Kant's Critique of Idealism

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Introduction

Explicitly and emphatically, the German idealists criticized some of the central assumptions of the Cartesian tradition: that self-consciousness is certain and given; that we know ourselves with more certainty than objects in space; that knowledge is the result of contemplation rather than action; that the bearers of meaning are ideas; and, at least after Kant, that we know ourselves apart from and prior to others. This critique of the Cartesian legacy begins with the early Kant; it grows in intensity with the first Critique; and it comes to a climax with Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.

The development of German idealism consists not in an increasing subjectivism but in the very opposite: a growing realism and naturalism. German idealism has been interpreted as a story about the gradual discovery of this ego, as a tale about the progressive path toward absolute self-awareness. Rather than a story about the triumph of the subject, German idealism becomes a story about the progressive de-subjectivization of the Kantian legacy, the growing recognition that the ideal realm consists not in personality and subjectivity but in the normative, the archetypical, and the intelligible.

There were two fundamental forms of German idealism from 1781 to 1801. There was first of all the “subjective” or “formal” idealism of Kant and Fichte, accord- ing to which the transcendental subject is the source of the form but not the matter of experience. Contrary to it, there was the “objective” or “absolute” idealism of the romantics (Hölderlin, Novalis, Schlegel, Schelling, and the young Hegel), according to which the forms of experience are self-subsistent and transcend both the subject and object. While subjective idealism attaches the forms of experience to the transcendental subject, which is their source and precondition, objective idealism detaches them from that subject, making them hold for the realm of pure being as such. In subjective idealism the ideal or the rational is the subjective, mental, or spiritual; in objective idealism it is the archetypical, intelligible, and structural.

These idealisms have similar approach to some common philosophical problems. Since Kant, philosophers had become preoccupied with two distinct but closely related issues: how to explain the possibility of knowledge, and how to account for the reality of the external world. To explain the possibility of knowledge, there must be some identity between subject and object. However to explain the reality of the external world, it is necessary to establish some kind of dualism between the subject and object, given that it is just a fact of our experience that the object appears given to us and independent of our conscious control. Hence the general problem of German idealism was how to find a principle of subject–object identity that could surmount but also explain the subject–object dualism of ordinary experience. Hegel put the whole problem in a nutshell when he famously stated that the task of philosophy is to find the “identity of identity and nonidentity.”

There are two interpretations of Kant’s transcendental idealism: subjectivist interpretation and objectivist interpretation.

According to the subjectivist interpretation, Kant’s transcendental idealism is that the immediate objects of perception are the ideas of the perceiving subject. But it takes this principle to its ultimate skeptical conclusion: that we have no direct knowledge of reality in itself; rather, all that we know are our own representations, from which we must infer the existence of an independent reality. They stress the subjectivist premise behind Kant’s empirical realism: the identification of material objects with representations; and they point out that Kant’s belief in the reality of things-in-themselves is inconsistent with his critical teaching that we cannot know anything beyond experience.

According to the objectivist interpretation the ideas of the knowing subject are determined by the intersubjective order of the a priori concepts of the understanding. There Kant turns subjectivism upside down for he demonstrates that the intersubjective public world constituted by these concepts is not constructed from the ideas of the individual mind; rather, it is the necessary condition of even having such ideas. The knowing subject therefore loses its primacy, because it is not the first condition of experience but simply an- other element within experience itself. The objectivist interpretation seems to ignore or eliminate the Kantian version of the Cartesian cogito, the ‘I’ of the unity of apperception, which is the source of all the categories. They note that ‘I’ designates nothing more than an impersonal ‘it.’ This ‘it’ is either the activity of pure thinking—the mere exercise of a cognitive function—or it is the unifying principle behind the totality of experience, that which makes the forms of understanding and sensibility into a systematic whole. The objectivist interpretation brings Kant’s transcendental idealism very close to the absolute idealism of Schelling and Hegel. The central thesis of absolute idealism is that everything is an appearance of the idea, where the idea is not something in the individual conscious mind but the form, archetype, or structure of reality in general. Since it is a normative order that makes possible both subjectivity and objectivity, this idea is neither subjective nor objective itself; rather, it transcends both the subject and object and yet manifests itself in both.

