the view that experience must be the sole source of evidence about the
world, led to scepticism when it was found that experience in itself, if
carefully examined, was not sufficient to justify some of our most
basic beliefs about the world.
Kant was convinced both that, contrary to Leibniz, knowledge of
the world had always to be concerned with the world of our
experience, not a reality beyond appearances, and that, contrary to
Hume, the senses were not alone as a means of justifying our
knowledge of such a world. The way out of this is to deny that
sensation and experience are one and the same. Kant’s basic idea is a
distinction between form and content; the form of our experience is
knowable a priori, the content is given a posteriori, and only in
combination can these provide knowledge of the world. We could not
have knowledge of a world other than the experienced one; but
sensation alone could not support our claims to knowledge. Sensation
is always particular, changing and subjective, and our knowledge
claims are general, universal, unchanging and objective. Leibniz was
impressed by the power of mathematics; maintaining a distrust of the
senses as a source of knowledge that led back to Plato, Leibniz sought
a metaphysics that describes the fundamental or underlying nature of
the world beyond appearances, which was independent of the
evidence of experience, based on a few basic principles; the world of
appearances is explained ultimately through the reality that lies
behind it; it is this reality which is the metaphysical foundation for all
other knowledge of the world. This is not to say Leibniz thought that
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humans could deduce all scientific laws from a priori metaphysical
principles; such a priori principles are too general and the a priori
principles and reason describe not appearances but the reality
underlying those appearances. Metaphysics seeks to describe what the
world must fundamentally be like if it is fully rationally explicable.
Kant thought Newtonian mechanics explained not a reality behind
appearances, but those appearances themselves; the question was how
this was possible in the light of Hume’s attack on our ability to justify
through examining our sensations the kind of necessary universal laws
Newton proposed, and the application of such laws to experience. It
could not be achieved through Leibniz’s philosophy, for Hume had
also shown that the machinations of pure reason alone could not
generate any new knowledge concerning what is actual; a pure logical
argument unpacks only items that are already contained in its
premises. The finite ability of the human mind may give us the
impression that something new is arising; but it is already there; for
God there would be no point in doing mathematics, or logic, or
playing chess; He would already know all the consequences.
There were other intellectual structures that Kant thought it
necessary to defend: Euclidean geometry, absolute space, continuous
infinite time, the applicability of mathematics in explaining the
world. Underlying Newtonian mechanics especially are the concepts
of causality and substance. Each area of human inquiry has its limits;
one Newtonian limit consisted in not questioning the existence of
matter, but instead concentrating on how all posited matter behaves.
But without the establishment in reality of a general concept of an
independent, self-subsisting stuff, Newtonian mechanics is left
entirely hypothetical: if the world is a certain way then these are the
laws of its behaviour. In addition the justification of general laws as
such had to be attempted: universal causality, which allows us to go
beyond seeing that this follows that to saying that this always causes
that, and so make inferences to cases we have not observed. Hume
thought that rational justification for our beliefs could lie only in
either reason or experience; but neither reason nor experience could
justify our belief in an external world of bodies, substance, causality,
or the self of personal identity; we could only show how they in fact
arise as natural beliefs in response to the experiences we have. It is
just these general concepts or categories that Kant aims to show we
are justified in applying necessarily and objectively to the world we
experience, although that application could not be justified, or
refuted, by experience.
It must be emphasized that Kant thought that in some areas of
human inquiry some final answers had been generated. The world did
obey Newton’s laws, Aristotle’s logic said all there was to say about
logic; space was Euclidean and three-dimensional, time was classical
and stretched like an infinite straight line towards the future and back
162 Transcendental idealism
into the past; causality did apply universally. All these things have
been questioned by modern thinking; Einstein questioned Newtonian
space, time, and motion; quantum mechanics questioned universal
causality; modern logic generated a richer array of theorems, making
Aristotelean logic a small fragment of it. Kant was not narrow-minded,
but Newton’s world-view in particular was so powerful and allencompassing
in its unified explanations of a vastly diverse range of
phenomena that to be overwhelmed by its finality was
understandable. Nor must we let Kant’s adherence to these particular
theories detract from his important and revolutionary views.
