7.Philosophy as Meditative Doubt
by Stephen Palmquist (stevepq@hkbu.edu.hk)
Imagine a tree. Perhaps the drawing I've made here (see Figure III.1) will help you to do so (although it will also demonstrate that you don't have to be an artist in order to be a philosopher!). Just how is it that philosophy is like a tree? There are, in fact, many different possible ways of applying this analogy. One interesting way is suggested by the philosopher whose ideas we shall be discussing today. He worked out his own version of the myth that guides this course, by claiming philosophy is like a tree that has metaphysics as its roots, physics as its trunk, and the other sciences as its branches. In such a case, which may well have been an accurate reflection of how philosophy functioned in the seventeenth century, the leaves of the tree would probably best be correlated to knowledge, though the philosopher in question did not carry his analogy this far. For our purposes here in Part One of this course, we can at least agree that metaphysics certainly does have a function similar to the roots of a tree. By the time we have completed the first nine lectures, I hope the reasons for this will be clear enough. Later on, however, I shall suggest revisions of some of the other aspects of this version of the myth, in order to bring it up to date (see Figure VII.1).
Ren? Descartes (1596-1650) is a name some of you will already be familiar with, because of the contribution he made to the field of mathematics. Not only did he contribute to the further development of algebra, but he invented the system of coordinate geometry that we all learned in school. When he turned his attention toward philosophy, he recognized an inherent problem in the tradition.
For two thousand years the systems of Plato and Aristotle, in one form or another, had dominated virtually all philosophical thinking in the west. When Christianity came on the scene, most of the early church Fathers adopted some version of Platonic idealism as the basis for their theology. This trend culminated in the philosophical and theological system constructed by St. Augustine (354-430), whose influence remained so dominant for most of the so-called Dark Ages that Aristotle was virtually forgotten in Europe. Fortunately, various Arabic scholars kept Aristotle's writings alive during that period, using them as the basis for constructing various forms of Islamic philosophy and theology. Eventually, Aristotle's realism returned to Europe, mainly through the work of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), whose massive theological system remains the most influential source of Catholic theology to this day. By the time Descartes came on the scene, no significant alternative had been offered to the idealist (Platonic-Augustinian) and realist (Aristotelian-Thomist) schools. Was there something wrong with these two systems that hindered other philosophers from making progress in philosophy?Descartes believed both traditions suffered from a common flaw. The impasse was created by the lack of any completely certain truth that
Figure III.1: Descartes' Tree of Philosophy
could serve as an indisputable starting point for constructing a genuine system of knowledge (i.e., a science). This insight raised a new question in Descartes' mind: how could such absolute certainty be established? Neither Plato's method of dialogue nor Aristotle's teleological method on their own had been able to produce a solid foundation for a truly rigorous science. How then could such a foundation be discovered? In reflecting on this question, Descartes hit upon an idea for a new philosophical method that would enable us to establish certainty once and for all. Replacing dialogue with solitary meditation, his new method was to doubt. By systematically doubting everything we think we know about our world and our selves, he hoped he might come across something that would be impossible to doubt. This could then serve as an absolutely certain starting point for building a positive philosophical system.
What then can we doubt? How about our senses? Can you trust your senses? One day, not long after moving to Hong Kong, I went shopping with my family in a local mall. It was getting quite late, so we started looking for a place to eat. As we walked into a supermarket that had food stalls all along the front, I noticed at a distance a very nice display of Japanese food on sale. I was quite hungry, so my mouth began watering immediately. We agreed to try eating at this place, though it was rather crowded. As we came closer I was really impressed by the apparently high quality of the meals they had on display. Only when we reached the counter itself did I realize that the food on display was not food at all, but plastic! My senses had been utterly fooled by the ingenuity of some marketing agent. And by your laughter I can tell that many of you have made similar mistakes.
In the first of the six "meditations" described in Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes began his quest for certainty by using the virtually universal experience of being fooled in this way to cast doubt on the reliability of our senses. If we were fooled in that one instance, how do we know we have not been fooled more often? Indeed, if any given impression our senses are now giving to us might be a false impression, then there seems to be no possibility of discovering anything certain in our senses. This discredits Aristotelian realism, since it is based on the assumption that substances, as perceived primarily through our senses, are ultimately real.