Both parties can find evidence in Kant’s text but also some passages that’s against their interpretation. For them, it is not so much a question of what Kant did say but of what he ought to have said according to his fundamental principles. The way to resolve this is to look at the history of Kant’s thought. Kant conceived his transcendental ideal- ism as the middle path between the extremes of subjective and objective idealism. It is as if he already foresaw—and forcefully rejected—both the subjective and objective interpretations of his transcendental idealism.

Idealism in the Precritical Years

In his lectures on metaphysics Kant distinguishes sharply between idealism and egoism: idealism maintains that all that exists is immaterial, or at least all that I know to exist is immaterial, while egoism holds that only I myself exist, or at least all that I know to exist is my own self.

The refutation of idealism takes place in the context of his general metaphysics, which consists in two fundamental propositions, the principle of succession and the principle of coexistence.

The principle of succession states: “No change can happen to substances except insofar as they are connected with other substances, whose reciprocal dependence determines their mutual change of state”. The principle of coexistence declares: “Finite substances do not, in virtue of their existence alone, stand in relationship with one another, nor are they linked together by any interaction at all, except insofar as the common principle of their existence, namely the divine understanding, maintains them in a state of harmony in their reciprocal relations” Kant wanted a theory of mental-physical interaction that would do justice to separate existence of the mind and body while also explaining the interaction between them.

Kant’s refutation of idealism appears as a corollary to his exposition of the principle of succession.

Transcendental Idealism and Empirical Realism

We have the definition of transcendental idealism in Fourth Paralogism: “By the transcendental idealism of all appearances I understand the doctrine according to which we regard all appearances as mere representations and not things in themselves, and space and time as only sensible forms of our intuition, but not given determinations or conditions of objects as things in themselves” (A 369).

To understand how transcendental idealism differs from empirical or material idealism, it is important to recognize Kant’s distinction between two senses in which an object exists outside us (außer uns). There is the transcendental sense in which it exists outside us as a thing-in-itself, that is, its existence and nature are independent of all consciousness of it. There is also the empirical sense in which the object belongs to outer appearance or to “things which are to be found in space” (A 373).11 In this sense the object is outside me simply because it is in a different place from my body in space.

The fundamental distinction between transcendental idealism and empirical idealism, Kant argues, is that the transcendental idealist affirms, while the empirical idealist doubts or denies, the existence of objects outside us in the empirical sense.

Kant stresses the transcendental status of the representation of space when he claims that it is a necessary condition of experience, and more specifically the necessary condition under which anything appears to the external senses, sight or touch. To say that space is a necessary condition of the external senses means that if we see or touch anything we must perceive it as somewhere in space. Such an explanation excludes two possibilities: the empiricist view that space is simply an abstraction from experience, having at best only an accidental or contingent validity; and the rationalist view that space is only a fiction of the understanding or an illusion of the imagination.

Kant’s second explanation of the empirical reality of space is second-order or logical. This account determines the conditions under which judgments about space in general, or specific things in space, are true. The empirical reality of space simply means that the proposition ‘All things are in space’ is universally true, where it is under- stood that these things are appearances. The transcendental ideality of space preserves the truth of all empirical judgements about particular things in space.

Kant’s third and final account of the empirical reality of space is mathematical or geometrical. According to this explanation, space has empirical reality because transcendental idealism shows that the axioms and theorems of geometry are necessarily true of appearances.

