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Does Kant’s transcendental idealism fare any better than the naive idealism he attempts to distance himself from in terms of escaping radical scepticism?
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is an inquiry into knowledge and what constitutes the real world and any justification we have for claiming to understand any part of it. In attempting to reconcile the seemingly disparate, but equally inconclusive, schools of thought represented by empiricism and rationalism, he claimed to be revolutionising philosophy, a revolution akin to that brought about by Copernicus in the field of astronomy. Kant’s Critique begins from the premise that all knowledge derives of experience, but, vitally, some knowledge is both a priori and synthetic. This assertion is central to Kant’s transcendental argument (the process by which he arrives at transcendental idealism) as he claims that this was over-looked by both rationalist and empiricist camps. For Kant, an active knowing subject, in order to understand knowledge, must understand the role of its own activity – its reasoning. Analogous to Copernicus’s overthrowing of Ptolemaic cosmology, Kant’s revolution highlights that the mind, with its activities, structures and principles, cannot be separate from the phenomena which appear to it. “Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition…” [1]
Kant declared that the empiricists’ position – the naïve idealism of Berkeley in particular – is open to hard sceptical attack. If the real world is a construct of the human mind, then what happens when the human mind is not around to do the constructing? Can we actually deny the real world’s existing? The position is vulnerable to the whole gambit of Descartes’ deceiving evil demon, Nozick’s ‘experience machine’ and Dancy/Putnam’s ‘brain-in-vat’.
In this essay, I shall explore the claim that Kant does not escape the same fate. Strawson (1966) suggested that Kant was far closer to Berkeley than he would have liked to admit[2] and Russell commented that those following in Kant’s footsteps – Fichte, Hegel and Schelling – also “fell into something very like solipsism”.[3] Even if Kant has proven his synthetic a priori ‘pure intuitions’ of time and space, and his categories of intuition, his relying upon unknowable things-as-they-are, as the objects which give rise to the real world (which we see represented as phenomena and our intellectual conceptualization of them) is a problem. Can it be argued (despite Kant’s recourse to Transcendental or regulative ideas) that the very existence of noumena is subject to reasonable sceptical doubt, and hence the remaining existence of reality in the mind of thinker, after Kant, is no more solid a proposition than Berkeley’s before him? Or is this an empiricist misconception? I shall begin by looking at Kant’s transcendental idealism and then discuss some of the criticism levelled against Kant’s philosophical thought by later commentators. I shall discuss criticisms of Kant’s position on two fronts. Firstly, I shall explore the synthetic a priori. This falls into two discrete arguments, the first of which is criticism levelled fundamentally at Kant’s division of analytic and synthetic, whilst the second focuses on Kant’s supposition that synthetic a priori judgements are possible. Secondly, I shall explore the notion that noumena, despite some salvation attempts by modern thinkers, might well undermine the whole case put by Kant in establishing his transcendental idealism.
Kant’s transcendental idealism
Kant’s philosophy is grounded in empiricism. He is clear that our sensory experiences give us our knowledge. However, we are not simply seeing the world ‘as it is’, a direct correlation between the reality ‘out there’ and our recording of it internally. Firstly, we become aware of intuitions through our sensory perceptions, or our faculty of sensibility. These intuitions, however, are random and nonsensical in their raw form – they are mere sensations. Our knowledge, that is our understanding of the perceived object, comes about only through our faculty of thinking, through our ability to conceptualise in the mind and organise what we have received into something ‘knowable’ - phenomena. Thus for Kant, a combination of the faculties of sensibility and conception is essential to understanding. On their own, neither faculty is able to attain knowledge. “The faculty for thinking of objects of sensible intuition… is the understanding. Neither of these properties is to be preferred to the other. Without sensibility no object would be given to us, and without understanding none would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”[4] For Kant then, seeing an object, a car in a street for example, is a synthesis. Seeing the red shape against a darker background is my sensory awareness of the phenomena, whereas it is my conception of ‘car’ as a category, as distinct from its background, which gives meaning to the image. Without the conception, my image would be little more than abstract art, and without the phenomena, my conception of ‘car’, would be ungrounded and empty.
