Notes on <Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason> - The Possibility of Objects
- The Critical problem: Kant’s letter to Herz
- Interpretations of Kant: Analytic and Idealist
- The Problem of Reality
- Kant’s Copernican Revolution
This chapter attempts to set out the line of thought underlying Kant’s Copernicanism, in terms that as far as possible avoid the technicalities of his philosophy.
The Critical problem: Kant’s letter to Herz
Representation (Vorstellung) is Kant’s generic term for a constituent or element of cognition. There is no problem in understanding how sensory representations can relate to objects, since the mind is straightforwardly passive with respect to the objects of the senses. But it is not readily intelligible how intellectual representations, which the Dissertation had claimed can alone represent things as they are - can relate to objects, for they are not produced through our being affected by objects and nor do they produce their objects.
Interpretations of Kant: Analytic and Idealist
The analytic interpretation(Strawson) identifies the task of Kantian philosophy as analyzing the implications of our conception of experience. The chief point of uncovering the structure of experience, on the analytic interpretation, is that it allows skepticism to be refuted.
But the source from which a world originates is equally dependent on that world. The idealist interpretation agrees that Kant’s enquiry is directed to uncovering the structure of experience but understands this notion differently. On the analytic interpretation, the structure of experience ultimately reduces to the structure of what is experienced, on the idealist interpretation, experience itself, the activity of experiencing, has an inherent structure, which it bestows on its objects.
Analytic is a kind of epistemological interpretation basically claiming that we can only experience certain kind of things, and it would have certain structures. It grounds all claims about the structure of experience on an appeal to the impossibility of our forming any other conception of experience. Idealist interpretation is more of an “ontological(metaphysical)” interpretation saying that the inherent structure of experience comes from the experience itself. I feel I’m more inclined to the analytic interpretation.
The Problem of Reality
The deepest issue with which Kant is preoccupied, on the idealist interpretation, is that of the possibility of objects.
There is no doubt that there is a real world, and we also suppose that reality is known to us. The problem is what makes reality into an object for us? Whatever it is that allows reality to become an object for us is naturally and perhaps inevitably conceived as some sort of fundamental connecting relation between reality and ourselves. The question is then what this relation consists in. However, as said in the letter to Herz:
either it must be admitted that we cannot account for our relation to reality, which makes all assertions regarding the nature of reality and our relation to it dogmatic; or the idea that we stand in a knowledgeable relation to reality must be renounced, which is to embrace skepticism.
The problem is rooted in what we are naturally disposed to think, on the story told by pre-philosophical common sense: there is first of all a set of objects composing a world, into which the subject is then introduced as a further item. when the subject’s eyes are opened and its cognitive functions are in working order, the world floods in and knowledge of the world results. And all pre-Kantian philosophy about this issue can be summarized as:
they all reduce on examination to the bare, non-explanatory claim that we represent real things because they affect us and because we have an immanent capacity to represent them.
The fundamental objection to making assumptions about the possibility of reality’s becoming an object for us is that it signifies a collapse of philosophical explanation at the crucial point. The only reason for believing that there is a pre-ordained harmony between reality and our representations, or for accepting any other fundamental epistemological principle intended to guarantee that reality is knowable, is the belief that we represent reality: the principles of rationalist and empiricist epistemology lend no support to this assumption. The pre-Kantian epistemology does not so much attempt to solve as fail to recognize the problem of reality.
Just as we lack any positive reason for believing that our representations do not match reality, so we also lack any reason for believing that reality is open to being represented by us. What it means is just that the most that we can be asked to do, in advance of seeing what a philosophical alternative to realism would look like, is to suspend our instinctive commitment to realism.
Kant’s Copernican Revolution
This sketch of the problem of reality gives an idea of Kant’s motive for re-conceiving objects as conforming to our mode of cognition. The alternative is Kant’s Copernican revolution, a.k.a transcendental idealism. And the pre-Copernican philosophical systems are called transcendental realism by Kant.