What about our ideas? Perhaps Plato was right after all, and our ideas are the proper foundation for all knowledge. But Descartes found it just as easy to cast doubt in this realm as well. Even ideas that seem to us to be certain, ideas most people would never think of doubting, can be doubted if we try. For example, there would be many ways of casting doubt on the spatial and temporal character of our everyday experience. Most of us have had dreams that violate spatial laws such as gravity (e.g., when we fly in our dreams) or dreams in which time seems to go slower or faster than when we are awake. How do we know our everyday experience is not just a dream, from which we will wake up any minute now? Perhaps there is an evil demon who is deceiving us all into mistaking this long dream for our real world. Even if there is no such demon, we have all had the experience of suddenly realizing that some idea we have held to be true for a long time is actually false. Any single idea might turn out to be an illusion of this kind, so there is nothing to prevent all our ideas from being illusory. Hence, Plato's idealism is of no more use than Aristotle's realism in our search for something absolutely certain.
How about mathematics? Descartes himself was a mathematician and certainly believed mathematics to be true. Indeed, many philosophers in his day used a mathematical method in their philosophizing. Is it possible to doubt that, for example, 2+2=4? I'll let you think this one through on your own, as an encouragement to read Descartes' book for yourself. But suffice it to say that Descartes believed even mathematics cannot provide an absolutely certain foundation for knowledge.
Is there anything that is impossible to doubt? As Descartes lay on his bed in a dark room doing this prolonged thought experiment, he suddenly hit upon the answer he had been searching for. He found he could not doubt that at that moment he was doubting. For this would be possible only under the absurd conditions that a doubt could exist without anyone doing the doubting! Doubt is a form of thinking, Descartes reasoned in his second meditation, so thinking must be the basis upon which the certainty of his own existence could be proved. Hence he came up with the now famous maxim, "I think, therefore I am" (in Latin, Cogito ergo sum). The existence of this "thinking being" is the absolutely certain foundation for all knowledge. This "I" or "ego" stands outside of history and culture as a basic metaphysical given, It does not depend on any kind of faith, since its nonexistence is impossible as long as I know I am thinking.
No sooner did Descartes reach this conclusion than he realized that it presents a new problem that requires some solution. Descartes himself refused to side with Plato by treating the body as an illusion, for as a scientist he believed the body is just as real as the mind. Instead he adopted a metaphysical viewpoint known as "dualism", whereby the mind and body are both regarded as equally real. Just as the former is a "thinking substance" (res cogitans), the latter is an "extended substance" (res extensa). Yet he had now demonstrated that our knowledge of our bodies, together with the whole of extended nature, can never be as certain as our knowledge of our thinking nature. So on what can we base our confidence in the reality of the body? And just how is it that the mind and body are related?
In his third meditation Descartes answered the first question by appealing to God. He began by constructing what is now referred to as an "ontological argument" for the existence of God (i.e., an argument appealing only to the proper understanding of the concept "God"). His proof goes something like this: we all have within us an idea of "perfection"; no human being is perfect, so the perfect Being is not the "I" of whose existence I am certain; yet this perfect Being must actually exist, for otherwise it would be less than perfect. That is, if our concept of a most perfect Being refers to a Being who does not really exist, then that Being would not be as perfect as a perfect Being who does exist. Descartes then argues that, since we can in this way be certain that a perfect Being ("God") exists, and since such a Being must be good in order to be perfect, we can also be confident that such a Being would not deceive us. In response to critics who claimed such an argument is circular (i.e., that it already assumes what it tries to prove), Descartes appealed to the notion of "innate ideas" (ideas that are present in our mind at birth, and are therefore self-authenticating), claiming that "God" is an innate idea just as much as is the idea of my own "ego".