Kant held that a conception is above and beyond the individual instance of something – it is true irrespective of state of mind or perspective. As Strawson (1966) affirms, “Judgements about objects, if valid, are objectively valid, valid independently of the occurrence of the particular state of awareness, of the particular experience, which issues the judgement.”[5] It is this ‘something fixed and unalterable’ which lies behind the specific impression we have of a singular instance which gives Kant his objective world, existing beyond our experience of it. What we see is real, its reality a product of our reception of phenomena and our conceptions. To investigate appearances is to investigate the empirically real.[6] By explaining reality in terms of its being objectively valid, Kant can make a claim to empirical reality.
In the first instance, it is central to Kant’s transcendental idealism that he establishes the existence of synthetic, a priori truths, or judgements, something which, for the rationalist camp is something of a logical contradiction. If these cannot be shown to exist, philosophy in general is left only with the analytic a priori, which Kant argues tells us nothing we didn’t already know, being by its very nature tautological, and the synthetic a posteriori which relies upon strict sensory verification. (The notion of an analytic a posteriori would seem to be a clear contradiction[7].)This will not do, and so Kant needs to show a third option which avoids both difficulties. Hospers (1967) says that Kant “explained the possibility of synthetic a priori truths by the nature of the human mind. It is because the human mind is structured the way it is that certain truths are both synthetic and a priori.”[8] Hospers goes on to give the example of fishing with a one inch net in the sea. From the evidence the net presents to the fisherman, he might induce that the sea contains only fish bigger than one inch long. However, what is not always easy to see is that what the fisherman has is a fact about the net, not a fact about the sea. Kant’s structure of the mind is like the net, and what we know of the world is actually our knowledge of the mind, not the actual noumenal world, which for Kant is unknowable.
Kant postulates ‘pure forms of the intuition’ (space and time) and ‘forms of the understanding’ (his ‘categories’, including causality and necessity) as being special cases of understanding. These intuitions are known about the-world-as-it-appears-to-us: the phenomenal world. Time and space, for Kant, are crucial to our notion of phenomena. They are a priori because they are the essential way in which our minds register and make sense of the world – no further sensory experience is required to separate two objects spatially or to differentiate two events temporally – this is simply how our mind works. They are also synthetic, though, in that they are informative – they provide information in the predicate which did not exist in the subject. (For Kant, the analytic is a tautology – the subject is restated in the predicate.) If Kant is right, and notions such as time and space are within us inextricably, then he has made a case for the synthetic a priori. Gardner(1999) explains thus: “Consider ‘every event has a cause’. Because it is necessary, it must be a priori. But it’s not analytic, for the concept of the predicate is not contained in the concept of the subject: the concept of an event...does not contain that of being an effect. That is why the judgement is informative, and that makes it synthetic. Metaphysical judgements are therefore a priori and synthetic. Which means they cannot be derived either from logic (since they are synthetic) or from experience (since they are a priori)”[9]
Problems with the synthetic a priori
Kant’s most basic assumption - that of an analytic/synthetic divide - is open to controversy. I pursue this since, without recourse to this distinction, Kant is already in trouble asserting a synthetic a priori. Jason S. Baehr (2006) expresses the analytic/synthetic divide thus: “[One] way of drawing the distinction is to say that a proposition is analytic if its truth depends entirely on the definition of its terms (that is, it is true by definition), while the truth of a synthetic proposition depends not on mere linguistic convention, but on how the world actually is in some respect.”[10] In other words, an analytic proposition is to do with how we construct language and cannot, by definition, provide us with any information about the world, whereas a synthetic proposition is giving information beyond the subject of its proposition.
Kant gives the examples of analytic and synthetic propositions as ‘all bodies are extended’ and ‘all bodies have weight’ respectively. In the first example, a body, by virtue of its definition, must have shape and occupy space; in the second the notion of weight is extra information about a ‘body’ not necessarily part of the definition of ‘body’.