Kant’s Critique is, roughly, divided into two parts: the Analytic and
the Dialectic; the Analytic includes the Aesthetic. The word “aesthetic”
derives from a Greek word aesthesis relating to perception by the
senses. The special Kantian sense of “Aesthetic” concerns the a priori
form or order necessarily imposed by our capacity to receive
representations—our sensibility—on the material supplied by the
senses. The form or order is a priori and necessary, and Kant discovers
it by subtraction of both the material of sensation and the concepts
contributed by the faculty of understanding. These pure forms of
sensible intuition or of experiences turn out to be space and time. The
Analytic is largely positive; in it are determined the a priori principles
of the understanding; we are also shown the proper use of
metaphysics in providing the basis for our objective knowledge. The
Dialectic is largely negative. We are shown the misuse of metaphysics
in using concepts to go beyond what we can possibly experience, to a
world of illusion and contradiction; we are also shown why we are
prone to be tempted to this kind of speculation. The Aesthetic and
Analytic give us a metaphysics of experience; they display what must
be the basic features of experience and reasoning. The Dialectic shows
how we err when we attempt to extend our knowledge beyond that
which it is possible for us to experience.
We now turn to examining some well-used terms in Kant’s
Critique. These divide into three pairs: a priori/a posteriori, analytic/
synthetic, necessary/contingent. First we distinguish a priori
statements, which once understood can logically be known to be true
prior to, and independently of, the evidence of experience, from a
posteriori statements, which once understood can logically be known
to be true only by the evidence of experience. Analytic statements are
true in virtue of the meanings of the terms in the statements and are
known to be true merely by understanding the meanings of the terms
contained in the statements; synthetic statements cannot be known
just by examining the meaning of the terms in the statements.
Generally speaking, although it is this that Kant will question,
necessary statements (those that must always be true or must always
be false) are a priori analytic, and contingent statements (those that
may be true or may be false) are a posteriori synthetic. Thus, “All
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bachelors are unmarried” is a priori analytic; we can know it to be
true without consulting our experience, nor could any experience
refute it, for the meaning of “bachelor” includes “unmarried”; if
someone was suggested to us as an example of a bachelor who was
married, we would respond by explaining how we define “bachelor”,
not by seeking empirical evidence. Analytic truths are those truths
whose denial is contradictory; the predicate “unmarried” is
contained in the concept of the subject term “bachelor”. However,
“All bachelors admire Kant” may be true, or it may be false; the way
we find out is by empirically investigating bachelors; it certainly is
not part of the definition of the term “bachelor” that an admiration
or otherwise for Kant should come into it, and so it cannot be known
to be true a priori.
Hume thought that the only necessary propositions were analytic
ones (mathematics, for example); but the price we pay for our only
pieces of necessary truth is that they are quite empty; they tell us
nothing about the world. They simply unravel linguistic definitions.
Logical truths such as “not-(p and not-p)” are known to be true a priori
precisely because they exhibit a universally valid form which is devoid
and independent of content; any proposition could be substituted for
p, therefore the whole expression can tell us nothing about the actual
contingent world. Logic alone can tell us only what is necessary,
impossible or possible, not what is actual and contingent: that which
is, but might have been otherwise. Hume argues that all our
knowledge of the world must come from the senses; but all we can
generate from that source is contingent particular statements which
cannot support general necessary statements, such as the reality of
universal causation, the truth of universal laws, the real existence of an
independent constant external world. If we observe A followed by B,
we note that we perceive no necessary connection between A and B,
which is an essential part of the belief that A causes B, that would
justify saying B must always follow A; but this is the form of universal
laws of nature and the basis of any inferences from the observed to the
unobserved.