Even if we accept Descartes' theological explanation for why we can have confidence in the reality of the external world, the question remains as to how our minds actually relate to our bodies, if indeed they are two ultimately distinct substances. Descartes' solution to this problem never met with much approval from his fellow philosophers. He surmised that a small gland at the base of the brain, called the "pineal gland", is responsible for ensuring a causal connection between the mind and body. In Descartes' day the prevailing idea of the human body was that it is a living machine, so that any time one part moves, it must have been caused to move by a mechanical process whereby some other part, as it were, "bumped" into it. So Descartes claimed that, when the mind wants the body to do something, it somehow influences the pineal gland, where it sets off a chain reaction that ends in the desired action being performed. So if my mind tells me to throw this piece of chalk up in the air, that idea spins round and round in my mind until it gathers enough force to make a significant impact, then it bangs into my pineal gland, sending a series of movements through my neck and down my arm, until my arm actually obeys the command, like this!
Having explained Descartes' two main ways of defending his metaphysical dualism, we can now summarize his theory as follows:
Figure III.2:
Descartes' Solutions to the Mind-Body Problem
Descartes' dualism has several important consequences. For one thing, it replaces Aristotle's definition of the human person as a "rational animal" with the notion of a mind imbedded in a fleshly machine. In the field of natural science this had the significant effect of providing scientists with a world view that enabled them to attain (or at least, to believe they could attain) a totally objective perspective on the external world, totally eliminating any influence the observer's own mind might have on what we come to know. In this sense, Descartes' dualism can be regarded as paving the way for Newtonian science. The view that the human ego controls the material world, though now called into question by many modern thinkers (see e.g., Lecture 18), is what enabled technology to develop so rapidly over the past three hundred years.
As far as metaphysics is concerned, the most significant consequence of Descartes' dualism was that it sparked off a new controversy, commonly known as "the mind-body problem". Descartes' own position seems highly implausible; but is there any better way to explain the influence the mind and body appear to have on each other? The debate over the proper answer to this question began almost immediately, and is, in fact, still alive in some philosophical circles today. For example, one of the most influential books written by an analytic philosopher in the twentieth century, Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind, begins by arguing that Descartes' dualism is based on a "category mistake" and that a proper understanding of the way we use words like "mind" and "body" can resolve the whole mind-body problem once and for all.
The mind-body controversy was at its height in the century immediately after the publication of Descartes' Meditations. We have no time for an exhaustive analysis of the many arguments that were put forward. However, it might be helpful to give a brief overview of five of the most notable alternatives to Descartes' position, as represented in each case by its most influential proponent. They are as follows:
(1) Materialism: Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) argued that only matter truly exists. The mind is just a special configuration of brain matter. Therefore there is no problem of interaction, because the whole system is physical. This view is similar, though by no means identical, to Aristotle's realism.
(2) Immaterialism: George Berkeley (1685-1753) argued that only perceptions truly exist. There is no reason to believe matter has any independent existence outside of the perceiving mind. Therefore there is no problem of interaction, because the whole system is spiritual. This view is similar, though by no means identical, to Plato's idealism.
(3) Parallelism: Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) argued that the mind and body are indeed separate substances, but they do not actually interact. They seem to interact whenever a mind's thoughts and a body's actions happen to run parallel to each other; but in such cases the correspondence is governed directly by God.
(4) Double Aspect theory: Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-1677) argued that the mind and body (like all spirit and matter) are two aspects of one underlying reality, which can be called either "God" or "Nature", depending on how the subject views it. Reality is like a coin with two quite different faces, both being equally true as a description of the coin.
(5) Epiphenomenalism: David Hume (1711-1776) argued that the mind is nothing but a bundle of perceptions arising out of the body. Later philosophers refined this idea, arguing that the body (in particular, the brain) is the primary reality, but it creates or gives birth to the mind. Some argue that once the mind arises, it has a reality of its own.
I'd like to conclude today's lecture by suggesting one very significant difference between Descartes' metaphysics and that of Plato and Aristotle. For Plato and Aristotle, and for most philosophers over the next two millennia, the answer to the basic question of epistemology ("What can I know?") was dependent upon a foregoing answer to the basic question of metaphysics ("What is ultimately real?"). For Descartes, however, the opposite was true. As we have seen, he began his enquiries by asking what we can know for certain, and only on the basis of the answer to this question did he construct his metaphysical dualism.