Quine (1951), in his paper ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, rejects Kant’s argument about analytic statements being necessarily true by virtue of definitions. More accurately, whilst he accepts that they are true, he rejects Kant’s argument as circular, and thus untenable. Quine defines two types of analytical statement, exemplified by (i) all unmarried men are unmarried and (ii) all bachelors are unmarried. Simply put, Quine argues that analytic statements in the second category rely upon replacing words with synonyms, and that our notion of synonyms is also dependent upon analyticity, hence the argument cannot be resolved. After a rather complex investigation of the meaning of synonyms, Quine says, “Analyticity at first seemed most naturally definable by appeal to a realm of meanings. On refinement, the appeal to meanings gave way to an appeal to synonymy or definition. But definition turned out to be a will-o'-the-wisp, and synonymy turned out to be best understood only by dint of a prior appeal to analyticity itself. So we are back at the problem of analyticity.”[11] Quine concludes that, “for all its a priori reasonableness, a boundary between analytic and synthetic statement simply has not been drawn. That there is such a distinction to be drawn at all is an unempirical dogma of empiricists, a metaphysical article of faith.”[12] It might, however, be reasonable to argue that this in itself has no real effect in any phenomenological sense on Kant’s notion of the a priori.
Leibniz had asserted that, in deference to natural order, all subjects contained all of their predicates necessarily, hence arriving at the conclusion that all truths are analytic[13]. Hume disagreed, and starting from a different point logically arrives at a conflicting conclusion. Arthur Sullivan states that, “It seems Quine is most justified in asserting that the distinction has never been well made; each philosopher's view on the subject simply reflects his or her metaphysical standpoint. This standpoint tells us something about their particular predispositions and approaches to logic, but nothing about the world.”[14] In conclusion, Sullivan states somewhat devastatingly for Kant’s transcendental idealism, “The terms of Kant's transcendentalist model, intended to explain the conditions of possible experience rather than ontologically commit, are at best metaphorical when viewed through Quine's microscope.”[15] This conclusion is echoed by Scott Soames (2005) in his article ‘Philosophical Analysis’[16] where he describes Quine’s attack as ‘a telling one’ since it produced two conclusions (if logical knowledge is a priori then it cannot always be explained linguistically and if it is not, then it is hard to see that any knowledge can be a priori) neither of which was acceptable to Kant’s notion of a priori. For Quine, the view that “all a priori knowledge is knowledge of analytic truths”[17] necessarily led to this conclusion, further undermining Kant’s distinction. More recent investigations, such as Boghossian (1996), seem to contest Quine’s conclusions. Boghossian proposes a division of analyticity into two strands, the second of which, epistemic analyticity, appears to escape Quine’s rejections. [18]
I move now to the synthetic a priori itself as being one of the major vulnerabilities of Kant’s transcendental idealism, for some a fatal weakness. Kant gives mathematics and geometry as examples of the synthetic a priori. The claim that mathematics is synthetic is the stronger claim, but Frege notably suggests that all mathematical truths could be shown to be analytic. [19] He felt that Kant had been misguided by outdated Aristotelian logic, and that his premise for synthetic a priori mathematics was based on a fundamental misunderstanding, a view shared by Russell.[20] The claim that geometry is a priori can also be doubted. Pure geometry is founded upon axioms for which no claim of truth is made – and is therefore not synthetic - and applied geometry, as a part of physics, relies upon additional empirical verification – and hence is not a priori. Kant argues that propositions in geometry were inextricably linked with an awareness of their absolute necessity[21] and laid significant weight on these claims in the Introduction: if they are rejected, this has a knock-on effect for the whole of his argument in the First Critique. It is possible to read the Critique as advancing metaphysical conclusions based upon suppositions about the truths of mathematics and geometry. This would lend the former, metaphysics, a dependence on the latter, which if the latter is revealed as a false claim renders Kant’s entire project epistemologically suspect. Russell (1946) is compellingly dismissive: “Thus of the two kinds of geometry one is a priori but not synthetic, while the other is synthetic but not a priori. This disposes of the transcendental argument.”[22]
Kant, however, foresaw this line of attack. He clearly states in the Critique of Practical Reason that he accepts that mathematics and geometry could still be the victims of sceptical doubt.
“...even Hume did not make his empiricism so universal as to include mathematics. He holds the principles of mathematics to be analytical; and if his were correct, they would certainly be apodictic also: but we could not infer from this that reason has the faculty of forming apodictic judgements in philosophy also - that is to say, those which are synthetical judgements, like the judgement of causality. But if we adopt a universal empiricism, then mathematics will be included.” [23]
In fairness, it would seem that, in drawing attention to the possibility that mathematics and geometry, as synthetic, are open to sceptical doubt, Kant was not intending to rest the entire transcendental project upon the unassailability of these disciplines.