The First Edition Refutation of Skeptical Idealism

Kant’s account of skeptical idealism in the first edition version of the Critique of the Fourth Paralogism is entirely Cartesian. Kant’s chief concern is to refute the Cartesian doctrine that we have immediate knowledge only of our own inner states, and that our knowledge of the external world is only by inference. According to Kant’s diagnosis, then, the fatal underlying assumption behind the Fourth Paralogism is nothing less than transcendental realism, the doctrine that appearances are things-in-themselves, or that the object that appears in space exists apart from and prior to our perception of it.

Self-consciousness of my inner states is not privileged, because what I know through outer sense is just as certain as what I know through inner sense. The existence of external objects in space is given to my representations as well as my own representations and existence.

Kant determines the validity of a perception simply by a formal criterion, by ascertaining the connection of perceptions among one another.

Cartesian skeptics said that empirical reality means our conception of objects corresponds to something independent of our ideas, Kant’s way of proving that empirical objects conform to space and time can’t show that the objects we perceive corresponds to some object independent of the object we perceive under space and time. Kant admits that we cannot assume that the whole framework of our experience has transcendental reality, that is, that it corresponds to things as they are in themselves. However, Kant argues that their reality can remain the same regardless of whether we assume transcendental reality or ideality. As long as the structure or organization of the whole web of belief remains the same, there will be no discernible difference between truth and falsity. So, ultimately, Cartesian doubt does not really matter.

What is spatial or three dimensional according to transcendental idealism? To what does Kant ascribe spatiality? The problem seems to disappear only when we recognize and appreciate the other meaning of appearance within transcendental philosophy. This is the sense in which appearances are not simply representations but aspects of things insofar as they are perceived according to the conditions of human sensibility. They essentially involve a relation between perceivers and an independent reality; and, more specifically, they are how things-in-themselves appear to perceivers endowed with a human sensibility. We cannot reduce such appearances to entities or monadic properties of the perceiver or the thing-in-itself—the mistake of empirical idealism and transcendental realism (respectively) - because if we remove either term of the relation there simply cannot be appearances.

Appearances in transcendental idealism can be understood in two senses: a mere representation, a monadic property of the perceiving subject, or an aspect of things-in-themselves, a relation between a subject and an object. The eternal dispute between subjectivism and anti-subjectivism suggests that it cannot be understood in both terms. Yet it can’t be resolved within Kant’s own limits of knowledge. As long as he is speaking transcendentally or epistemically rather than metaphysically or ontologically, Kant can regard appearances both as representations and as aspects of things-in-themselves. If, however, we speak metaphysically or ontologically, then we claim that appearances exist as either representations in the mind or as aspects of things; in this case we have to make a choice between one view or the other, given that nothing can exist at the same time as both an idea in the mind and as an aspect of things. Speaking transcendentally or epistemically means recognizing the limits of knowledge and admitting an agnosticism about the ontology of appearances.

We then say that, as far as we know, appearances might be only representations, because we cannot know whether they are aspects of things-in- themselves that exist independent of us. Nevertheless, again as far as we know, it is still possible for these appearances to be aspects of things-in-them-selves, for in thinking this we do not contradict ourselves or transcend the limits of experience.

The First Edition Refutation of Dogmatic Idealism

So far we considered Kant’s refutation of skeptical idealism which doubts the reality of the external world, but we also need a rebuttal of dogmatic idealism, which denies the reality of the external world. Kant’s debate with dogmatic idealism in the first Kritik, which appears equally in the first and second editions, was directed chiefly against Leibniz. Kant’s interpretation of Leibniz is that “in the senses there is nothing but illusion and in the intellect alone there is truth.” Leibniz is saying that the perception of bodies in space is an illusion. This was the flat antithesis of Kant’s own empirical realism. However Kant is not attributing to Leibniz the doctrine that sense perception is entirely illusory. Rather, the specific target of his criticism is Leibniz’s doctrine that sense perception is illusory insofar as it is sensory. Kant wants to maintain that the senses give us a distinct knowledge of phenomena and not simply a confused knowledge of noumena. Kant’s defense of empirical reality of space is that sensibility is not a lesser form of the understanding but a distinctive faculty in its own right. To perceive things in space is not to have a confused intellectual perception of something noumenal but a clear sensible perception of something phenomenal. The representation of things in space has empirical reality, then, insofar as it consists in a clear perception of the phenomenal.

