Kant: Critique of Pure Reason
(Meiklejohn translation, Dover Books, 2003)
Let’s do this.
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The problem around which Enlightenment philosophy centered was the problem of knowledge. "How do we know?" was the essential question to be asked. Metaphysics was not, as it had been in medieval philosophy, a given, for without knowledge, understanding of the essential nature of the world, ourselves, and even God was at issue. Thus attempts were made to come about to understanding of our world through various faculties of the human understanding. The dividing line amongst the philosophers of this time we know as that between the empiricists and the rationalists. Empiricism is in many ways the start of modern science. It holds that experience gained through the senses is our only true way to achieve knowledge of the world. And it seems to be right. After all, I don’t know much if I don’t have any perceptions of things. I seem to need some sort of grip on my senses to make the world make sense. On the other side are the rationalists. Rationalism descends from the old scholastic philosophy of the middle ages and concerns itself with its ideas in general; that is, rationalism tries to use reason and logic to discover essential principles of the world and to organize all things in a way that will reveal the true form of the world. This view also has its importance. For one, the senses don’t seem to amount to much on their own. They can, after all, lie to us. Secondly, it seems that there are many things, such as knowledge of God, that only become possible through reason.
After Descartes indirectly set the terms of this debate, both sides pushed their arguments to what seemed to be their logical conclusions, and through this it was seen (though not at the time) that both sides were, in fact, magnificent failures. The empiricists ended their line with David Hume, the skeptic. The problem to be discovered was that the senses give you things, sure, but they don’t prove anything. Berkeley had found that substances outside of our perceptions were not defensible, and Hume pushed that as far as the very notion of cause and effect. Empiricism can only provide at best inductive arguments, which are not proofs. Thus, any sort of certain knowledge is lost.
One had higher hopes for the rationalists, but it was not to succeed. For reason on its own seems to take us off on flights of fancy that leave any sort of reality behind. In Leibniz one finds that each individual is a universe unto himself, a man looking into mirrors that are shaped by principles. Logic almost becomes tangible, but the reality we experience is lost in the process. God is there, but he seems almost like a buffer or an expression at this point. This is unpleasant, but not the real problem. The real problem is that pure rationalism doesn’t seem to have any contact with reality. We are isolated in a circle of terms, with no real idea why it is this way and not another, since we cannot touch reality. We seem to need some sort of plain, empty starting point, and rationalism doesn’t provide.
Enter Kant. Kant doesn’t want to take up one side or the other. His goal in the Critique of Pure Reason is to reframe the debate, for he sees a different question in need of answering than what others sought. That question is not simply about knowledge, but about metaphysics. We use reason to try and discover essential principles, but
Questions about the reality of the world force themselves upon us and we feel compelled to answer. But how do we answer them? Can we even do so? This is Kant’s question. For him metaphysics is that knowledge which by definition transcends experience, and so to discover it requires the power of a priori reasoning on its own. Thus, our goal is "a critical inquiry into the faculty of reason, with reference to the cognitions to which it strives to attain without the aid of experience; in other words, the solution regarding the question of the possibility or impossibility of Metaphysics . . . ." (ix) That is, we need a Critique of Pure Reason.
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This is the first sentence of the book, and this is the point of our departure. Rationalists can cry if they want to, but it is for Kant an established and obvious fact that we do not simply know, but we know something. This something is experience, and so requires the activity of sensory perception.
Well, so much for metaphysics. Knowledge is of experience, and the metaphysical is that which transcends experience, so we’re done. However, the book does not end on page 1, for though knowledge starts with experience, "it by no means follows that all arises out of experience." (1) Kant holds that it is possible to obtain experience through other means. But how do we achieve non-experiential knowledge? We certainly seem to 'know' things about logic and such, even if a proposition is not something I see walking down the street. But how so? The answer to this is one of the two most important words in the entire Critique: necessity. Take the popular principle, "every effect has a cause." If this is true, we need not know every instance of an effect occurring to know so, since we would already know what will happen in every case. Cause and effect, then, is necessary, and so we know will always be present. It is simultaneously universal, since it must be present in all cases. Thus finding a necessary principle can lead us to new knowledge. This is the nature of a priori principles. They "are the independent basis of the possibility of experience itself, and consequently prove their existence a priori." (3)
We have just met with another important word, possibility. An a priori principle can be necessary if it is a requirement for experience in the first place. This would seem to be a new piece of knowledge, and one that transcends experience. That the knowledge is 'new' is one requirement that must be stated here, for there exists another possibility of knowledge, analytical. Analytical is based off of the definition of a thing ("A triangle has three sides") and so is merely tautological, giving nothing new. Something that establishes the grounds for experience itself, however, is synthetical.