There are, however, other issues with the a priori synthetic. Notably, Kant puts forward time and space as being the two ‘pure’ forms of intuition. His notion of time and space is a halfway house between Newton’s space and time as extant, as a substantive container of our spatiotemporal experiences, and the German rationalist view that they are nothing in themselves, only existing as relationships between substantial objects. Kant’s view is that in order to identify objects as being separate/next to/behind etc., (in relation to myself or to other objects), I must already have the concept of space. The idea, therefore, that something outside of me can have an effect on me – i.e. it is located in space – must be a synthetic a priori judgment. On time, Kant states that intuitions themselves cannot address change[24]. Only time can allow for contradictory propositions about things (the glass is full, the glass is empty) by allowing for the sequential (I have drunk the contents of the glass, thus the state of ‘full’ came before the state of ‘empty’). Kant goes on to say that if it is given that all outer experiences occur in space, then all inner experiences, “i.e. all objects of the senses, are in time, and necessarily stand in relations of time.”[25] So no object can appear to us which is not time bound, since time is a part of our natural conceptual processes.
Salomon Maimon was respected as a critic by Kant himself. His principal objections were fundamentally to do with Kant’s notions of experience and cognition, but he also had issues with Kant’s ascription of space and time. Maimon did not accept that space and time were forms of human intuition, but posited rather that they are the ways in which we represent differences conceptually between thoughts.[26] “The fact that we represent content spatially and temporally indicates only that there is some incompleteness in our conception of the world, and not that this content is provided by a realm of wholly independent objects.”[27] Guyer (2006) also questions the necessary a priori nature of time and space, suggesting that our empirical acquisition of these concepts could occur at a developmental stage in infants which precludes our memory of having acquired them.[28]
If space and time are substances, there is a problem in that they are causally inert and inaccessible – their nature is not changed through interaction with other substances. If they are properties of another substance – God perhaps – then they could potentially cease to be (as contingent upon the substance of which they are properties) and, perhaps worse, this would restrict God to a spatiotemporal existence. For Kant, space does not represent a property of things-in-themselves, nor does time. Space and time are pure intuitions (a priori) and subjective criteria of our sensibility, enabling the postulation of all our other intuitions.[29] Allison defends Kant’s notion of time as an a priori intuition through interpreting Kant’s arguments (at A23-4/ B38-9) as “two distinct arguments concerned with two distinct conceptions of apriority[.]”[30] The first is that space as a representation must be presupposed if I am to represent objects as outside of me and as apart from each other. The second is that as a necessary a priori representation, space grounds all outer intuitions and that whilst one can imagine empty space, one cannot image no space. Similarly, Kant’s ‘...argument for the permanence of substance essentially hinges on the thought that since time cannot be perceived without the experience of change, it must follow that there can be no such thing as empty time.’[31] For Kant, pre-existence and ceasing to exist both pose the problem of postulating empty time, and are thus untenable: leading to permanence of substance. And as he states clearly in the Transcendental Exposition, “...space and time, as the necessary conditions of all outer and inner experience, are merely subjective conditions of all our intuition, and that in relation to these conditions all objects are therefore mere appearances, and not given to us as things in themselves...”[32]
The idea that time is an a priori synthetic truth leads us, however, to a peculiar circular notion of appearance. Strawson (1966) identifies this issue in his essay ‘The Bounds of Sense’: if we appear to ourselves only as how we appear to ourselves, not as how we really are – as noumenal things in ourselves – do we really appear to ourselves thus, or only appear to ourselves to appear to ourselves thus? Strawson is claiming that this leaves us appearing to ourselves temporally but not really temporally appearing to ourselves. For Strawson, this idea, along with what ‘really appearing’ means in this context, goes beyond intelligibility and is unanswerable. “It is not a defence of an unintelligible doctrine that its unintelligibility is certified by a principle derived from it”, he concludes.[33]
It seems furthermore that Kant’s Critique really does suggest that we are aware of objects the very existence of which are logically (and therefore causally to some thinkers) dependent upon our awareness of them? If so, how can he extricate himself from this chicken-and-egg conundrum? Does the object exist before our awareness of it? Noumena become appearances of which I become aware at the point of my sensibility of them and my intuitions acting upon those sensibilities. It is the representation of the thing-in-itself which becomes empirically real as a result of my awareness. But the objection remains: the object – even in representation - only appears to me following my awareness of it and my awareness of it creates its appearance. There would seem to be no escape. This is perhaps, one interpretation. It is arguable, though, that this is a simple, if excusable, empiricist misunderstanding of Kant.