In Kant’s terminology, pre-Copernican, realist philosophy begins by ascribing reference to ‘the concept of an object in general’. Having put this concept into play, it then considers how we may take ourselves to stand in relations of knowledge to members of the class of real things. It is a consequence of this way of proceeding that the concept of an object is fundamentally independent of any epistemological conditions: an object is simply an individual that has being and a constitution, and any epistemic relations that it may have to subjects are to that extent inessential to it.
The alternative is to begin by making an absolute separation between the supposition that there is such a thing as reality, and the conception of objects which we are capable of cognizing. In this way, the concept of an object in general is not pre-assumed to have reference, and a class of real things is not posited at the outset. Instead, philosophical concern focuses on the task of explicating the concept of an object-for-us, that is, defining the class of knowable objects. What pre-Copernican philosophy treats as two distinct matters - objecthood and knowability - are thus treated as one.
The Distinction of Epistemology and Metaphysics: the Transcendental Turn
It is a consequence of this transformation in the concept of an object that Copernican philosophy revises the relation between metaphysics (or ontology) and epistemology, and in a sense blurs the boundary between them. The Copernican revolution is often identified with an epistemological turn in philosophy, meaning that it considers all metaphysical questions from an epistemological, justificatory angle.
Idealism
The general approach of Copernican philosophy in answering the question of how objects are possible for us, is therefore to say that, in a recondite philosophical sense, the subject constitutes its objects. It maintains, furthermore, that these subject-constituted objects compose the only kind of reality to which we have access. On this approach, skepticism is refuted by showing that, although claims to knowledge of real things in the strong sense must, as the skeptic says, be rejected as dogmatic and groundless, reality in the weaker sense is something that we can know precisely because we constitute it.
Kant explains what appears to be a wholly objective phenomenon in subjective terms, just as Copernicus explains the apparent movement of the sun in terms of the movement of the observer on the earth.
Kant’s Copernican conception immediately raise the question: since object is constituted by subject, how much of the object is the subject responsible for? Kant’s view is that we are justified in regarding as subject-dependent only whatever in objects pertains to the possibility of their being objects for us at all. Crucially, it therefore does not extend to the existence of objects. Kant says that his Critical idealism, unlike Berkeley’s idealism, is not after all a “genuine” idealism, because it concerns not the existence of things but only the properties that we predicate of objects by virtue of which we can know them. To say that the subject constitutes its objects is therefore not to say that objects are created by our representations.
Kant accepts realism at the level of common sense, what he calls “empirical realism”. The empirically real features of objects are those which they have over and above (and conditionally upon) their a priori features, and on the basis of which the realist form of explanation has legitimate application.
Transcendental
The philosophical method for transcendental idealism consists in what Kant calls “conditions of possibility”, or transcendental conditions. A transcendental proof has the peculiarity that it converts a possibility into a necessity: by saying under what conditions experience of objects is possible, transcendental proofs show those conditions to be necessary for us to the extent that we are to have experience of objects at all. Kant says in the introduction:
I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects in so far as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori’
Now we can revisit the distinction of analytic and idealist interpretation. On the idealist view, what is missing from the analytic interpretation is an account of how the structure of experience relates to reality. Reality must share the structure of experience, if our experience is to be experience of reality. The structure of experience is however not a set of logical truths. Merely to appeal to what is contained in our concept of experience in a sense leaves everything open, for what is to say that anything answers to that concept? For these reasons, on the idealist interpretation, the question of what secures an object for our conceptual scheme as a whole warrants the Copernican conception of the subject as shaping the world.
Proving the Doctrine
Kant does not intend to merely assume the truth of transcendental idealism at the outset and trace its consequences but to prove it.
The transcendental enquiry which follows from the Copernican hypothesis tells us, in the form of transcendental proofs, how we must constitute objects in order that experience be possible, and so provides us with a priori knowledge of objects.
The first verdict of the Critique is that metaphysics is possible in the (immanent) sense of the metaphysics of experience. The second verdict is that transcendent metaphysics is impossible: “we can know a priori of things only what we ourselves put into them”.