The disagreement between empiricists such as Hume and
rationalists such as Leibniz centres on whence our knowledge of the
world derives, on what knowledge of truths about the world logically
depends, and on the emptiness of analytic propositions. In general, the
issue is that of the informativeness of truths knowable independently
of the evidence of experience: whether such truths can tell us anything
about reality. The rationalists see analytic truths and deductive
reasoning as an a priori source of knowledge, admittedly not of the
ephemeral world just as we experience it, but of the reality behind
those experiences. Leibniz has a problem maintaining any a posteriori
synthetic truths at all, since he thinks all truths concerning underlying
reality must ultimately be analyzable into the subject-predicate form
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and be analytic. Unlike the rationalists, the empiricists see analytic
truths as empty or trivial statements, which can tell us nothing about
the actual contingent nature of the world.
Kant found himself agreeing and disagreeing with both parties. He
agrees with the empiricists, and disagrees with the rationalists, that a
priori analytic truths are empty, and that our knowledge must be of the
world we can experience; but he also thinks that we can know
necessary and universal a priori truths that tell us something about the
real or actual world of experience. Kant agrees with the rationalists
that not all a priori knowledge is empty, but disagrees that this
knowledge can be of a world behind appearances. The answer for Kant
is the existence of propositions that are synthetic a priori and in some
way necessary; these truths, knowable prior to the evidence of
experience, are irrefutable by any experience, and yet they go beyond
the mere meaning of the terms used in expressing them and determine
a priori certain truths concerning the world as experienced. The
necessity and universality of the truth of synthetic a priori judgements
cannot derive from their being analytic and their denial implying a
logical contradiction; they must be necessary and universal truths for
some other reason. Kant’s positive project, his transcendental
philosophy, is to show how it can be possible to know truths a priori
which are necessarily true of the world as it appears, but which are not
necessary by merely being analytic. Such a synthetic a priori truth is
that every event has a cause.
The term “transcendental” does a lot of work in Kant’s philosophy.
Generally whatever is transcendental is not derived from, or justifiable
or refutable by, experience, yet is applicable to, or is a condition for, all
experience. Transcendental knowledge is knowledge not of objects, but
knowledge of the necessary a priori conditions of our cognition of
objects. Kant uses the term to denote the a priori factors in our
knowledge.
Kant analyzes experience and understanding in order to justify
objective knowledge. Intuitions consist of sensations which are
necessarily subject to the forms of space and time; sensations are a
posteriori and space and time are supplied a priori by our sensibility or
capacity to receive representations; but sensation is not separable from
those a priori conditions. Space is the form of outer sense, of objects in
the external world, whereas time is the form of both outer and inner
sense—our inner experience necessarily only involves succession in
time. Space and time are the a priori forms of our sensibility as a whole.
These pure forms of our intuitions are analogous to filters on a camera:
the only images formed are ones that have passed through or been
subject to the filters. The pure forms of intuition are not empirical: they
are not derived from experience, rather they are the necessary form of
all experience. Nor are space and time concepts, for there can be no
object (like a table) corresponding to space and time in general. Kant
Kant 165
further holds that the pure intuition of space is presupposed by
geometry, and that of time is presupposed by arithmetic.
In addition to this, knowledge, as opposed to the mere having of
experiences, involves the use of the basic concepts or categories of the
faculty of the understanding. The knowledge that what we see is a
table involves having and applying the concept of a table by a
judgement of the understanding, not just seeing something in space
and time. Furthermore our understanding necessarily operates with
certain basic concepts or categories. Knowledge is possible through the
conjunction of actual intuitions with the necessary categories of the
faculty of understanding. The senses alone are literally thoughtless; the
understanding alone is contentless.
A summary of the nature of intuitions, and the relation between
them and concepts of the understanding producing knowledge, can be
given in the following diagram.
There is a sharp distinction between the intellectual and sensory
elements in human knowledge. The mind is active in understanding
nature, not a passive receptacle waiting to be filled by experiences.
Transcendental philosophy does not give us particular scientific
knowledge of the world we experience; but the transcendental
deduction shows how we can know the necessary a priori elements
166 Transcendental idealism
presupposed by such scientific knowledge of the world as experienced.