Scruton (2006) refers to another interpretation, which he calls an ‘objective’ view. Kant, he claims, meant the transcendental idealism to be a form of realism – the world of which we have knowledge does exist independently.[34] Kant’s references to the ‘world of appearance’ are only intended in so far as it exists in time and is made up of objects ‘perceived by us, or else causally related to our perception.’[35]
At this point, it is essential to consider Kant’s postulation of transcendental, or regulative, ideas. “Kant believed that there was a New World waiting to be discovered if Reason was only strong enough to resist the lazy postulation of a “constitutive” God and consider the purpose and unity of the world to be instead an “ideal” that “regulated” scientific inquiry.”[36] For Kant, the world is real insofar as it is the object of possible experience. The transcendental, or regulative, ideas of God, ultimate reality and the soul, serve to regulate our understanding – these ideas are pure concepts of reason, not constitutive principals of an empirical world. They can, however, be applied to the empirical world to guide our understanding. Allison (2004) suggests that the placing of these arguments in an Appendix goes some way to explaining not only the misunderstandings of the empiricist camp, but also the insufficient attention paid to them in post-Kantian attempts to grasp the full meaning of the First Critique.[37] These regulative ideas place before the intellect the whole spectrum of knowledge ‘since they make possible a priori the concepts without which there is no experience’.[38] Kant goes on at length to refute rational theology, rational psychology and rational cosmology – these can only be transcendental ideas, and are not objectively given.
Strawson, however, was confident as he sounded what he considered a death-knell for Kant’s transcendental project: “since nothing whatever really is, or could be, explained by this model – for it is incoherent – it must be concluded that Kant has no clear and general conception of the synthetic a priori at all.”[39]
Problems with the noumenal world
I wish to turn now to Kant’s beguiling introduction of the unknowable realm of noumena, as a means of explanation of experience. Hopsers (1967) poses some basic questions about the noumena. “We seem to be left with total scepticism as to the nature of the real (noumenal) world... How do we know there is a real world and that it is unknowable? ...If the phenomenal world is a result of the structure of the human mind, how do we know this structure won’t change?”[40]
Kant sets out a transcendental proof that the real word exists outside of ourselves. Firstly, he states that experience itself, and accordingly the object of experience, would be impossible without a connection between a given concept of phenomena and the concept of causation. Ritter (2009) makes the distinction between an apagogic proof, which is a refutation of an opposite, and Kant’s ostensive proof, which establishes truth directly, “ideally by affirmative premises.”[41] Kant is clear about the value of this type of proof: “that for each transcendental proof only a single proof can be found,” and “that [transcendental proofs] must never be apagogic but always ostensive.”[42] Kant thus claims to have logically[43] (and ostensively) proven that the external world exists:
“The proof that is demanded must therefore establish that we have experience and not merely imagination of outer things, which cannot be accomplished unless one can prove that even our inner experience, undoubted by Descartes, is possible only under the presupposition of outer experience. ….Consequently, the determination of my existence in time is possible only by means of the existence of actual things that I perceive outside myself. Now consciousness in time is necessarily combined with the consciousness of the possibility of this time-determination: Therefore it is also necessarily combined with the existence of the things outside me, as the condition of time-determination; i.e., the consciousness of my own existence is at the same time an immediate consciousness of the existence of other things outside me.”[44]
This proof, for Kant, moves him away from the realism and idealism of his predecessors. Interestingly, Cassam (2007) suggests that Kant was mistaken in thinking his rejection of Hume had to be a rejection of Realism, and shows how Realism can allow for a priori knowledge, and that “its explanation doesn’t require the positing of an intrinsic harmony between mind and world.”[45]
However, Kant’s premise that understanding of the world arises in our mind, above and beyond experience, can be seen as problematic. Kant’s idealism hinges on his idea of things-in-themselves. He argues, as we have seen, that space and time are not external to us, independently existing, but are in fact within us as conceptualisations we use to understand the world. Furthermore, we can only understand our perceptual inputs, our sensory experiences – we can know nothing of things-in-themselves. We similarly do not know the relationship between things-in-themselves and phenomena (or appearances) – they cannot be causal, because causality is only an intuitive conception we have, and things-in-themselves are outside of our intuition.
