7. PHILOSOPHY AS CRITIQUE The last philosopher whose ideas on metaphysics we will consider in this first part of our course is a man whose influence on the last two hundred years of philosophy, both in the west and in the east, can hardly be underestimated. He is almost universally recognized as being the greatest philosopher since Aristotle: a thinker whose ideas one must either accept or refute, but who cannot be ignored. Indeed, some have claimed, with justification, that philosophy in the past two hundred years has been like a series of footnotes to this man's writings! Others have observed that his philosophical system is to the modern world what Aristotle's was for the medieval world, a virtual intellectual reference system. Like Aristotle, he wrote on nearly every philosophical subject and his ideas produced an immediate and lasting effect on the way people think--philosophers and non-philosophers. Although today we will be looking only at those aspects of his philosophy related most closely to metaphysics, we will return to this thinker several times later in the course. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was born into a working class family in the Prussian port city of Knigsberg (now Kaliningrad). He lived a quiet, regulated life, never marrying and never travelling more than about thirty miles from his birthplace during his entire life. Kant is often the subject of some rather unfair caricatures, such as that his daily routine was so rigid that his neighbors found they could set their clocks by his daily comings and goings! However, I prefer to regard such stories as reflecting the integrity of a life lived in accordance with one's own ideas. For as we shall see, Kant's idea of philosophy was that it ought to be a systematic whole, governed by regular patterns of interrelated ideas. When he died, the epitaph on his tomb simply said "The Philosopher"--an appropriate title, considering that the philosophical cycle which began with Socrates reached its fulfillment, to a large extent, with Kant. Kant was motivated to conceive a new philosophical method for much the same reason as Descartes: he asked himself why other sciences have progressed, but metaphysics has not. Yet his answer to this question not only ignored the whole mind-body problem, but also called into question another of Descartes' key contributions: namely, his belief in the absolute objectivity of the external world. Kant asked a new question: was Descartes (and most other philosophers) right to assume that the objects we experience and come to know are things in themselves? The term "thing in itself" is a technical term he used to talk about the nature of ultimate reality; it means "the things in the world, considered apart from the conditions which make it possible to know anything about them". Given this definition, Kant claimed, things in themselves must be unknowable. In stark contrast to Descartes, who required his starting point to be an absolutely certain item of knowledge, Kant posited a philosophical faith in the reality of unknowable things in themselves as the starting point of his system. This is just one of many ways in which Descartes and Kant are diametrically opposed to each other in their philosophical methods. Kant called his own way of philosophizing the "critical" method. The titles of the three main books in which he developed his system each begin with the word "critique". Each book adopts what we could call a different "standpoint", which means it addresses all its questions with a particular end in view. The first Critique (of Pure Reason), which we will be looking at today, assumes a theoretical standpoint. This means the answers to all the questions it asks are concerned with our knowledge. The other Critiques, as we shall see later on, sometimes answer the same questions in different ways, because they assume a different standpoint. Recognizing the differences between these standpoints is therefore crucial for a proper understanding of Kant's philosophy. We can picture the interrelationships between the three parts of Kant's System in the following way: [Figure 7.1: Kant's Critiques and Their Standpoints] The Critical method is, in fact, a new form of the Socratic method. For just as Socrates' main concern was to examine thoroughly himself and others in the search for wisdom, Kant's Critical method requires the self-examination of reason itself. In other words, a true "critique", for Kant, is a process by which reason asks itself about the extent and limits of its own powers. The purpose of such self-examination is to discover once and for all the boundary between what human reason can and cannot achieve. In each case the "knowledge" we gain of the boundary line informs us about what Kant called the "transcendental conditions" for empirical knowledge. Hence, his Critical method requires "transcendental reflection", which simply means thinking about the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. Something transcendental is something that must be true, otherwise our experience itself would be impossible. Whatever is outside the boundary, Kant called "transcendent": since we can never have any experience of such things, called "noumena", they can never be known by human reason. But whatever is inside the boundary line defines the things open to discovery by ordinary, "empirical reflection". Kant called such empirically knowable objects "phenomena". This distinction between the empirical, the transcendent, and the