For example, we cannot know a priori that A is the cause of B—that is a
matter for scientific empirical investigation; but it can be known a
priori that B has some cause—that much can be proved by
transcendental philosophy.
Kant was well aware of the distinction, said to be confused in the
work of some earlier philosophers, between the origin (quid facti) of
something, and its justification (quid juris). The revealing of the origin
or genesis of a truth or belief has to be distinguished from whether the
truth or belief can be known a priori or a posteriori. The origin concerns
facts about psychology; the question of whether a proposition is a
priori or a posteriori concerns what logical type the proposition is.
Propositions that can be shown to follow deductively from certain
logically necessary premises can be known independently of the
evidence of experience, since their denial would imply a logical
contradiction; but some truths can be known only by consulting the
evidence of experience, even if the belief in the truth happens to be
psychologically innate. I may have been born with the belief, which is
true, that “There are lions in Africa”; but the conditions for the belief
being true depend on facts about Africa; knowledge of those facts,
and hence knowledge of the truth of the proposition describing those
facts, can be justified only by experience of Africa; it could not be
proved a priori by deductive reasoning or a priori by merely
understanding the meaning of the terms in the proposition that
expresses the belief. To show that something is psychologically a priori
does not show it to be a priori valid or true, still less that its truth is
knowable a priori.
Kant was not engaged in speculative empirical psychology. If Kant
can justify the necessity of the application of the forms of space and
time, and the categories, to the world, he will have achieved a great
deal. In the first case we have, for example, justified, and explained,
applied mathematics; in the second we have justified concepts
essential to science, for example, substance, causality, plurality, unity
and the like.
Running through Kant’s philosophy is a distinction between form
and content. The form of experience is knowable a priori; the content or
filling is given to us and is knowable a posteriori; but the two elements
are not simply separable. The form of our intuitions is space and time,
the forms of our understanding or thought are the categories. In actual
intuitions, sensations and space and time are not separable; in actual
knowledge, intuitions and categories are not separable. This idea is
essential to understanding Kant’s transcendental idealism: his notion
of objectivity is designed to counter empirical idealism, which is the
position that our knowledge is only subjectively valid concerning the
content of our own minds.
The “schemata”, which are kinds of restricting frameworks, are
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required to give rules for applying the categories, for the concepts of
the understanding in their pure form are never met in intuitions; we
must take the pure concepts and form schematisms by which
particular intuitions can be identified as falling under pure concepts. If
we take the example of the category of substance as that which is
always a subject of predication and is never predicated of another
subject, the schema of substance is that which is permanent in time
while other things change. The schema of necessity is the existence of
an object at all times. The schema of causality is the succession of real
things according to a rule. Time is presupposed a priori in our
experiencing things existing simultaneously or successively; and it is
indeed temporal existence that is the primary condition to which
schemata of the a priori imagination must conform. It is the schema
which ensures that the categories are applied only to objects of
possible experience; the understanding is effectively limited to
experience (intuitions of our sensibility) by requiring that the
application of the pure concepts is through schemata which involve
the a priori pure form of inner intuition (time) and outer intuition
(space); that is, the categories are limited to objects in time and space.
Thus the categories become more than pure or formal logical truths,
but come to have objects to which they apply; they come to tell us
something a priori about the objects of possible experience, that is,
possible intuitions. Through the methodological adoption of the
mechanism of schemata, reason does not attempt to describe a world
beyond or behind all possible experience; in this case it is not a world
which is as a matter of fact out of reach of all experience from which
we exclude ourselves, but rather a world which is necessarily out of
reach of all possible experience. What is denied is “transcendent”
knowledge: knowledge of things-in-themselves or, in Kant’s
terminology, noumena beyond the conditions for all experiences. For
example, it can be said to be possible to experience atoms, although in
fact they are too small to see (at least with the naked eye); whereas it is
impossible that we should experience timelessness or eternity, since all
experiences are in time as they involve succession; nor is it possible to
conceive of a spaceless world.