The issue, then, is the noumena – given that we can know nothing at all about them, in what way does it make sense even to discuss their existence? It seems that there is no sense at all in discussing the nature of something which is defined as being something with a nature which we cannot know. How is it possible to posit that the noumena exist, that they somehow relate – but in a non-causal way – to our perception of the appearances of them? Can we justify a belief in them? Kant’s argument is that they must exist, because phenomena are appearances of something – therefore the ‘something’ must exist. Yet it exists in such a way as we can know nothing of its existence – which would necessarily include the supposition that it does exist. Kant seems to be saying both that “we are aware of bodies in space as distinct from our perceptions” and that “bodies in space have no existence apart from our perceptions”[46]. But just as scepticism can upturn Berkeley’s empiricism – how do we know the external reality exists? – so it can upturn Kant’s transcendental idealism – how do we know noumena exist if we can know nothing about them?
Kant would hold that noumena are objectively existent – they require no thinking subject. They are ontologically objective. He also, in the Second Critique, attempts to suggest that the noumena of freedom might actually be knowable, as it revealed through moral law. Others, such as God and immortality, whilst unknowable can be the objects of faith, since practical reason demands belief in them.[47] Allison (2004) defends the notion of noumena by arguing for a ‘one world-two aspect’ reading of the First Critique, as opposed to the ‘two world-two object’ reading, as espoused by Strawson and Guyer, which he dismisses as a dead-end interpretation. Allison argues that Kant introduces two standpoints about things – one where spatiotemporal considerations apply, as in our everyday experience, and another, where these epistemic conditions are not present, and hence can be considered a possible view of things-in-themselves. Thing-in-themselves, in this reading, would not be some postulated objects lacking in spatial or temporal qualities, but rather, spatiotemporal properties are omitted from one account of our conception of things. Guyer rejects this reading, pointing first to Kant’s historical background and the universality of a two-world view, and also to the fact that “a domain of objects that are not spatial and temporal has to be numerically distinct from a domain of object that are.”[48]
If the thing-in-itself is unknowable, we are justified in doubting its existence, as nothing is offered by way of proof of existence. Another interpretation of noumena might be that they are simply a symbol of the limits of our understanding. Again though, the very act of interpreting that which is by nature unknowable is doomed. Kant, however, was quite explicit about the noumena actually existing, albeit outside of time and space, and hence outside of our comprehension. Rae Langton (2001) sets out the problem thus:
“K1 Things in themselves exist. K2 Things in themselves are the causes of phenomenal appearances. And it attributes to Kant an epistemological thesis. K3 We can have no knowledge of things-in-themselves. Trouble comes with the conjunction of the three. For the epistemological thesis appears to imply these corollaries: C1 We cannot know that things in themselves exist. C2 We cannot know that things in themselves are the causes of phenomenal appearances. We cannot know K1 and K2. Kant's story makes itself untellable.”[49]
For Kant, the world can only be understood in the context of noumenal reality, without which the world and everything in it is really only in my mind. Transcendental idealism would reduce to abstract intellectual sophistry if Kant’s noumena are not viable, bringing the whole Critique close to Berkley’s idealism – that which Kant struggled so tirelessly to distance himself from.