But back to possibility. So we know a rule that establishes the possibility of experience to be necessary. Can we think of anything that fills this description? Kant can think of two off the top of his head: time and space. All thoughts of external objects are in space. All thoughts period are in reference to time. An object thought of without space, is not an object. What would it be like, without a place in which to exist? And what would thought itself be, without the passage of time? The answer is nothing.
Two observations at this point:
1) What, then, are space and time themselves? Theoretically they are infinite (they must contain everything), nonsubstance (they precede that which has substance) things. That is to say, they are nothing. At least, nothing without things which exist within them. Time and space are absolutely beyond experience, as are all a priori transcendental conceptions. So they cannot be understood independently of some sort of sensory content. Therefore, space and time do not themselves exist, but things exist in space and time.
2) What are objects without space and time? Well, in a way, nothing. Space and time are necessary elements of every experience, and so without them there is no experience, and so we do not know of what a thing is without them. All objects perceived, even in thought, must be perceived within a spatio-temporal context. This is called the phenomenon, an object of perception. It is not a noumenon, which is a 'pure' object, that is, an object before it falls under our necessary principles such as space and time. This means that, while a priori conceptions are nothing without sensory experience, sensory experience is nothing without a priori conceptions. That means that empiricism and rationalism are, in fact, both right. Experience and reason are needed, as they form two parts of a whole, the name of which is experience. In summary:
"Space and Time, as the necessary conditions of all our external and internal experience, are merely subjective conditions of our intuitions, in relation to which all objects are mere phenomena, and not things in themselves, presented to us in this particular manner." (39)
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At this point a question might present itself: "What exactly are we aiming for here? What I mean is, what is reason doing in bringing conceptions under space and time?" The first answer is that it has to in order to experience anything. But that’s not really answering the question, as the question is asking for what we do this. The goal, like before, is that of knowledge. We want to be able to know things. Now, how exactly do we know things?
Take any knowledge claim. "John is in the bar." What does this mean? We have two elements, the subject "John" and the predicate "being in the bar". In our proposition, the subject John is held as having the predicate of being in the bar. Thus we have taken two separate conceptions and placed them together. Since the predicate of being in the bar is not in John by definition, this is a synthetical judgment. While this synthesis is brought about by the sensory perception of seeing John in the bar, metaphysical questions cannot involve experience, and so a metaphysical claim would have to be a priori. This is what is so important about synthetical a priori judgments. The give us knowledge by bringing together separate conceptions through means of some sort of third connecting conception. In other words, the goal of synthetic a priori judgments is unity. The conceptions are brought together by an a priori connecting principle, which is itself valid because it is necessary. So, the objects of experience are not related by definition, but are connected through the necessary principles of space and time. The ability to bring together these conceptions is called the faculty of judgment, and "all judgments, accordingly, are functions of unity in our representations . . . (where) many possible cognitions are collected into one." (55)
The goal of reason, then, is in fact unity. But this unity does not stop at space and time. Far, far more is included under the list of necessary connecting principles. The most famous example is that of the categories of quantity, quality, relation, and modality. The categories are principles of the understanding which place all objects of experience under one of three conceptions. For example, the category of quantity places things either under unity, plurality, or totality. Either something is one, it is many, or it is the unity of one and many (where the many is the whole). The objective of the categories is the synthesis of the objects of experience, whereby they become phenomena, which are able to be placed as knowledge.
Let us take an example. Take any object. On its own it is nothing. It has yet to have any designation. Therefore we cannot say what it 'is', and so have no knowledge of it. It is noumenon. Yet that object now falls within space and time. We can say it is somewhere, that it is there at a certain time. Let us also place it under the categories. Now it is a united thing, part of real things, etc. Now we can say more about it. However, it is no longer a noumenon, since noumenon are not designated as being anything, for they exist before and without designations. The thing is now a phenomenon, but it is also something that can be known. We can have knowledge.