We can see the categories as the highest point of a hierarchy of
classificatory and ordering concepts. We use the concept “tree”, which
falls under the concept “plant”, which is an “object”, which is
subsumed under “substance”, something that is separable and can
remain the same while undergoing certain sorts of changes. We can
conceive of a world as experienced to which the lower and more
particular concepts do not apply—a world without trees, in which the
concept “tree” is not applied in our judgements—but we cannot
conceive of a world to which the concepts of something that can
endure through change, universal causality, plurality and unity do not
apply. The same applies to the other twelve in the table of categories.
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I
Quantity
Unity
Plurality
Totality
II III
Quality Relation
Reality Substance and accident
Negation Cause and effect
Limitation Reciprocity
IV
Modality
Possibility and impossibility
Existence and non-existence
Necessity and contingency
These are the categories with which we must think if we think about
the world at all, and they must therefore be presupposed in, apply to,
any way the world can appear to us and be involved in all judgement
and knowledge.
In the metaphysical deduction of categories, Kant tries to
demonstrate how the categories arise from general logic—from
different kinds of logical judgements. However, Kant’s exposition is
unusually terse. The judgement “Some S is P” (“Some cows are black’)
involves concepts; it involves the concept of plurality, since it involves
two terms, it involves the concept of reality, since it states something is.
Perhaps of greater importance to the modern reader is the
transcendental deduction, for here we have an argument that attempts
to justify the application of categories as such; that there are concepts
we necessarily have to apply to experience, whatever these concepts
specifically turn out to be. The sense of “deduction” in the
transcendental deduction is more akin to a defence in law than an
argument in formal logic.
The transcendental deduction runs as follows. The aim of the
transcendental deduction is to show not only that there are categories
or concepts we necessarily apply to our experience, but also that that
experience must be such that in applying the categories we can be said
to be making objective judgements, or judgements about objects. The
absolutely minimum condition for experiences which are something to
me is that the experiences are subject to a synthesis such that they are
all part of one consciousness. To say that experiences are thus united is
equivalent to the condition of apperception, that is, the experiences are
possible objects of self-consciousness; it must be possible for the “I
think” to accompany all my representations. The “I” here is not
empirical self-consciousness; sometimes I reflect, and sometimes I do
Kant 169
not; it is the transcendental unity of apperception: the unity given by
the mere possibility of my being self-conscious of whatever
experiences I have. For this apperception to make sense it is necessary
that I am aware of something which is not-self, objects which have a
unity and independence of their own, distinct from my self; if they
were not thus independent, I would not be engaged in an act of selfconsciousness
at all. The items on which I reflect in self-consciousness,
that is, the items of my consciousness, are not-self and are therefore
objects; they have objectivity. Now to reflect at all is to apply concepts;
to say, for example, “x now”, “there are more xs than ys”, “x is
different from y”, “x again”, “y has got bigger”; in reflection concepts
must be applied, so what presents itself could not be a totally
disordered stream of sensation, each item utterly unrelated to any
other. In the final step, having shown we necessarily apply concepts,
Kant, due to his faith in his metaphysical deduction, thinks he has
shown that it must be just those concepts or categories deduced in the
metaphysical deduction that we apply.
To sum up: consciousness is a uniting of intuitions, the condition
for this is possible self-consciousness; the condition for selfconsciousness
is awareness of objects, or objective experiences
(experiences under categories); the objects of conciousness on which
we reflect in self-consciousness are therefore subject to concepts (are
objects having order intrinsic to them); and if we must apply concepts,
the categories revealed in the metaphysical deduction must be the
concepts we apply.
Kant equivocates about the nature of objects, items of which we
can claim to be able to make judgements independent of the
particular state of the subject. Whether the objectivity granted by the
categories as the necessary universally valid conditions for all
experience is enough to give us everything we expect of an object,
and an objective world, is open to dispute. But the transcendental
deduction attempts to justify the application of the categories by all
rational consciousnesses, not just the human mind. There cannot be
forms of understanding quite different from our own. Kant does
allow that there could be forms of sensible intuition other than our
own human forms.