Kant and Berkeley

Göttingen Review raised the question to Kant that what is the point in talking about a higher transcendental idealism when it still affirms the fundamental principle behind all idealism: the identification of the objects of consciousness with ideas? Kant responds to this in the Appendix of Prolegomena. Criticizing that they simply condemned the work according to their own metaphysical system rather than considering the central problem behind the Kritik - the possibility of metaphysics. They fail to grasp that its central purpose is to solve a problem on which the very fate of metaphysics depends: namely, ‘How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?’

The case for the Berkeleyian interpretation of Kant’s idealism mainly rests on the Critique of the Fourth Paralogism in the first edition of the Kritik. Here Kant’s definition of transcendental idealism - “the doctrine that appearances are to be regarded as being, one and all, representations only, not things-in-themselves” seems to be perfectly Berkeleyian.

If, like Berkeley, Kant identifies the objects of experience with representations, at least in the Fourth Paralogism, this does not mean that he endorses Berkeley’s esse est percipi principle. On the contrary, Kant denies this principle, holding that it goes beyond the limits of human experience. There are two respects in which Berkeley’s principle transcends these limits: first, it assumes that what is true of objects of experience (appearances) is true of objects in general; and, second, it assumes that objects of experience are only representations, when, for all we know, they could be aspects of things-in-themselves. Kant’s aim is not to determine the meaning of existence, the essence of being, but simply to determine the conditions for the possibility of objective knowledge.

There are three differences between Kant’s transcendental idealism and Berkeley’s dogmatic idealism. First, Kant’s idealism prohibits all purely rational speculation about the nature of reality beyond experience. Second, Kant remarks that transcendental idealism affirms, while Berkeley’s idealism denies, the reality of things-in-themselves. Third, Kant argues that transcendental idealism upholds, while Berkeley’s idealism undermines, the reality of objects in space outside us.

The Second Edition Refutation of Problematic Idealism

Kant added a section called “The Refutation of Idealism” in his second edition of CPR. It is here that Kant’s break with the subjectivist tradition becomes most explicit and extreme, and it is here that he makes his strongest case yet against the problematic idealism of Descartes. However this is the most controversial part of the CPR.

While appearances are representations of an object in space outside me, and so have only empirical reality, things-in-themselves are objects existing completely independently of representations, and so have transcendental reality. The problem is that if Kant tries to demonstrate only the existence of the former kind of objects, he is consistent with his transcendental idealism but he begs the question against the Cartesian skeptic, who does not doubt that we have representations of objects in space outside us. If, however, he attempts to prove the existence of the latter kind of objects, he violates the principles of transcendental idealism. Hence Kant’s Refutation is either trivial or inconsistent.

The middle path between its horns consists in Kant’s attempt to prove that we have an experience of objects in space. Experience of objects are appearances only insofar as they conform to universal and necessary rules of the understanding and the form of outer sense, which is space. The Refutation of Idealism attempts to establish the existence of an object in Kant’s own technical sense of existence or actuality: “Whatever is connected with a perception according to empirical laws is actual”.

The central thesis of the Refutation states: “The mere, but empirically determined, consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside me”. The conclusion reads: “The consciousness of my existence is at the same time an immediate consciousness of the existence of other things outside me”.

Kant and the Way of Ideas

The main thesis of the theory of ideas is that the basic objects of awareness consist in ideas. Whatever we are thinking of is an idea, so that ideas are the objects of all thought. According to the way of ideas, ideas are not only objects in conscious- ness—whatever we are aware of when we are thinking—but they are also essentially representative, standing for or referring to some object beyond themselves. They are understood as the medium by which the subject knows the world because he becomes aware of the world through them.