Thus knowledge of an object requires synthesis of something (Kant calls it a manifold of tuition, we can call it a mass of sense experience) under given a priori conceptions. "Synthesis is that by which alone the elements of our cognitions are collected and united into a certain context . . . ." (60) But we have yet to see just how far the rabbit hole goes. We know now that the objects we perceive are not in fact things 'in themselves', but are masses of sense experience grouped together under categories and other principles for purposes of unity. But what about the phenomena themselves? A bunch of independent phenomena floating around won’t make any more sense than before. They must be united under something as well. That something is the self.
"I think, therefore I am." So said Descartes. But what does that mean? Who am I? When I think of myself, I think of – what? Do I know myself purely as myself? In fact, I cannot. I only know myself as a series of memories of experiences, as actions taken, and so on. But these are all united under space and time. Thus "we cognize our own subject only as phenomenon, and not as it is in itself." (90) It is a synthesis itself. To what end? Knowledge. Knowledge doesn’t exist on its own. It requires a subject. And so "it is the unity of consciousness alone that constitutes the possibility of representations relating to an object, and therefore of their objective validity, and of their becoming cognitions, and consequently, the possibility of the existence of the understanding itself." (79) That is to say, a knowing subject is necessary. Now if you’ve been keeping track, necessary things have tended to be not objects proven valid by experience, but principles. The self, as much as we might tend to think otherwise, is the same. The self is a principle that allows experience. Our experience of it is like our experience of space or time; we have knowledge of things within ourselves, namely our actions and thoughts, but knowledge of ourselves does not exist without those contents. Thus I am necessary unity, my goal being knowledge gained through the synthesis of the senses under principles, and those principles under the principle of myself.
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We have conducted a deductive search into the nature of synthetic a priori knowledge, and found it to consist by definition in the unity of sense and of principles. Now we must ask ourselves what this means for the knowledge of things which is known as metaphysics. We know we can have synthetic a priori knowledge. It is to be found in necessary principles of the understanding and of reason. But are these what we are looking for when we do metaphysics?
The answer is no. The reason is that these principles cannot transcend experience, for even though they themselves are not parts of experience, neither can they exist without it. "All principles of the pure understanding are nothing more than a priori principles of the possibility of experience, and to experience alone to all a priori synthetical propositions apply and relate . . . ." (156) Though they are transcendent in a sense, they are not themselves free of experience. They are a part of it. Furthermore, synthetic a priori principles themselves are nothing: "A conception which contains a synthesis must be regarded as empty and without reference to an object, if its synthesis does not belong to experience." (143) So any sort of transcendent thing, be it a principle or conception of any kind, will not be purely transcendental for it requires some sort of experience, and experience is nothing without some sort of sensual content.
In that case, what are the objects which we traditionally consider as being parts of metaphysics? For example, what about God? God certainly seems to be the idea of a thing. God is the greatest thing. It is the source of all that is, the first cause, the infinite, the perfect, etc. We have a long philosophical history of giving various attributes to God. Kant, in discussing God, himself gives us a statement not only of God’s possibility, but of his necessity: "We cannot do without the existence of a necessary being." The idea itself is supposed to be composed of necessity in some sense, so it has to exist, correct?
No. Remember, necessity is only necessity, nothing more. Space and time are also necessary, but that does not give them any sort of concrete existence. Thus Kant’s engagement of the ontological argument accuses it of what I will call a transcendental fallacy: it goes from a phenomenal requirement to noumenal existence, something which cannot be allowed. What does this mean? God is a necessary being. Let’s grant that. Let’s also grant that all the things in the world need a reason to exist and not be nothing. Let’s even grant that the chain of causes and effects needs a first cause. Fine, proof of God. But what is this proof based upon? It is based upon necessity, which, if you are keeping track, only exists in the phenomenal sphere.
Thus the proof for God’s existence is perfectly valid according to the rules of phenomenon, but the actual existence of things is based upon the noumenal world, a place that precedes our rules and where therefore they don’t apply. So we can say that the ontological argument is valid in our experience, that it is even necessary for it to be so, but that does not prove God’s existence, because an argument is based off of assumptions that shape what we already see, and that we cannot place into things that exist in themselves (which God can only be, since an experience of an infinite or all-powerful being we have never had).