Hume correctly thought we could not derive an abiding self from
the flux of perceptions open to introspection; but Kant argues that the
ability to introspect at all assumes a self or subject which has the
experience, for we say, “This is my experience”; it must be possible for
the “I think” to accompany all my representations. But I can think only
according to the categories; so there can be no experience such that it is
not subject in my judgement to the categories, since then there would
be experiences of mine which could not be accompanied by “I think”,
which is impossible. The awareness of self derives from the awareness
of our power to unite representations in one consciousness.
170 Transcendental idealism
This creates for Kant the possibility of objective knowledge of the
world; knowledge must include experience, and we necessarily have
to apply the categories which give the form of that experience.
Whereas Kant’s argument may have justified the application of
necessary conditions for experience—some set of categories or other—
it is not clear that he has justified the application of all and only those
categories he lists in particular; that would follow only if we accepted
the metaphysical deduction.
This has led some to update the categories but maintain their
necessity; it has led still others to update them but to abandon their
necessity. The second of these positions seems to abandon the point of
Kant’s transcendental idealism, for then the categories are neither
universal (for they apply only to human cognition) nor necessary (not
transcendentally necessary but psychological facts). On the other hand,
the first position has great difficulty generating categories which at
once can be shown to apply necessarily to any comprehensible world,
while at the same time avoiding the triviality of being entirely vacuous
and non-specific.
Interpretations of Kant’s transcendental idealism vary. One view
asserts that we have obtained objective knowledge because the
categories have been demonstrated to have universal inter subjectivity.
Another view suggests that Kant has to show that there is a world of
objects existing independent of us in some further sense than the
world we experience and know, necessarily conforming to the
categories which are not thereby merely arbitrary and subjective. But
this destroys Kant’s position by asking him to accomplish the
impossible. We cannot possibly know that objects in themselves,
distinct from how they are experienced or appear to us, are organized
according to the categories, but we can know that objects as they
appear or the world-as-experienced must be organized according to
the categories, since the way objects appear partly depends on
ourselves and we must apply the categories in thinking about what we
experience. The world, or nature, just is the sum of possible
experiences; the world of phenomena. Noumena, or things-inthemselves
(Dinge-an-sich), are not objects of experience; they stand
proxy for a world beyond appearances that is unknowable; this realm
is nothing to do with the world as studied by science. Noumenon is
not, it must be emphasized, the atomic world, or anything where our
lack of actual experience of it is purely a matter of accidental
contingent fact. The atomic world exists straightforwardly (or so it
seemed in Kant’s day) in space and time, even if the laws governing its
behaviour are discovered indirectly by its effects; our inability to
observe atoms directly is an empirical, not a transcendental, limit to
our experience. The appearance/reality distinction is not between
phenomena/ noumena, but between the variant/invariant features of
our experience. To suggest that we can still look around the edge of all
Kant 171
our experiences, dropping our form of cognition, to a world untainted
by that form, to see if the categories actually apply, is to attempt what
Kant denies is possible, and to abandon precisely the ground from
whence the objectivity of the categories arises. The categories which
we bring to experience cannot be abandoned, for they are present
whenever we have an intelligence capable of self-conscious thought.
Kant says his position supports empirical realism and refutes
idealism. Whatever we may think of Kant’s arguments, he cannot be
defending empirical realism in the form of knowledge of objects
devoid of our form of understanding; to think otherwise is to miss the
point. If we tried to apply Kant’s views to objects totally independent
of our, and all intelligent, modes of understanding, Kant could never
have hoped to justify the necessary application of categories; there
would always be an unbridgeable gap between the way we think and
what we think about; we would never be able to show the categories
applied to reality in this sense, rather than merely indicating how we
have to think about the world. If any conception of reality is
inseparable from mind, then there is a possibility of explaining why
our basic intellectual structures—causality, substance, plurality, and
the like—must actually apply. The point is that as far as we are
concerned, transcendental idealism delivers all that a bald empirical
realism supposes to be the case; these two positions are in that sense
equivalent and indistinguishable. A logically or transcendentally
inescapable perspective is equivalent to an objective view. Universal
objectively valid knowledge, invariant with, and not requiring
qualifying reference to, the state of the subject, is squared with the
argument that there cannot be a perspectiveless world-view of thingsin-themselves
through the establishment of the categories and forms of
intuition as transcendentally necessary and objective for all possible
appearances in being invariant with the experiencing subject. There is
then no perspectiveless position from which the rational perspective
itself can be checked; if the perspective is thereby universal it is also
necessary and objective and independent of the individual subjective
perspective.