There were three pervasive assumptions behind the theory of ideas. First, an assumption about origins: that ideas are given to, not constructed by, the mind; this holds whether an idea is innate or acquired from experience. If it is innate, it is only a question of our reflecting upon it; and if it is empirical, it is only a matter of our receiving it. Second, an assumption about meaning: that the idea is the basic unit or bearer of meaning. All meaningful terms are either compounds of simple ideas or simple ideas themselves, each of which has a complete, self-sufficient, and unanalyzable meaning. Third, an assumption about truth: that ideas represent their objects only by virtue of some kind of similarity with or resemblance to them.

Kant uses representation to represent all forms of consciousness. Kant’s usage of ‘representation’ is also ambiguous in the same manner as ‘idea’: a representation not only has the function of standing for something else, but it can also be the object of representation.

Finally, Kant appears to accept the theory of meaning behind the way of ideas, for he often writes as if representations are basic, as if they are simply given to our sensibility, and as if they are complete in themselves, the fundamental units of all mental synthesis.

Kant denies that ideas have a self-sufficient meaning, as if they somehow represent objects by virtue of their own nature alone. It is one of Kant’s central theses in the Analytic that ideas acquire their representative status—their capacity to designate or refer to an object—only if the understanding synthesizes a manifold of sensations according to a rule.

Finally, Kant also criticizes the assumption about truth. He denies that ideas represent their objects by virtue of their similarity to them, insisting instead that they represent their objects only because they are synthesized according to rules. In a nutshell, representation consists not in resemblance to a thing but in conformity to rule. The object is distinct from its representations not by virtue of its existential or ontological status as a thing-in-itself, but by virtue of its formal or epistemological status as a synthesis of representations. Such a synthesis is not reducible to any of its individual elements because it is that which binds them together and gives each of them their representative status.

Kant still accepts the central thesis of the way of ideas: that ideas are the ultimate bearers of meaning.

Rather than reducing experience down to the level of individual consciousness, the critical philosophy makes both the subjective and objective - understood as the representations of inner and outer sense - equal and coordinate parts of a single intersubjective structure or form. This normative order is neither mental nor physical but transcendental, the necessary condition for the possibility of experience of any rational being equipped with a human sensibility.

Recognizing the normative status of the transcendental is crucial if we are to understand Kant’s attempt to solve the classical problem of knowledge. If the transcendental consists in the normative, then both the subjective and objective - the appearances of inner and outer sense—be- come parts of a single experience. The subject’s ideas correspond to its objects because the interaction of these appearances conforms to one universal and necessary structure, one common system of interconnected laws.

Like Hume, Kant appears to be saying that we cannot know our real self anymore than things outside us. After all, the subjectivist holds that we know only representations, not even the self that has them. However, Kant is not claiming that self knowledge is illusory. Here again he maintains that we have knowledge of ourselves as we have of things in space, so that self- knowledge too has empirical reality. Kant’s breaks the asymmetry of knowledge of self and knowledge of external world which was presupposed by previous philosophers like Descartes. Both consciousness of our inner states and consciousness of things in space are certain, to be sure, but they are also only of appearances.

The Transcendental Subject

For Kant, while the subjectivist is right to maintain that the existence of objects is analyzable into a set of actual and possible representations, he is wrong to claim that their essence or nature is reducible to, or is only a construction of, particular representations.

Apart from Kant’s qualified endorsement of the subjectivist principle that what we perceive are ideas, there is another even deeper subjectivist dimension to his philosophy. This appears in the fundamental principle of the Transcendental Deduction: the unity of apperception. According to this principle, the ‘I’ of the ‘I think’ is inescapable and ineliminable. Kant insists that the synthetic activity of the ‘I’ in appropriating the manifold of sensation is the source of all combination, and therefore the form of experience. This means that the form of experience is created by me, so that all appearances are only appearances for me. Of course, the ‘I’ in question here is not my personal and private self but my impersonal and public self. and these appearances are still intersubjective in the sense that they have a universal and necessary validity in conforming to the norms of the understanding, which hold for all human beings.