As we shall see in the following lecture, the next metaphysician whose ideas we will consider also gave priority to epistemology. Anticipating that lecture just slightly, we can therefore use the cross as a map of the relationship between the methods employed by the four metaphysicians considered here in Part One:
Figure III.3: Four Key Philosophical Methods
One of the chief dangers for beginning students of philosophy is that they may be overwhelmed by the great diversity of viewpoints and arguments that have been expressed on a given subject, such as metaphysics. Although maps like the one above inevitably over-simplify the complex relationships between such philosophers, they nevertheless can help us to get a handle on their basic similarities and differences, as well as suggesting further insights of various sorts. For example, this diagram suggests that the development of western philosophy can be regarded as a process of slowly working backwards from, as it were, the highest and most aloof insights, to the deepest groundings of human reasoning. We shall see in the next two lectures the extent to which this suggestion gives us an accurate description of the contribution Kant made to the roots of our philosophical tree.
8. Philosophy as Transcendental Critique
The last philosopher whose ideas on metaphysics we will consider in detail here in Part One of this 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 Scholastics: a virtual intellectual reference system. (The Scholastics were medieval theologians who used philosophy to interpret Christianity, even speculating on issues such as how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. Scholasticism reached its peak in Thomas Aquinas' work, but had far less influence after Descartes.) Like Aristotle, this giant of the mind wrote on nearly every philosophical subject and had 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 on numerous occasions later in the course.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was born into a working class family in the Prussian port city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad). He lived a quiet, regulated life, never marrying and never traveling 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 that 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 that 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 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 wherein he developed his System each begin with the word "Critique". Each book adopts a different "standpoint"; that is, it addresses all its questions with a particular end in view. The first Critique (of Pure Reason), the focus of our attention 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 different standpoints. 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 III.4: Kant's Critiques and Their Standpoints
Comparing Figure III.4 with Figure II.6 suggests that the Critical method is a new form of the Socratic method. Whereas Socrates' main concern was to scrutinize himself and others in the search for wisdom, Kant's Critical method requires the self-examination of reason. In other words, a true "critique", for Kant, is a process whereby 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
Figure III.5: Kant's Transcendental Boundary
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. His Critical method thus 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 III.5, 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
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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; so the four questions shown in Figure III.6 describe |
Figure III.6: Kant's Four Philosophical Questions
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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 (especially in Lectures 22, 29, 32, and 33), because he himself warned that in order to understand his ideas properly, the reader must have an "idea of the whole" (CPR 37).
Kant's new method requires us to see the truth in both extremes in any debate, to recognize how each limits the other, and as a result, to adopt a standpoint that affirms the legitimate points from both sides. As I hope you recall from the last lecture, this stands in stark contrast to Descartes' method: whereas the latter assumes both Plato and Aristotle to be wrong, Kant's method assumes both are right, as shown below:
Figure III.7: Descartes vs. Kant on Plato and Aristotle
According to Kant, Plato and Aristotle both made the mistake, like that of most other western philosophers, of ignoring their opponent's point of view and adopting 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., of 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 that make them inherently unsatisfactory. Let us now investigate how Kant accomplished this task.
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 (CPR 18). Mathematics made progress only when people began to search for the necessary and universal characteristics we read into mathematical objects, instead of paying attention only to their accidental characteristics (19). And natural sciences succeed only when they proceed according to some predetermined plan (20). Armed with these hints, Kant gained one final clue by turning to a particular scientist, whose daring insight profoundly changed the way we view the universe.
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 traveling 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, together with the claim that the earth revolves around its own axis, he found he could explain mathematically how all the planets in reality always move in a (nearly) 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 III.8). 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
(a) The appearance (b) The reality
Figure III.8: Kant's Copernican Revolution
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)!
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) way of thinking, my knowledge that this chalk is white obviously comes not from any invention of my mind, but from the fact, plainly observable for all to see, that this chalk appears to be white. Kant never denied that this is true. What he denied is that such appearances have anything to do with the chalk's metaphysical reality; instead, they 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, revealing 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 providing us with true but limited ways of viewing the real world.
What then are these transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience, these absolutely necessary elements whose "movement", Kant claimed, forms 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 senses, and is the material out of which we produce our knowledge. For 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 III.9. Today we can safely ignore the
Figure III.9: Kant's Twelvefold Division of Categories
details of this part of Kant theory, because Lecture 21 will include a closer look at the most important category, causality. Moreover, as we will discover in Week V, understanding the logical form of this set of categories is more important than understanding Kant's reasons for selecting these specific twelve. The key at this point is to understand the function of the categories, along with space and time, their counterpart forms of intuition.