This is not the only interpretation of Kant’s position, and Kant
himself was not entirely consistent or clear; he plainly felt uneasy
about it. Kant sometimes speaks as if noumena are the unknowable
causes of our experiences.
Kant attacks in the Dialectic the possibility of knowledge
transcending experience and its a priori form or conditions to attempt
to gain knowledge of unconditioned noumena, a perspectiveless view
of things-in-themselves. Kant is setting the necessary presupposition of
all human knowledge and so marking the bounds of legitimate
inquiry. The Dialectic is the logic of illusion. That is not to say that we
cannot think beyond the bounds of possible experience; we can form
concepts—for example of substance—to think about that which exists
172 Transcendental idealism
beyond our possible intuitions, and so outside space and time; but
knowledge is not possible.
Noumena are unknowable; we can speak of noumena only
negatively: we can say what they are not as compared to phenomena
that we can experience, since we can say that none of our concepts can
be positively applied to characterize noumenon. It is indeed unclear if
we can legitimately talk of either noumenon in the singular or
noumena in the plural, since the first involves the category of unity
and the second that of plurality. Whatever is the case, noumenon, or
the thing-in-itself, is reality in the sense of being independent of all
conceptual determinations which apply necessarily to the world as
experienced; and, since all knowledge involves applying concepts,
things-in-themselves are unknowable.
Illusory metaphysics which aims at knowledge has three main
subjects: God, and proofs for the existence of God; freedom, which
connects with cosmology; immortality, which connects with the soul.
Metaphysical speculation which aims at knowledge of truths
concerning these subjects has been endless, fruitless and contradictory.
In contrast to physical science, disputes seem undecidable. As Kant
says, it has involved “deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew
with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can
never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion”. Kant wants
to show why this is so, and put an end to it. This is the overall aim of
Kant’s “critical philosophy”.
Kant sets about this demonstration in the Antinomies. The strategy
is, after taking some matter about which we illegitimately aim to know,
to present a pair of equally logically compelling arguments from which
are derived a thesis and antithesis which are mutually exclusive and
collectively exhaustive alternatives. The conclusions cannot both be
true, but we have no way of knowing which is true and which false.
The proof of the thesis and antithesis is by reductio ad absurdum:
showing that denying an assertion leads to an impossibility, thus
demonstrating the truth of the assertion. Kant presents four
Antinomies: first, the finitude or infinitude in space and time of the
universe; secondly, the finite or infinite divisibility of substance;
thirdly, whether there is freedom or no freedom; fourthly, whether
there exists an absolutely necessary being or not. These matters are
undecidable by human reason, since we are presented with equally
convincing conclusions which are mutually contradictory. However, to
agree that the Antinomies show this, we would have to accept the
arguments for each thesis and antithesis in each Antinomy as equally
valid; unfortunately their quality is variable.
Hegel (1770–1831) was to suggest that the opposing conclusions of
Kant’s Antinomies indicate not the limits of human reason, but the
need for a synthesis which somehow encompasses the conflicting
conclusions as to the nature of reality.
Kant 173
Arguments for the existence of God are classified in three ways:
physico-theological, cosmological, ontological. The physico-theological
is basically the argument from design, whereby, if an orderly clock
needs a clockmaker, the world surely needs a worldmaker. Hume had
attacked this argument on the grounds that if the clock/world analogy
was weak, then the world might not need a maker; if the analogy was
strong, then the worldmaker was no better than a clockmaker, and
need not be a God at all. The cosmological argument harks back to the
ancient unmoved-mover argument of a first cause required to start the
universe off; this is already implicitly undermined in the Antinomies.