There is a better way of enforcing the attack on the ontological argument than simply throwing God into the noumenal world. This is the antimony of pure reason. Antimonies of pure reason are two contradictory propositions of pure reason that are both equally valid. In other words, two contradictory truths are both true (technically they are both false, but we will get into that presently). How is this possible? Because they are both necessary. For the argument of God as first cause, the antimonies (or my shortened versions of them) are roughly like this:
1) Everything has a cause. If everything has a cause, every cause has a cause, and that has a cause, and so on, and so on, to infinity. Now, an infinite chain of causes is inconceivable. If that were so an infinite time would have to have passed from then to now in time. But any further time would be greater than infinity, which is impossible (and further, how could infinite time have elapsed to get to this point?). Thus there must have been a first cause.
2) Everything has a cause. This is a necessary law of nature. If a first cause existed, it would itself be uncaused. But this is impossible, as all things have a cause (God doesn’t just wink in out of nowhere, that is nonsensical. To say otherwise throws all knowledge out, as cause and effect, perhaps the most important law of nature, is not empty as a law.). Thus There is no first cause.
Arguments of pure reason "can neither find confirmation nor confutation in experience; and each is in itself not only self-consistent, but possesses conditions of necessity in the very nature of reason – only that, unluckily, there exist just as valid and necessary grounds for maintaining the contrary proposition." (239) Without any actual experience to give one hypothesis the edge over the other, both arguments fall together, leaving us nowhere. This will always happen when reason oversteps its bounds and tries to assert things about transcendental objects based upon transcendental laws, simply because necessity does not line up with or even truthfully imply existence. "The question, what is the constitution of a transcendental object, is unanswerable – we are unable to say what it is; but we can perceive that the question itself is nothing." (271) That is, the question is not about anything that can be understood, since it is about something that is by its very nature noumenal, and so knowledge of it is impossible. Such goes for all transcendental objects. Such goes for the study of those objects, metaphysics.
But then, what are the principles of reason, those synthetic a priori judgments and principles and whatnot that we use to structure our thoughts? They are not objects, that much we have proven to excess. They are only what we have called them all along: rules. Synthetic a priori truths such as time, space, substance, cause, etc. "can have nothing else for their aim, than the conditions of the unity of empirical cognition in the synthesis of phenomena." (124) We receive sense, and the mind applies its forms to it, like a brick wall where the principles are mortar and the sensory data bricks. Alone it is just bricks and mortar, and no wall exists. But together, the bricks make up the surface of a standing wall with the mortar uniting them and giving shape to the surface. The wall then stands, the picture of a phenomenal object. This wall is combined with other wall with other bonding agents different in content but similar in form and goal. Thus the walls are erected, and up stands the fortress of the human being. This is the working of the mind, and the principles that transcend experience are nothing more than mortar, the rules by which experience works. Thus "the proud name of an Ontology . . . must give place to the modest title of an analytic of the pure understanding." (161), and thus "pure reason . . . is found, when examined, to contain nothing but regulative principles." (393)
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I think I have done a sufficient job of giving an idea of the mission of Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. At least, for a blog. A full account of Kant could never be shorter than book length, as his thought was incredibly vast even in this one work. I spent no time detailing the structure and hierarchy of reason, the proofs of transcendental principles, the antimonies of reason outside of God (which are quite fascinating), and I completely ignored the “Doctrine of Method”, which outlined the future of philosophy and metaphysics after the Critique had redefined the whole field. And it is no understatement to say it redefined everything. Kant, and this book in particular, is the closest thing philosophy ever had to a period at the end of a sentence. Even now I find his writing has a convincing power I see rarely in works of any kind. Thus to anyone who is serious about philosophy I can only recommend reading this book. It is dry, it is epically technical, and Kant does not spare any details. But it is also powerful, compelling, and for its time, a step not only forward but out of the view of anyone around.
Coming up next: this.
Let’s do this.