One interpretation of Kant’s transcendental subject is that all that the Kantian subject amounts to, on one reading, is “the global representation, the single representation within which many of the usual denizens of a system of representations are all contained,” or “a continuing interdependent system of representations.” It tries to solve the dilemma: it is neither a bundle of impressions nor a single numerically identical substance. Their middle path between these extremes is the idea of a cognitive system. The Kantian subject is then best seen as simply the entire functioning of such a system, or as some representation of such a system; in any case, it is not any entity above and beyond it.

However, there are indeed important respects in which subjectivity remains an ineliminable feature of Kant’s transcendental idealism. It is what Kant’s transcendental idealism differs from objective idealism and cognitive science. Before we explain why subjectivity is irreducible, it is necessary to raise a crucial question: In what sense is Kant’s transcendental subject subjective? Kant maintains that one distinguishing characteristic of subjectivity is self-consciousness. If self-consciousness is one defining condition of subjectivity, the transcendental subject meets this requirement. For Kant thinks that the ‘I think’ of the unity of apperception expresses self-consciousness. Another distinguishing feature of subjectivity for Kant is freedom. He understands freedom in the very specific sense of autonomy, the power to create and act according to self-given laws.

It then seems necessary to distinguish the transcendental self, which is a mere “logical subject,” from the noumenal self, which is a thing-in-itself. Although the ‘I’ of the ‘I think’ does indeed designate the noumenal subject, this principle alone does not give us grounds to know it. The ‘I’ of the unity of apperception is just the noumenal self in its transcendental role. As far as we know, it designates only “that which experiences,” and as such it is only a “logical subject”; but this does not mean that it somehow designates some new kind of subject distinct from the noumenal self.

Granted that self-consciousness and spontaneity are the distinguishing traits of subjectivity, the question still remains: What justifies Kant in attributing these characteristics to the transcendental ‘I’? The transcendental subject appears unknowable since self-knowledge means to make myself passive and determined, in order to apply categories to it. The analysis of possible experience alone gives reason to ascribe self-consciousness to the subject since the subject can have representations only if it is possible for it to be self-conscious of them. That spontaneity is a necessary condition of experience is also evident from the unity of apperception. It is only in virtue of its spontaneity, Kant contends, that the ‘I’ synthesizes its representations, and so establishes order and connection among them.

Why Kant’s subject is transcendental rather than phenomenal? One reason is spontaneity can’t be achieved in phenomenal since spontaneity means unconditioned causality but everything in phenomenal world is causally determined. Kant not only rejects Humean empiricism, which would reduce the subject to a collection of impressions, but he also repudiates Wolffian rationalism, which would make the subject into a single permanent substance. What, then, is the middle path between reduction and inflation, phenomenalism and metaphysics? The answer to these questions comes when we identify the transcendental subject with that agent that performs the roles, functions, or tasks necessary for the possibility of experience. On the hand, this subject is not simply reducible to these roles, functions, or tasks, because it is the agent behind them, that which executes them. But, on the other hand, there is no commitment to a single numerically identical and enduring substance behind this agency: there could be many numerically distinct but related selves that perform them.

The Status of the Transcendental

Concerning the objective or subjective nature of Kant’s transcendental idealism, there is no more important issue than the status of the categories themselves. We have already seen that the categories are not simply representations but the rules or norms governing representations, but how are we to interpret their extra-psychological status? Is it logical, epistemological, or metaphysical? Subjectivists have always advocated the psychological interpretation. They stress that the categories are only mental functions or faculties, so that they have no validity apart from our manner of conceiving things. The objectivists have always championed the non-psychological interpretation; but they have rarely agreed about precisely how to characterize the non-psychological status of norms. The questions concerning the status of categories raises the question about what is transcendental. Kant tells us that the transcendental concerns not objects themselves but the conditions of our a priori knowledge of objects, and that it deals with not the nature of things but the understanding that judges about the nature of things. But how are we to understand these conditions for a priori knowledge? Are they psychological, metaphysical, or logical? In some respects each of these characterizations seems to be accurate; in other respects each seems to be misleading.