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 weareabletoperceiveitsexistence,andaframeworkofcategories, 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 of thinking, in order 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.
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 for two hundred years about whether or not this so-called "Copernican revolution" in philosophy really makes sense, I'm sure we won't settle this issue here; but I hope you will think through this question more thoroughly on your own. In the next lecture, I shall discuss some of the metaphysical implications of the first Critique and give a brief overview of how Kant has influenced metaphysics over the past two hundred years. My claim will be that Kant's position represents a fully matured version of the insights Socrates presented in the form of a seed.
9. Philosophy after Critique
Kant's epistemological legacy had an almost immediate impact on virtually every area of philosophical inquiry, bringing to a close what is often called the "modern era" of western philosophy and giving rise to a long series of "post-modern" or "post-Critical" philosophies. Before sketching how Kant influenced subsequent developments in metaphysics, I shall briefly examine the metaphysical implications Kant himself believed his epistemology had.
Kant argued that the transcendental conditions of knowledge (i.e., space, time, and the categories) establish an absolute boundary line that enables us to judge what we can and cannot know about what is real. Any concept that has no intuition corresponding to it, or any intuition that cannot be conceptualized, can never be used to construct knowledge. Nevertheless, whenever a person obtains some empirical knowledge, his or her reason inevitably forms certain "ideas" about things that go beyond the boundary of what we can know. The most important of these, Kant claimed, are the metaphysical ideas of "God, freedom, and immortality": reason impels us to postulate each of these, yet we cannot prove any of them to be objects we can know are real. The fact that we are necessarily
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ignorant of the three most important aspects of human life poses a problem, as pictured in Figure III.10, whose solution is philosophy's primary task. Kant himself solved this problem by claiming we must change the standpoint from which we are thinking if we ever hope to justify our belief in such ideas. In Lectures 22 and 29 we will examine two examples of how he suggested we do |
Figure III.10: The Problem of Kantian "Ideas"
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this. For now it will suffice to say that Kant himself believed that recognizing the limitations of knowledge is very good for metaphysics. As he confessed in CPR 29: "I have ... found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith." An honest and courageous recognition of reason's limits may make philosophy a more difficult and dangerous task, but as we shall see in Lectures 32 and 33, it is the best (if not the only) way to preserve the meaningfulness of human life.
We can now summarize the main features of Kant's metaphysics in terms of the following four fundamental tenets:
1. Ultimate ("transcendent") reality-i.e., reality apart from the limiting conditions through which we learn about it-is an unknowable "thing in itself".
2. Empirical reality-i.e., the particular aspects of our knowledge-is determined by the "appearances" we experience (cf. Aristotle).
3. Transcendental reality-i.e., the general aspects of our knowledge (especially space and time as "forms of intuition", and twelve categories as "forms of thought")-is determined by the knowing subject (cf. Plato).
4. Knowledge inevitably gives rise to ideas about what ultimate reality might be like if we could know it; but attempting to prove these ideas leads reason into self-contradiction, so they can never become items of scientific knowledge.
The implications of the philosophical System that arises out of these tenets are manifold. At this point, let's just look at four of the most significant implications for metaphysics.
First, if we think of Socrates as planting a "seed" in the history of western philosophy with his idea that philosophers must begin by recognizing what they do not know, then the tree that grew out of this seed first bore fruit with Kant. Kant agreed that philosophy begins with the recognition of ignorance; indeed, he even claims that the "inestimable benefit" of his first Critique is "that all objections to morality and religion will be for ever silenced, and this in Socratic fashion, namely, by the clearest proof of the ignorance of the objectors" (CPR 30). But he goes much further than Socrates by demarcating, once and for all, the precise boundary lines between the areas of "necessary ignorance" and "possible knowledge": we may be able to think about a concept that cannot be intuited, or feel an intuition that cannot be conceptualized; but we can know only what appears to us in a form that lends itself to both intuition and conception. Moreover, Kant distinguishes between two types of ignorance (605-606): our accidental ignorance in empirical matters should motivate us to extend our knowledge, whereas our necessary ignorance in metaphysical matters should motivate us to look beyond knowledge to the practical purpose of doing philosophy-namely, to live a better life. We shall come back to this in Part Three.