transcendental perspectives, as shown in Figure 7.2, is one of the most important distinctions in Kant's entire theoretical system. In each of his three Critiques, Kant performed a distinct type of self- examination of reason: he searched, respectively, for the boundaries between what we can and cannot know (theoretical), between what we ought and ought not to do (practical), and between what we may and may not hope (judicial). He said these three concerns can be summarized as an attempt to understand who man is. Hence, he used the four questions listed in Figure 7.3 to describe the systematic relationship between the different parts of his own philosophical project. It is important to keep in mind the relationships between these four questions whenever we discuss Kant, because he himself warned that in order to understand his ideas properly, the reader must have an "idea of the whole". [Figure 7.2: Kant's Transcendental Boundary] Kant's new method requires us to see the truth in both extremes in any debate, to recognize the ways in which each limits the other, and as a result, to adopt a standpoint which affirms the legitimate points from both sides. Thus, for example, whereas Descartes' metaphysics, as I hope you recall from the last lecture, assumes both Plato and Aristotle are wrong, Kant's assumes both are right (see Figure 7.4). According to Kant, their mistake, like that of most other western philosophers, was to ignore their opponent's point of view, and adopt an extreme position that ends up expressing only half the truth. If Kant's view of things in themselves is correct, then Plato was right to say objects of experience are mere appearances of a thing in itself; for in saying this, he was adopting Kant's "transcendental" perspective. Likewise, Aristotle was right to say appearances are the true objects of science (i.e., knowledge); for in saying this, he was adopting Kant's "empirical" perspective. In both cases their mistakes were caused by the fact that they had not yet recognized their ignorance of the thing in itself. This neglect is what led Plato mistakenly to believe we could attain absolute knowledge of mere ideas and it is what led Aristotle mistakenly to believe substances are the ultimate reality. So the Critical method encourages us not only to synthesize Plato's idealism and Aristotle's realism, but also to explain both the truth in each, which has kept them alive for so long, and the errors which made them inherently unsatisfactory. Let us now investigate how Kant accomplished this task. [Figure 7.3: Kant's Four Philosophical Questions] [Figure 7.4: Descartes vs. Kant on Plato and Aristotle] In the second edition Preface to the first Critique, Kant turned to the established sciences in hopes of finding clues to their success. Logic, he found, could become an exact science only when its field of inquiry was clearly limited (p.18). Mathematics made progress only when people began to search for the necessary and universal characteristics which we read into mathematical objects, instead of paying attention only to their accidental characteristics (p.19). And natural sciences succeed only when they proceed according to some predetermined plan (p.20). Armed with these hints, Kant turned to one particular scientist, whose daring insight profoundly changed the way we view the universe, in order to gain one final clue. Nicolaus Copernicas (1473-1543) was a Polish astronomer who dared to question the long-standing assumption that the earth is a flat disk located at the center of the universe. This assumption, he believed, had prevented anyone from explaining why some planets appear to reverse their motion as they travel through the sky from night to night, and then reverse again to continue travelling in the direction of the stars. So he decided to experiment with the assumption that the sun is actually in the center of the universe, and the earth and other planets are all round balls that revolve around the sun. Using this new assumption, he found he could explain mathematically how all the planets in reality always move in the same circular orbit, even though they appear to change directions from the vantage point of earthly observers. Kant suggested we should try a similar experiment with metaphysics (see Figure 7.5). Not only had philosophers in the past nearly always assumed things in themselves are knowable, but they had also assumed our knowledge must conform itself to these objects, rather than vice versa. Why not experiment with the opposite assumption? Perhaps in metaphysics, just as in astronomy, the correct description of what appears to be true is different from the correct description of what is true in reality. In other words, Kant proposed that for metaphysics it may be more accurate to say objects conform themselves to the knowledge of the subject (i.e., to the human mind)! [Figure 7.4: Descartes vs. Kant on Plato and Aristotle] [Figure 7.5: Kant's Copernican Revolution] This new "transcendental perspective" might sound quite strange. How could it make any sense to say, for example, that my knowledge of this piece of chalk depends not on the chalk itself but on my own mind? According to our ordinary (empirical) wayof thinking, it is obvious that my knowledge that this chalk is white comes not from any invention of my mind, but from the plain fact, which we can all observe, that this chalk appears to us to be white. Kant never denies that this is true. What he denies is that such appearances have anything to do with