Notes on <Kant's Transcendental Idealism> - An Introduction to the Problem
The aim of the book is to both interpret and defend Kant’s transcendental idealism from his Critique of Pure Reason.
The Standard Picture and Its Inadequacy
The standard interpretation for Kant’s transcendental idealism affirms the unknowability of the thing in itself and relegates knowledge to purely subjective realm of appearances. It combines the phenomenalistic account of experience and postulates of an additional set of entities which are unknowable. It claims that Kant’s subjectivistic starting point forces him to choose from (1). things only seem to us to be spatial, which entails that our consciousness of a world of objects extended and located in space is somehow illusory (2). appearances, or representations really are spatial, which is absurd because it requires us to regard mental items as extended and located in space.
The problem with the standard picture is that it fails to distinguish between the central part of Kant’s theory, the distinction between transcendental and empirical.
Ideality means mind dependent, or in mind, reality means mind independent, or external to mind. Kant distinguishes between transcendental and empirical ideality. Empirically, ideality means private to mind, the mental content in the ordinary sense of mental. Reality in empirical sense means intersubjectively accessible, spatial-temporally ordered realm of objects of human experience. When Kant claims that he is an empirical realist, he means our experience is not limited to private domain of our own representations, but includes encounter with empirically real objects.
At the transcendental level, the level of philosophical reflection upon experience. Ideality is used to characterize the universal, necessary, a priori conditions of human experience. The transcendental ideality of space and time means they are a priori conditions of experience, forms of sensibility. Things in space and time are ideal because they can’t be described independently of these sensible conditions. In transcendental sense, something thing is real if it is independent of these conditions. Therefore, transcendental real objects are non-sensible object.
The main point here is that in the empirical sense, “appearances” and “things in themselves” designate two modes of being, one in mental and the other physical. At the transcendental sense, the distinction between “appearances” and “things in themselves” means two ways in which objects and be considered, either in relation to subjective conditions of human sensibility or independent of these conditions.
The Concept of an Epistemic Conditions
We want to define the term epistemic condition in order to explain transcendental idealism. An epistemic condition is one that is necessary for the representation of an object or an objective state of affairs, it could be called an “objectivating condition”. It is distinct from logical conditions of thought like the principle of non-contradiction. This is analogous to the distinction between transcendental and general logic. Pure concepts of understanding and space and time are epistemic conditions.
It’s important to distinguish epistemic condition with psychological conditions on the one hand and ontological condition on the other hand.
Psychological condition means some mechanism or aspect of the human cognitive apparatus that is appealed to when explaining why we experience things in certain ways, for example, habit or custom. But it can not account for objective validity, in Kant’s terms it answers quaestio facti, but not quaestio juris, the first one is what concerns the fact, the second one is what is lawful. The latter one is the concern for the Critique. Kant says Hume mistook a subjective necessity for an objective necessity.
Ontological condition are the conditions of Possibility of being of things. An ontological condition is a condition of the possibility of things as they are in themselves. For example, Newtonian absolute space and time. Kant believes this conception of space and time leads to absurdities in B70-71. Berkeley’s idealism which denies the reality of material objects makes certain sense when viewed as a response to Newton. This is because when empirical reality of material objects are made dependent on the absolute space and time, the absurdity connected with the latter would deny the former. Since space and time are self-subsistent non-entities according to Newton. But this can be avoided if space and time are viewed as conditions of the possibility of experience.
Consequently, just as Hume confuses psychological condition with epistemic conditions and it leads to skepticism, Newton confuses ontological condition with epistemic conditions and it also leads to untenable consequences. For Kant, these two confusions represents two sides of the same coin, namely the failure to recognize the role of epistemic conditions in human knowledge.