Indeed, it seems likely that scepticism can throw its classic taunt at Kant’s transcendentalism, despite Kant’s Refutation of Idealism. What of Putnam’s brain-in-a-vat? Ritter discusses Putnam’s thought experiment as well as the evil demon of Descartes’ radical scepticism. He is compelled to conclude that in the case where everybody is deceived – such as the scenario more recently depicted in the film ‘The Matrix’ – “the nature of unity collapses...As a result, Putnam’s sceptical scenario remains in the field. The Refutation of Idealism is inappropriate for proving that we are not in fact brains-in-vats or in similar distress. That question...does not lie in the scope of the transcendental approach.”[50]
A further problem in relation to the conceptual framework espoused by Kant is raised by the question, ‘If I cease to exist, what becomes of the external world?’ If the world – by which I now mean the ‘real’ empirical world of Kant’s representations and phenomena – exists insofar as my intuitions and cognitions act upon one another, what happens when they don’t? How do infants, the intellectually handicapped and non-human animals, for that matter, have a role in reality? Surely Kant must accept that they too have experiences? If humanity were to disappear, and only animals remain, would that therefore alter the nature of reality? With no minds capable of actioning the second phase of Kant’s dual notion of cognition, what becomes of reality? In a world of only infant brains, would time stop and space cease to exist? The implications of this seem to bring into question the logic for attempting to assert that our conceptual cognitive makeup somehow shapes the world. Our cognition, for Kant, comprises an awareness which comes from an unknowable source. Strawson rejects “the senseless dogma that our conceptual scheme corresponds at no point with reality”[51], and argues that noumena must in some sense be knowable. Thielke (2007) offers that “Maimon holds that the thing-in-itself stands only as an object of inquiry, rather than an independent noumenal entity...[and the fact that the thing-in-itself is not possible for us to experience] does not imply that the thing in itself cannot in principle be an object of cognition.”[52]
Later philosophers such as Fitche and Hegel removed ‘things-in-themselves’ as simply too problematic. Fichte regarded the thing-in-itself as little more than left-over dogmatism, and a weakness that could open the floodgates to traditional scepticism. He replaced the noumena with his concept of Ego, consciousness grounded in itself. He states (1868) “In the Science of Knowledge, the Ego is represented; but from this it does not follow that the Ego is represented as merely representing...the Ego as object of philosophizing may be something more.”[53]
As Frederick Beiser (1949) stated, “The consequence of Kant’s philosophy, if it were to drop its inconsistent postulate of the thing-in-itself, was solipsism...”[54] Jacobi famously declared that in removing the thing-in-itself from Kant’s philosophy, Fichte had revealed that what was left was nihilism.[55]
In conclusion, crucial elements of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism rely upon distinctions and definitions which are flawed. The possibility of synthetic a priori – the basis for Kant’s understanding of space, time and categories of intuition – cannot be proven. The ethereal noumena, crucial also in being the mysterious source of all experience, cannot, paradoxically, be experienced and therefore cannot realistically be held to exist. If these elements of Transcendental Idealism after Kant are unproven – and they are at the very least highly dubious – then scepticism claims the entire project. Even Descartes’ ‘cogito’ can only be a construct of phenomenal reality – my consciousness as it appears, not as it actually is. The world exists only in and is created by the mind, and the mind is open to deception and illusion. The Lockean school of philosophers, in particular Feder, accused Kant of being no different from Berkeley in this respect.[56]
Bibliography
All quotes from Kant are taken from:
Kant, Immanuel – Critique of Pure Reason CUP 1998
Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood
Kant, Immanuel - Critique of Practical Reason
The Project Gutenberg EBook Release Date: May, 2004 Version 10
Kant, Immanuel – Critique of Judgement Dover Philosophical Classics 2005
Books and Articles
Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism Rev. and Enl. Ed. Yale University Press 2004
Beiser, Frederick The Fate of Reason Harvard University Press 1949
Bird, Graham (Ed) A Companion to Kant Blackwell 2005
Burham, Douglas and Young, Harvey – Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason Edinburgh Philosophical Guides 2007
Boghossian (1996) “Analyticity” Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Second Edition, Macmillan (Thompson and Gale) 2006 Vol.1
Dickers, Georges Kant’s Theory of Knowledge: An Analytical introduction OEP 2004
Fichte, J.G. The Science of Knowledge J.B. Lippincott & Co. 1868
Gardner, Sebastian Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason Routledge 1999
Guyer, Paul Kant Routledge 2006
Hospers, John – An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1967 Scruton, Roger - A Short History of Modern Philosophy Routeledge Classics 2002
Strawson, PF - The Bounds of Sense Metheun and Co Ltd., 1966
Soames, S. ‘Philosophical Analysis’ (2005) Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Second Edition, Macmillan (Thompson and Gale) 2006 Vol. 1
Ward, Andrew Kant: The Three Critiques Polity Press 2006
Websites
Bellotti, T. ‘Does Kant’s Theory of Knowledge lead to solipsism?’ www.philososphypathways.com/essays/bellotti3.htmFebruary 1st 2010
Baehr, J., ‘A Priori and A Posteriori’ 2006
http://www.iep.utm.edu/apriori/#H2 January 29th 2010
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University of Hawaii, USA www.phil.pku.edu.cn/zxm/pdf/spec16.pdf accessed February 2010
[1] (Preface to second edition – Bxvi – p 110)
[2] PF Strawson The Bounds of Sense Metheun and Co Ltd., 1966 p22
[3]Russell, Bertrand A History of Western Philosophy Book 3 Chapter XX Simon and Schuster 1946 p718. Russell’s account is controversial however and many other commentators refute this conclusion, in particular with regard to Hegel and Schelling. For example, see Cassirer Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics In M. Gram, ed. Kant: Disputed Questions. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1967
[4] A50-51/B74-76
[5] Strawson, PF – The Bounds of Sense p73
[6] A45-46/B62-63
[7] See Burnham and Young – Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, p29-30, for a brief discussion of the possibility of analytic a posteri truths, such as, for example, ‘all mammals are warm-blooded’.