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The problem around which Enlightenment philosophy centered was the problem of knowledge. "How do we know?" was the essential question to be asked. Metaphysics was not, as it had been in medieval philosophy, a given, for without knowledge, understanding of the essential nature of the world, ourselves, and even God was at issue. Thus attempts were made to come about to understanding of our world through various faculties of the human understanding. The dividing line amongst the philosophers of this time we know as that between the empiricists and the rationalists. Empiricism is in many ways the start of modern science. It holds that experience gained through the senses is our only true way to achieve knowledge of the world. And it seems to be right. After all, I don’t know much if I don’t have any perceptions of things. I seem to need some sort of grip on my senses to make the world make sense. On the other side are the rationalists. Rationalism descends from the old scholastic philosophy of the middle ages and concerns itself with its ideas in general; that is, rationalism tries to use reason and logic to discover essential principles of the world and to organize all things in a way that will reveal the true form of the world. This view also has its importance. For one, the senses don’t seem to amount to much on their own. They can, after all, lie to us. Secondly, it seems that there are many things, such as knowledge of God, that only become possible through reason.
After Descartes indirectly set the terms of this debate, both sides pushed their arguments to what seemed to be their logical conclusions, and through this it was seen (though not at the time) that both sides were, in fact, magnificent failures. The empiricists ended their line with David Hume, the skeptic. The problem to be discovered was that the senses give you things, sure, but they don’t prove anything. Berkeley had found that substances outside of our perceptions were not defensible, and Hume pushed that as far as the very notion of cause and effect. Empiricism can only provide at best inductive arguments, which are not proofs. Thus, any sort of certain knowledge is lost.
One had higher hopes for the rationalists, but it was not to succeed. For reason on its own seems to take us off on flights of fancy that leave any sort of reality behind. In Leibniz one finds that each individual is a universe unto himself, a man looking into mirrors that are shaped by principles. Logic almost becomes tangible, but the reality we experience is lost in the process. God is there, but he seems almost like a buffer or an expression at this point. This is unpleasant, but not the real problem. The real problem is that pure rationalism doesn’t seem to have any contact with reality. We are isolated in a circle of terms, with no real idea why it is this way and not another, since we cannot touch reality. We seem to need some sort of plain, empty starting point, and rationalism doesn’t provide.
Enter Kant. Kant doesn’t want to take up one side or the other. His goal in the Critique of Pure Reason is to reframe the debate, for he sees a different question in need of answering than what others sought. That question is not simply about knowledge, but about metaphysics. We use reason to try and discover essential principles, but
its labors must remain ever incomplete, because new questions never cease to present themselves; and thus it finds itself compelled to have recourse to principles which transcend the region of experience . . . . The area of these endless contests is called metaphysic. (vii)
Questions about the reality of the world force themselves upon us and we feel compelled to answer. But how do we answer them? Can we even do so? This is Kant’s question. For him metaphysics is that knowledge which by definition transcends experience, and so to discover it requires the power of a priori reasoning on its own. Thus, our goal is "a critical inquiry into the faculty of reason, with reference to the cognitions to which it strives to attain without the aid of experience; in other words, the solution regarding the question of the possibility or impossibility of Metaphysics . . . ." (ix) That is, we need a Critique of Pure Reason.
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That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. (1)
This is the first sentence of the book, and this is the point of our departure. Rationalists can cry if they want to, but it is for Kant an established and obvious fact that we do not simply know, but we know something. This something is experience, and so requires the activity of sensory perception.
Well, so much for metaphysics. Knowledge is of experience, and the metaphysical is that which transcends experience, so we’re done. However, the book does not end on page 1, for though knowledge starts with experience, "it by no means follows that all arises out of experience." (1) Kant holds that it is possible to obtain experience through other means. But how do we achieve non-experiential knowledge? We certainly seem to 'know' things about logic and such, even if a proposition is not something I see walking down the street. But how so? The answer to this is one of the two most important words in the entire Critique: necessity. Take the popular principle, "every effect has a cause." If this is true, we need not know every instance of an effect occurring to know so, since we would already know what will happen in every case. Cause and effect, then, is necessary, and so we know will always be present. It is simultaneously universal, since it must be present in all cases. Thus finding a necessary principle can lead us to new knowledge. This is the nature of a priori principles. They "are the independent basis of the possibility of experience itself, and consequently prove their existence a priori." (3)
We have just met with another important word, possibility. An a priori principle can be necessary if it is a requirement for experience in the first place. This would seem to be a new piece of knowledge, and one that transcends experience. That the knowledge is 'new' is one requirement that must be stated here, for there exists another possibility of knowledge, analytical. Analytical is based off of the definition of a thing ("A triangle has three sides") and so is merely tautological, giving nothing new. Something that establishes the grounds for experience itself, however, is synthetical.