The most significant attack is upon the ontological argument. Here
God’s existence is said to be deducible from the concept of God; God is
perfection, it is more perfect to exist than not to exist, therefore the
perfect being must exist. Kant’s refutation of this proof rests on
arguing that “existence” is not a descriptive predicate adding anything
to the meaning or concept of a subject, so that to say something exists
does not therefore attribute an additional property to a subject at all;
rather it merely says that there is something to which the concept of
the subject applies. We do not add an additional property, after we
have listed all the attributes of Kant, by saying Kant exists; rather it is
to say that all the properties of Kant—shortness, thin body,
philosopher, etc.—actually have an instance.
Kant was concerned that he had, in a sense, done his job of
providing necessary metaphysical foundations too well; especially
with reference to the universally valid application of causality to
phenomena, it seemed as if there was no place left for human freedom.
Kant replies through an analysis of the self. Although the world of
phenomena may be determined by the causal laws of physics and
transcendental concepts, the noumenal world beyond experience is
not. Kant’s answer is to posit a noumenal-self, or transcendental-self,
which is “outside” the phenomenal world; man viewed as noumenon
can therefore act freely according to the moral law. The transcendentalself
is the only transcendental object we have access to; here our
perspective and a perspectiveless view become one and the same; the
distinction between appearance and reality can be eliminated. This
explanation of freedom leaves too many questions in obscurity to be
satisfactory; moreover, because the moral law governs the operation of
the noumenal-self, it fails to explain how we could ever act wrongly. If
it is maintained that the operation of the noumenal-self originates
totally spontaneously, then it amounts to nothing more than a
reassertion of belief in freewill. In any event Kant’s call upon the
transcendental world should, on his own account, be illegitimate, as
this world is unknowable, and its causal interaction with the
phenomenal world impossible, since the concept of causality cannot
apply to it.
Kant does leave some positive function to the ideas of
174 Transcendental idealism
unconditioned reason; they can be regulative of our inquiries, even if
concrete knowledge of truths cannot directly be derived from them. If
we treat the ideas of unconditioned reason as unobtainable aims, they
may act as injunctions. For example, the idea of determining if the
world has a beginning in time is not something we can settle by pure
reason, nor could any empirical inquiry determine the answer; but the
question of the universe’s temporal origin requires us to keep
searching for ever greater understanding of the universe’s origin.
We can summarize the philosophy of Kant in the following way.
Kant starts from the problem of justifying the objectivity and necessity
of the form of intuitions and the concepts we apply to the world. Their
necessity and objectivity seem unjustifiable by the raw sensations of
experience alone or because their rejection would involve logical
contradiction. The world for us can be nothing but the sum total of
possible appearances, and the form given to those appearances—
applied to the raw sensations—is the product of our minds;
appearances, but not things-in-themselves, have to conform to the
form given to them by our understanding; these forms are objective
and necessary because they are that to which all appearances must
conform if there are awareness and judgements concerning those
appearances; these forms are universally valid for all rational beings.
Thus they are objective because they apply to all worlds conceivable to
us, and to rational beings in general, and so are independent of the
subjective contributions of any individual minds. The world as
noumenon is the world considered as other than how it can ever
appear to us; such a world beyond all possible appearances is
unknowable; it is a world in which the a priori form produced by our
intellect is not valid, since it is the world as it is independent of all
appearances, beyond possible experience. The function of philosophy
is not to provide us with knowledge of the nature of reality as a whole
or in itself—how the world might be beyond how it can possibly
appear to us—but with knowledge of the a priori form or structure of
those appearances themselves. Nor can philosophy lay down a priori
the scientific laws of nature; but it can justify the presuppositions that
the scientific empirical inquiry into the laws of nature involves.
Philosophy studies the only thing it can: the necessary and universal a
priori form of the world as it appears to us; the a priori forms are
necessary and objective because they are how any rational minds must
think; the forms are therefore applicable to any conceivable world, that
is, to all that is a possible appearance to us.
Kant 175
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