With Kant, therefore, metaphysics finally came of age. After two thousand years of philosophers attempting to combat necessary ignorance with metaphysical knowledge, Kant completed a cycle in the history of western philosophy, and in so doing, opened up a whole new set of problems. For the next implication of Kant's System is that we must now find a way to cope with our necessary ignorance. How can we do philosophy without having any knowledge of ultimate reality? The last two hundred years of philosophy has been a series of different suggestions as to how this can best be accomplished. Kant's own solutions, such as his "Copernican" theory that the subject reads the transcendental conditions of knowledge onto the object, have been rejected by most subsequent philosophers. However, I don't think we should be too quick to reject this rather strange sounding theory. For just as Descartes' "cogito" paved the way for Newtonian physics, I believe Kant's Copernican revolution paved the way for relativity physics and quantum mechanics, based as they are on a very similar notions of the observer participating in the formation of knowledge.
Because Kant defined such a clear-cut set of limits for human knowledge, we can say philosophy becomes more complete with Kant than ever before. Kant himself was well aware of this aspect of his System (CPR 10):
I have made completeness my chief aim, and I venture to assert that there is not a single metaphysical problem which has not been solved, or for the solution of which the key at least has not been supplied.
Interestingly, if you think back to our discussion of myths in Lecture 3, you might recall that a myth is also something that is enclosed in limits. So I think it would be right to say that with Kant western philosophy experienced such a major "paradigm shift" that we can say Kant gave philosophy a new "myth"-the myth of the thing in itself. Of course, as long as we treat this as an "enlightened" myth-i.e., as long as we always remember it is a myth, and so treat it not as an absolute truth, but as a basic assumption, freely adopted on faith-we can avoid many of the pitfalls that "living in a myth" otherwise tends to have.
One final implication of Kant's philosophy is that its insistence on an area of necessary human ignorance keeps the philosopher humble. This might seem surprising, especially for those of you who have read some of Kant's own writing, since Kant was certainly not ignorant about the greatness of his own achievement! For on several occasions he proudly claimed that his System is superior to those of all past philosophers. My point here is that, whereas most philosophers appeal to certain speculative ideas, requiring access to some kind of special, transcendent knowledge that is inaccessible to ordinary people, Kant's philosophy replaces these with hypotheses, thus putting philosophers in general on an even par with non-philosophers when it comes to their ability to gain knowledge about the most basic metaphysical issues. Because Kant used such complicated terminology to express his ideas, this implication of his philosophy is often overlooked, even by those who spend years studying his writings. Yet Kant stated this "humiliating" aspect of his Critical System clearly enough on several occasions. One of the best examples, near the end of the first Critique (651-652), is worth quoting in full:
But, it will be said, is this all that pure reason achieves in opening up prospects beyond the limits of experience? .... Surely the common understanding could have achieved as much, without appealing to philosophers for counsel in the matter.
I shall not dwell here upon the service which philosophy has done to human reason through the laborious efforts of its criticism, granting even that in the end it should turn out to be merely negative ... But I may at once reply: Do you really require that a mode of knowledge which concerns all men should transcend the common understanding, and should only be revealed to you by philosophers? Precisely what you find fault with is the best confirmation of the correctness of the [Critical philosophy]. For we have thereby revealed to us, what could not at the start have been foreseen, namely, that in matters which concern all men without distinction nature is not guilty of any partial distribution of her gifts, and that in regard to the essential ends of human nature the highest philosophy cannot advance further than is possible under the guidance which nature has bestowed even upon the most ordinary understanding.
In other words, philosophy is special not because it allows us proudly to claim a higher level of knowledge than ordinary people, but because it humbles us by showing us the limitations of all our knowledge.