But back to possibility. So we know a rule that establishes the possibility of experience to be necessary. Can we think of anything that fills this description? Kant can think of two off the top of his head: time and space. All thoughts of external objects are in space. All thoughts period are in reference to time. An object thought of without space, is not an object. What would it be like, without a place in which to exist? And what would thought itself be, without the passage of time? The answer is nothing.
Two observations at this point:
1) What, then, are space and time themselves? Theoretically they are infinite (they must contain everything), nonsubstance (they precede that which has substance) things. That is to say, they are nothing. At least, nothing without things which exist within them. Time and space are absolutely beyond experience, as are all a priori transcendental conceptions. So they cannot be understood independently of some sort of sensory content. Therefore, space and time do not themselves exist, but things exist in space and time.
2) What are objects without space and time? Well, in a way, nothing. Space and time are necessary elements of every experience, and so without them there is no experience, and so we do not know of what a thing is without them. All objects perceived, even in thought, must be perceived within a spatio-temporal context. This is called the phenomenon, an object of perception. It is not a noumenon, which is a 'pure' object, that is, an object before it falls under our necessary principles such as space and time. This means that, while a priori conceptions are nothing without sensory experience, sensory experience is nothing without a priori conceptions. That means that empiricism and rationalism are, in fact, both right. Experience and reason are needed, as they form two parts of a whole, the name of which is experience. In summary:
"Space and Time, as the necessary conditions of all our external and internal experience, are merely subjective conditions of our intuitions, in relation to which all objects are mere phenomena, and not things in themselves, presented to us in this particular manner." (39)
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At this point a question might present itself: "What exactly are we aiming for here? What I mean is, what is reason doing in bringing conceptions under space and time?" The first answer is that it has to in order to experience anything. But that’s not really answering the question, as the question is asking for what we do this. The goal, like before, is that of knowledge. We want to be able to know things. Now, how exactly do we know things?
Take any knowledge claim. "John is in the bar." What does this mean? We have two elements, the subject "John" and the predicate "being in the bar". In our proposition, the subject John is held as having the predicate of being in the bar. Thus we have taken two separate conceptions and placed them together. Since the predicate of being in the bar is not in John by definition, this is a synthetical judgment. While this synthesis is brought about by the sensory perception of seeing John in the bar, metaphysical questions cannot involve experience, and so a metaphysical claim would have to be a priori. This is what is so important about synthetical a priori judgments. The give us knowledge by bringing together separate conceptions through means of some sort of third connecting conception. In other words, the goal of synthetic a priori judgments is unity. The conceptions are brought together by an a priori connecting principle, which is itself valid because it is necessary. So, the objects of experience are not related by definition, but are connected through the necessary principles of space and time. The ability to bring together these conceptions is called the faculty of judgment, and "all judgments, accordingly, are functions of unity in our representations . . . (where) many possible cognitions are collected into one." (55)
The goal of reason, then, is in fact unity. But this unity does not stop at space and time. Far, far more is included under the list of necessary connecting principles. The most famous example is that of the categories of quantity, quality, relation, and modality. The categories are principles of the understanding which place all objects of experience under one of three conceptions. For example, the category of quantity places things either under unity, plurality, or totality. Either something is one, it is many, or it is the unity of one and many (where the many is the whole). The objective of the categories is the synthesis of the objects of experience, whereby they become phenomena, which are able to be placed as knowledge.
Let us take an example. Take any object. On its own it is nothing. It has yet to have any designation. Therefore we cannot say what it 'is', and so have no knowledge of it. It is noumenon. Yet that object now falls within space and time. We can say it is somewhere, that it is there at a certain time. Let us also place it under the categories. Now it is a united thing, part of real things, etc. Now we can say more about it. However, it is no longer a noumenon, since noumenon are not designated as being anything, for they exist before and without designations. The thing is now a phenomenon, but it is also something that can be known. We can have knowledge.