  1. Metaphysical interpretation. One of the most common interpretations of the transcendental understands it in metaphysical terms, so that the categories are the intelligible structures, forms, or archetypes behind experience. This is how Kant’s categories were transformed in the late eighteenth century by the objective idealists - by Hölderlin, Schelling, and Hegel—who freed the categories from their subjective moorings and made them into Platonic or Aristotelian forms constitutive of reality itself. The objective idealists argued that the categories could not arise from the knowing subject because, as necessary conditions of experience, they precede and make possible subjectivity itself. Both the subject and the object fall within experience, so that these necessary conditions of experience cannot be conceived as either subjective or objective; rather, they belong to the realm of the intelligible or noumenal, which is neither subjective nor objective though it appears equally in both. However, if the categories are forms or archetypes, it seems as if we blatently violate Kant’s express teachings about the limits of knowledge. Also if the categories are conditions under which anything becomes an object of experience, they cannot be objects in their own right. The metaphysical interpretation is indeed unsound if its advocates claim that the categories are Platonic archetypes that exist independent of experience. But the metaphysician need not do this. His main defense of the idea is perfectly Kantian because he claims that they too can have their own transcendental deduction when they are necessary conditions of experience.

  2. The Psychological Interpretation. According to the subjectivist reading, the categories are nothing more than “laws of thought,” the necessary modes of operation of our cognitive constitution. It is precisely the psychological status of the categories, the subjectivist argues, that ensures their subjective status, their limitation to how we conceive of the world. Simply because they are normative, the categories determine the conditions for how someone ought to think rather than how they happen to think, or even how they must do so. It might be countered, however, that the Kantian categories are really not properly speaking normative at all. They could be normative only if they were imperatives; but they are imperatives only if we could somehow fail to comply with them, which is not really the case. We cannot but conform to the categories, for they are necessary to and constitutive of any possible experience. If we consider categories as rules of judgments then they do have a normative meaning since we may attempt to extend them as rules of judgment beyond their appropriate domain in possible experience. To establish the objective validity of the categories—to show that they are not only subjective necessities of our nature but true of objects of experience itself - was precisely the goal of all Kant’s labors in the Transcendental Deduction.

  3. The Logical Interpretation. The main danger of both metaphysical and psychological interpretations of the transcendental is that they fail to do full justice to Kant’s explicit definition of the transcendental: “I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects insofar as this mode is to be possible a priori”. The immediate purport of Kant’s statement is that transcendental discourse is essentially second-order, dealing not with the world itself but with our knowledge of the world. In Transcendental Analytic, Kant makes it perfectly clear that his main interest in the Transcendental Deduction is with the quid juris, the question of the justification of a principle. What the critique investigates are claims to knowledge, and that its central concern is with the justification for some of our beliefs. His central concern is not with the activities of knowing, and still less with the origins or causes of these activities, but with the truth or falsity of judgments, and more specifically synthetic a priori judgments. If we are to interpret the transcendental in the strict logical sense, then the necessary conditions of experience should determine the truth-conditions of our making more specific judgments.

Although we have to understand Kant’s transcendental discourse in essentially logical terms, and as such concerned with the truth-conditions of judgments, it does not follow that we must explain it entirely or exclusively in such terms. Indeed, there is good reason to hold that we cannot, and indeed should not, attempt to eliminate the psychological idiom of the critique.

What, in the end, gives our synthetic a priori principles an objective validity is that they apply to the objects of experience; but the only condition under which we can say this is that these objects are appearances.

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