Unfortunately, many of the philosophers who came after Kant refused to accept this important implication of his System. Instead, the history of metaphysics over the past two hundred years has to a large extent been the history of different attempts to avoid precisely this painful implication, that philosophers have to be humble in order to be good philosophers. Philosophers have tried to escape this outcome by denying, suppressing, or misinterpreting one or more of the standpoints Kant sought to hold in a fragile balance. The remainder of today's lecture will be a brief overview of key figures in four post-Kantian movements: German idealism, existentialism (both pessimistic/atheistic and optimistic/ theistic versions), linguistic analysis, and hermeneutic philosophy.
The German idealists (most notably, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Marx) were the first and most notorious examples of post-Kantian attempts to regain for human beings the capacity to know ultimate reality. Johann Fichte (1762-1814) was initially thought by many to be earmarked as Kant's chosen successor; however, he soon made an obvious break with Kant, by arguing that the "transcendental ego" actually produces the whole natural world out of itself. The problematic "thing in itself" could then be discarded, since there is no longer a need for anything to exist apart from our minds. Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) belonged as much to the concurrent Romantic Movement as to the idealists; this was evident in his emphasis on art, feeling, and individual diversity. His book, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), outlines a position much like Fichte's, whereby the ego "posits itself" (i.e., makes itself into an object), thus creating the external world and setting itself the task of coming to know it. Both views reject the empirical realism Kant valued so highly.
German idealism reached its height with Georg Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), whose major contribution was to bring history into the center stage of metaphysics. He argued that the three-step process used by Fichte and Schelling (itself having strong roots in Kant [see e.g., Figure III.1]) constitutes a fixed, logical pattern that tells us just how history develops. This makes it possible for us to gain a priori access to ultimate reality in the form of what Hegel called "Absolute Spirit". (We shall look more closely at Hegelian logic in Lecture 12.) Karl Marx (1818-1883) can be regarded as the concluding figure in this tradition, not because he was an idealist, but because he constructed his entire philosophy as a reaction against the Hegelian system. Ironically, this required him to accept many of Hegel's underlying assumptions, including the basic myth that ultimate reality can be made known through historical development. But because his focus was not so much on metaphysics as on political philosophy, we shall postpone any further discussion of Marx's ideas until Week IX.
Though not part of German idealism, the American philosophers C.S. Peirce (1839-1914) and John Dewey (1850-1952) were also influenced by Hegel in developing pragmatism, an approach to philosophy that emphasizes common sense more than metaphysical theories as such. What is real is determined not so much by philosophical reasoning as by finding out what works in the empirical world. The issue of ultimate reality is virtually ignored. As such, pragmatism need not be anti-Kantian; but it also does not fully adopt Kant's position (cf. Lectures 22 and 29).
Another way of reacting to Hegel's absolute denial of Kantian limits produced existentialism-though in this case Hegel's myth of the centrality of history was itself called into question more fundamentally. The two major figures here are Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), who developed pessimistic and optimistic alternatives to Hegel, respectively. Schopenhauer remained far more faithful to Kant than Hegel did; but he modified Kant's System by identifying the realm of the thing in itself with an all-encompassing unconscious "will" that relates to much more than just moral issues, as Kant had argued (see Lecture 22). He believed the conflict between the will and the external world creates inevitable suffering, and that this suffering constitutes the true meaning of life. Kierkegaard also attacked Hegel by returning to Kant, but in a more optimistic way, by regarding life's suffering as a force that points us to God and ought therefore to be transcended. His position will be the focus of our attention in Lecture 34.
These pioneers strongly influenced, in turn, two philosophers who developed existentialism more explicitly. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), deeply influenced by Schopenhauer's dark pessimism, constructed a moral philosophy in direct opposition to Kant, that became the seedbed for most of the atheistic versions of existentialism that were rampant during the twentieth century. Paul Tillich (1886-1971), influenced far more by Kierkegaard, is the philosopher-theologian who developed the existentialist framework most completely in an "optimistic" (i.e., theologically affirmative) direction. Nietzsche will be the focus of our attention in Lecture 23, and Tillich in Lectures 17, 30, 31, and 34.