[8] Hospers, J – An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis p184
[9] Gardner, Sebastian Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason p 56
[10] Baehr J., ‘A Priori and A Posteri’ 2006 http://www.iep.utm.edu/apriori/#H2 Jan 29th 2010
[11] Quine ‘Two dogmas of Empiricism’ 1951 http://www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html January 29th 2010
[12] Ibid. Quine
[13] Russell op. cit. p 591
[14] Sullivan, A. ‘W. V. Quine on the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction’
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/sullivan.htm February 1st 2010
[15] Ibid. Sullivan
[16] Soames, S. ‘Philosophical Analysis’ (2005) Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Second Edition, Macmillan (Thompson and Gale) 2006 Vol. 1 p150
[17] Ibid. Soames
[18] See Boghossian (1996) “Analyticity” Encyclopedia of Philosophy p165
[19] Rey, Georges ‘The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction’ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analytic-synthetic/ Jan 29th 2010
[20] Scruton, Roger - A Short History of Modern Philosophy Routeledge Classics 2002 p250-251
[21] B41
[22] Russell op. cit. p 716
[23] CPracR Preface, paragraph XXX
[24] B48
[25] B51
[26] Thielke, Peter ‘Salomon Maimon’ 2007 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/maimon 8th February 2010
[27] Thielke, Peter op cit
[28] Guyer, Paul Kant 2006 Routledge p 66
[29] Janiak, Andrew ‘Kant's Views on Space and Time’ 2009 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-spacetime/
[30] Allison 2004, op cit p100
[31] Wade, Andrew Kant – The Three Critiques 2006 Polity Press p72
[32] CPR A48-9/B66
[33] Strawson, PF op. cit. p39
[34] Scruton, Roger - A Short History of Modern Philosophy Routledge Classics 2002 p147
[35] Scruton ibid
[36] Behuniak, James Jr., The “Regulative” Idea from Kant to William James
[37] Allison, op cit p423
[38] CPR (A644-5/ B692-3)
[39] Strawson, op cit p 43
[40] Hospers, op.cit. p 185
[41] Ritter, Bernard – ‘What is Kant’s refutation of idealism designed to refute?’ Abtracta Special Issue IV, 2009 p66
[42] A787/B815; A789/B817
[43] Ritter, Bernard op cit p66
[44] B275 - B276
[45] Cassam, Quassim. The Possibility of Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Oxford Scholarship Online. Oxford University Press. 25 January 2010 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199208319.001.0001
[46] Strawson op. cit. p260
[47] Paragraph IV Preface, CPracR op cit
[48] Guyer op cit p68
[49] Langton, Rae. Kantian Humility - Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Scholarship Online. 10/02/2010 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/0199243174.001.0001
[50] Ritter op. cit. p82
[51] Strawson op.cit. p42
[52] Thielke op cit p
[53] J.G. Fichte The Science of Knowledge J.B. Lippincott & Co. 1868 p60
[54] Frederick Beiser The Fate of Reason Harvard University Press 1949 p2
[55] Beiser, ibid p 124
[56] Beiser, ibid p 171