Thus knowledge of an object requires synthesis of something (Kant calls it a manifold of tuition, we can call it a mass of sense experience) under given a priori conceptions. "Synthesis is that by which alone the elements of our cognitions are collected and united into a certain context . . . ." (60) But we have yet to see just how far the rabbit hole goes. We know now that the objects we perceive are not in fact things 'in themselves', but are masses of sense experience grouped together under categories and other principles for purposes of unity. But what about the phenomena themselves? A bunch of independent phenomena floating around won’t make any more sense than before. They must be united under something as well. That something is the self.
"I think, therefore I am." So said Descartes. But what does that mean? Who am I? When I think of myself, I think of – what? Do I know myself purely as myself? In fact, I cannot. I only know myself as a series of memories of experiences, as actions taken, and so on. But these are all united under space and time. Thus "we cognize our own subject only as phenomenon, and not as it is in itself." (90) It is a synthesis itself. To what end? Knowledge. Knowledge doesn’t exist on its own. It requires a subject. And so "it is the unity of consciousness alone that constitutes the possibility of representations relating to an object, and therefore of their objective validity, and of their becoming cognitions, and consequently, the possibility of the existence of the understanding itself." (79) That is to say, a knowing subject is necessary. Now if you’ve been keeping track, necessary things have tended to be not objects proven valid by experience, but principles. The self, as much as we might tend to think otherwise, is the same. The self is a principle that allows experience. Our experience of it is like our experience of space or time; we have knowledge of things within ourselves, namely our actions and thoughts, but knowledge of ourselves does not exist without those contents. Thus I am necessary unity, my goal being knowledge gained through the synthesis of the senses under principles, and those principles under the principle of myself.
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We have conducted a deductive search into the nature of synthetic a priori knowledge, and found it to consist by definition in the unity of sense and of principles. Now we must ask ourselves what this means for the knowledge of things which is known as metaphysics. We know we can have synthetic a priori knowledge. It is to be found in necessary principles of the understanding and of reason. But are these what we are looking for when we do metaphysics?
The answer is no. The reason is that these principles cannot transcend experience, for even though they themselves are not parts of experience, neither can they exist without it. "All principles of the pure understanding are nothing more than a priori principles of the possibility of experience, and to experience alone to all a priori synthetical propositions apply and relate . . . ." (156) Though they are transcendent in a sense, they are not themselves free of experience. They are a part of it. Furthermore, synthetic a priori principles themselves are nothing: "A conception which contains a synthesis must be regarded as empty and without reference to an object, if its synthesis does not belong to experience." (143) So any sort of transcendent thing, be it a principle or conception of any kind, will not be purely transcendental for it requires some sort of experience, and experience is nothing without some sort of sensual content.
In that case, what are the objects which we traditionally consider as being parts of metaphysics? For example, what about God? God certainly seems to be the idea of a thing. God is the greatest thing. It is the source of all that is, the first cause, the infinite, the perfect, etc. We have a long philosophical history of giving various attributes to God. Kant, in discussing God, himself gives us a statement not only of God’s possibility, but of his necessity: "We cannot do without the existence of a necessary being." The idea itself is supposed to be composed of necessity in some sense, so it has to exist, correct?
No. Remember, necessity is only necessity, nothing more. Space and time are also necessary, but that does not give them any sort of concrete existence. Thus Kant’s engagement of the ontological argument accuses it of what I will call a transcendental fallacy: it goes from a phenomenal requirement to noumenal existence, something which cannot be allowed. What does this mean? God is a necessary being. Let’s grant that. Let’s also grant that all the things in the world need a reason to exist and not be nothing. Let’s even grant that the chain of causes and effects needs a first cause. Fine, proof of God. But what is this proof based upon? It is based upon necessity, which, if you are keeping track, only exists in the phenomenal sphere.
[T]he conceptions of reality, substance, causality, nay, even that of necessity in existence, have no significance out of the sphere of empirical cognition, and cannot, beyond that sphere, determine any object. (379)
Thus the proof for God’s existence is perfectly valid according to the rules of phenomenon, but the actual existence of things is based upon the noumenal world, a place that precedes our rules and where therefore they don’t apply. So we can say that the ontological argument is valid in our experience, that it is even necessary for it to be so, but that does not prove God’s existence, because an argument is based off of assumptions that shape what we already see, and that we cannot place into things that exist in themselves (which God can only be, since an experience of an infinite or all-powerful being we have never had).