Opposed to existentialism for much of the twentieth century was analytic philosophy. As we shall see in Lecture 16, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) were its two major proponents. Many in this tradition see themselves as following directly in Kant's footsteps; however, this claim is based on an extremely anti-metaphysical interpretation of Kant as destroying metaphysics without putting anything better in its place. Fortunately, more and more Anglo-American philosophers are recognizing that the old dichotomy between existential and analytic approaches to philosophy is illegitimate-a development I believe is best described by the single word, "good" (cf. Figure I.2)!
A philosopher who is often regarded as an existentialist even though he tried to disassociate himself from the movement is Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). His approach to philosophy, to be touched on briefly in Lectures 17, 18 and 34, gave rise to one of the most influential developments in the last half of the twentieth century: hermeneutic philosophy. Lecture 18 will examine in some detail how Hans Georg Gadamer (1900-) developed a theory of interpretation that remains highly influential to this day. One of the main reasons for its increasing influence, I believe, is that it puts its focus elsewhere than on the traditional questions of metaphysics. Indeed, at its most extreme, hermeneutic philosophy has given rise to a movement called "deconstructionism", led by philosophers such as Jacques Derrida (1930-), who believe that not just metaphysics, but philosophy itself has come to an end. Since we shall be discussing these ideas more thoroughly in Lectures 18 and 24, there is no need to summarize them here.
If you were to take a course in metaphysics as part of a philosophy major, your teacher would probably focus on certain basic problems that tend to occupy the attention of contemporary metaphysicians. These are typically associated with one of the following four aspects of "reality": (1) the nature of physical things and our perception of them (e.g., color); (2) the nature of the mind and the proper identification of mental objects; (3) the nature of space, time, and relations in space-time (e.g., causality, necessity, and freedom); and (4) the nature of abstract entities (e.g., numbers, possible worlds, and God). Such problems are not new; we have met most of them in our discussions of classical and modern metaphysics over the past two weeks, though sometimes under different headings: metaphysics proper (e.g., the idealism-realism debate), human nature (e.g., the mind-body debate), etc. The names have changed, and the tools contemporary philosophers use to deal with such problems tend to be far more complex; but the basic issues have remained unchanged.
What then is the future of philosophy's "roots" as we enter a new millennium? Much of what passed for metaphysics during the twentieth century was unfortunately little more than a regression to the kind of Scholastic philosophy that was typically practiced in the Middle Ages. It has quite literally meant nothing to anyone outside the walls of academia. I believe the only way to avoid this tragic outcome is to learn the lesson Kant was trying to teach us in his first Critique. His goal in developing what is still regarded by many philosophers as the most complete and well defended epistemology was to put metaphysics "on the sure path of a science" (CPR 21). What he meant is that recognizing our ignorance of ultimate reality is the sole purpose for studying metaphysics. Once that is accomplished, we must resist the temptation to continue looking for answers in the wrong place, lest we either uproot the tree (thus killing it) or bury our own heads in the soil (thus killing our potential for any further insight). Instead, the only way to obtain something like "knowledge" of how life's most meaningful questions are to be answered is to admit that the answers are not to be found in metaphysics, but lie elsewhere on the tree of philosophy. Understanding how this is possible will be one of our primary concerns in Part Two and throughout this course.
QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT/DIALOGUE
1. A. Are you certain of anything?
B. Is it possible to doubt that 2+2=4?
2. A. Is it possible to know anything about ultimate reality?
B. Is it proper for a philosopher to appeal to faith?
3. A. What was the old myth that Kant's philosophy replaced?
B. Do minds actually impose anything onto objects we experience?
4. A. What would be the ideal philosophical method?
B. What is humility, and is it ever possible to be completely humble?
RECOMMENDED READINGS
1. Ren?Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy2, tr. Laurence J. Lafleur (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960[1951]).
2. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1949), Ch. I, "Descartes' Myth", pp.13-25.
3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, "Preface" (both editions) (CPR 7-37).
4. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, tr. Lewis White Beck (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1950).
5. Stephen Palmquist, Kant's System of Perspectives: An architectonic interpretation of the Critical philosophy (Lanham: University Press of America, 1993), Chs. IV-VI, pp.107-193.
6. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The lives and opinions of the greater philosophers3 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982[1928]).
7. John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966[1957]).
8. Michael Jubien, Contemporary Metaphysics: An introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1997).
Send comments to the author: StevePq@hkbu.edu.hk
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