metaphysics; instead, such considerations are under the domain of physics and the other sciences. Kant's point was that there is another, equally legitimate way of thinking about objects, which reveals a deeper, transcendental reality, and that when we think in this way, when we think about what is necessarily true about our experience of this piece of chalk, then it will turn out that these elements in our knowledge come from our mind, not from the object itself. The empirical and transcendental should therefore be regarded as two sides of the same coin, two perspectives, both of which present true, but limited ways of viewing the real world. What then are these transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience, these absolutely necessary elements which Kant claimed form the boundary line between our possible knowledge and our necessary ignorance? The first half of the Critique of Pure Reason attempts to discover and prove the necessary validity of a set of these conditions. In the process of fulfilling this task, Kant argued that all empirical knowledge is made up of two elements: intuitions and concepts. An intuition is anything that is "given" to our purposes, we can think of "intuition" as referring to "the way our sensation operates". A concept is a word or thought through which we actively organize our intuitions according to various rules of thinking. Kant attempted to prove that space and time are the transcendental "forms of intuition" and a special set of twelve categories are the transcendental "forms of conception". The categories are arranged in four groups of three, under the headings "quantity", "quality", "relation", and "modality", as shown in Figure 7.6. We will discover in Part Two how the logical form of this set of categories is derived. But at this point, it is more important to understand the function of these categories, together with their counterpart forms of intuition, space and time. [Figure 7.6: Kant's Twelvefold Division of Categories] In order to avoid misunderstanding Kant's theory of the forms of intuition and conception, we must be careful to clarify, when asking a question such as "How is it possible for me to know anything about this piece of chalk?", whether this is an empirical or a transcendental question. If it is the latter, then, according to Kant, the answer is that our own minds impose upon this object a framework of time and space, through which we are able to perceive its existence, and a framework of categories, through which we are able to think about its nature. I think we would all agree that if this piece of chalk did not appear to us in space and time, then we could never perceive it, and that we require a concept ("chalk"), together with numerous general rules our thinking must follow, in order for us to gain any knowledge of this (or any other) perception. (Examining such rules of thinking will be one of our main tasks in Part Two of this course.) Kant's most controversial claim was that these two necessary conditions for knowledge are impossible to explain unless we regard them as rooted in the human mind itself. Since philosophers have argued about this for two hundred years, I'm sure we won't settle this issue here; but I hope you will think through this question more thoroughly on your own. Kant claimed that these transcendental forms or conditions establish a boundary line which can help us to judge what we can and cannot know. Any concept that has no intuition corresponding to it, or any intuition that cannot be conceptualized, can never be used by us to construct knowledge. Nevertheless he did point out that whenever we have empirical knowledge, our reason itself inevitably causes us to form certain "ideas" about things which go beyond the boundary of what we can know. The most important of these, Kant claimed, are the ideas of "God, freedom, and immortality", each of which reason impels us to postulate, and yet none of which we can prove to be objects we can know are real. This poses a problem for human reason, which can be pictured as in Figure 7.7. Kant solved this problem by claiming we must change the standpoint from which we are thinking if we ever hope to justify our desire to believe in such ideas. In Part Three of this course, we will examine how he suggested we do so. For now it will suffice to say that Kant himself thought it was a very good thing to recognize the limitations of metaphysics. In fact, he said in the Preface to the first Critique (p.29) "I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith." As I will show at the beginning of the next lecture, this view of metaphysics represents a fully matured version of the insights Socrates presented in the form of a seed. [Figure 7.7: The Problem of Kantian "Ideas"] QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT 1. Is it possible to know anything about ultimate reality? 2. What is "experience"? 3. Does our mind actually impose anything onto the objects we experience? 4. Is it proper for a philosopher to appeal to faith? RECOMMENDED READINGS 1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), "Preface" (both editions), pp.7-32. 2. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, tr. Lewis White Beck (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1950). 3. Roger Scruton, Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 4. Stephen Palmquist, Kant's System of Perspectives: An architectonic interpretation of the Critical philosophy (Lanham: University Press of America, 1993).