There is a better way of enforcing the attack on the ontological argument than simply throwing God into the noumenal world. This is the antimony of pure reason. Antimonies of pure reason are two contradictory propositions of pure reason that are both equally valid. In other words, two contradictory truths are both true (technically they are both false, but we will get into that presently). How is this possible? Because they are both necessary. For the argument of God as first cause, the antimonies (or my shortened versions of them) are roughly like this:
1) Everything has a cause. If everything has a cause, every cause has a cause, and that has a cause, and so on, and so on, to infinity. Now, an infinite chain of causes is inconceivable. If that were so an infinite time would have to have passed from then to now in time. But any further time would be greater than infinity, which is impossible (and further, how could infinite time have elapsed to get to this point?). Thus there must have been a first cause.
2) Everything has a cause. This is a necessary law of nature. If a first cause existed, it would itself be uncaused. But this is impossible, as all things have a cause (God doesn’t just wink in out of nowhere, that is nonsensical. To say otherwise throws all knowledge out, as cause and effect, perhaps the most important law of nature, is not empty as a law.). Thus There is no first cause.
Arguments of pure reason "can neither find confirmation nor confutation in experience; and each is in itself not only self-consistent, but possesses conditions of necessity in the very nature of reason – only that, unluckily, there exist just as valid and necessary grounds for maintaining the contrary proposition." (239) Without any actual experience to give one hypothesis the edge over the other, both arguments fall together, leaving us nowhere. This will always happen when reason oversteps its bounds and tries to assert things about transcendental objects based upon transcendental laws, simply because necessity does not line up with or even truthfully imply existence. "The question, what is the constitution of a transcendental object, is unanswerable – we are unable to say what it is; but we can perceive that the question itself is nothing." (271) That is, the question is not about anything that can be understood, since it is about something that is by its very nature noumenal, and so knowledge of it is impossible. Such goes for all transcendental objects. Such goes for the study of those objects, metaphysics.
But then, what are the principles of reason, those synthetic a priori judgments and principles and whatnot that we use to structure our thoughts? They are not objects, that much we have proven to excess. They are only what we have called them all along: rules. Synthetic a priori truths such as time, space, substance, cause, etc. "can have nothing else for their aim, than the conditions of the unity of empirical cognition in the synthesis of phenomena." (124) We receive sense, and the mind applies its forms to it, like a brick wall where the principles are mortar and the sensory data bricks. Alone it is just bricks and mortar, and no wall exists. But together, the bricks make up the surface of a standing wall with the mortar uniting them and giving shape to the surface. The wall then stands, the picture of a phenomenal object. This wall is combined with other wall with other bonding agents different in content but similar in form and goal. Thus the walls are erected, and up stands the fortress of the human being. This is the working of the mind, and the principles that transcend experience are nothing more than mortar, the rules by which experience works. Thus "the proud name of an Ontology . . . must give place to the modest title of an analytic of the pure understanding." (161), and thus "pure reason . . . is found, when examined, to contain nothing but regulative principles." (393)
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I think I have done a sufficient job of giving an idea of the mission of Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. At least, for a blog. A full account of Kant could never be shorter than book length, as his thought was incredibly vast even in this one work. I spent no time detailing the structure and hierarchy of reason, the proofs of transcendental principles, the antimonies of reason outside of God (which are quite fascinating), and I completely ignored the “Doctrine of Method”, which outlined the future of philosophy and metaphysics after the Critique had redefined the whole field. And it is no understatement to say it redefined everything. Kant, and this book in particular, is the closest thing philosophy ever had to a period at the end of a sentence. Even now I find his writing has a convincing power I see rarely in works of any kind. Thus to anyone who is serious about philosophy I can only recommend reading this book. It is dry, it is epically technical, and Kant does not spare any details. But it is also powerful, compelling, and for its time, a step not only forward but out of the view of anyone around.
Coming up next: this.
posted by Derek at 7:12 PM
1 Comments:
This is an amazing paper and will be of great use for my project. I love your blog; it's very helpful.
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