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Kant’s Idealism: The Current Debate

An Introductory Essay

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Part of the book series: The New Synthese Historical Library ((SYNL,volume 66))

Abstract

In the last century much has been written about Kant’s idealism and the problems surrounding the distinction between appearance and thing in itself. Notably, the great Kant scholar Erich Adickes dedicated a whole book to the topic, entitled Kant und das Ding an sich, published in 1924, in which all relevant passages in Kant’s entire work were canvassed that dealt, implicitly or explicitly, with idealism or the transcendental distinction between appearance and thing in itself so as to clarify the meaning of Kant’s often ambiguous language. For Adickes it was in any case beyond doubt that the notion of things in themselves referred to Kant’s commitment to a thoroughgoing realism and the mind-independence of the things that we cognize.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See for an excellent critical account of Adickes’ position Bird (2006: 554ff.). See also Chapter 9 by Schulting in this volume.

  2. 2.

    The sense of ‘methodological’ here is nicely put by Michelle Grier, who states that it represents the position which “is very generally characterized by the claim that the representation of the thing as it is in itself is one that is methodologically entailed by the critical procedure of reflecting on objects in relation to our cognitive faculties” (2001: 89).

  3. 3.

    Cf. Quarfood’s comments on Langton’s critique in Quarfood (2004: 31–34); interestingly, Quarfood points out how also Langton’s own reading can be construed in a way that yields nothing but a tautology.

  4. 4.

    See also Quarfood (2004: 22–23).

  5. 5.

    Quarfood writes: “[T]he resources of the methodological two-aspect view are currently underrated, and […] the motivations for a robustly metaphysical reading of the notion of the thing in itself, to the extent that they rest on legitimate desiderata, can be met also on this interpretation.” (2004: 16–17) Quarfood looks at a version of a two-aspect reading of idealism provided by Gerd Buchdahl, which is loosely based on a Husserlian procedure, which charts the possible realizations of the concept of ‘object’. (2004: 39ff.) See also Caropreso (2003: 143ff.) for an interpretation in a Praussian vein.

  6. 6.

    See Ameriks in this volume for a critique of Hanna.

  7. 7.

    Allison (2006: 5). But see also already Allison (1996: 18).

  8. 8.

    Cf. Allison (1996: 16). Here, Allison emphasizes the similar distinction between the concept of the transcendental object and the concept of a thing in itself.

  9. 9.

    See further Ameriks (2003a) for a possible mediating of Allison’s and Guyer’s positions, and specifically on Kant’s apparent confusion of absolute and conditional necessity in the context of the doctrine of transcendental idealism.

  10. 10.

    Notice that also Allison, in an earlier reply to criticisms against his notion of epistemic condition, is ambiguous with regard to the connection of objectivity with representation, as opposed to “the existence of things in themselves” (1996: 5), which oddly makes him equally vulnerable to phenomenalism about appearances. Kant’s idealism can’t just have to do with how we epistemically represent things but must also be about how things are insofar as they are objects for us, lest Kant’s claims about the objectivity of appearances as empirically real objects are vacuous.

  11. 11.

    And indeed Guyer does suggest this when he talks about Kant’s alleged “degrading” or “downgrading” of spatial objects to mere mental items (cf. respectively Guyer 1987, 335; Guyer 2006, 51).

  12. 12.

    In the earlier literature, Arthur Collins has suggested a similar comparison (see Collins 1999, 11–12, 17).

  13. 13.

    Translation of the first Critique follows the Guyer and Wood edition (Kant 1998). Cf. B66=A48–49. See further B164 (AA 3: 127.1–10); B236=A190–191; A490–491=B518–519, where Kant declares that appearances are “modifications of our sensibility”; finally cf. B527 (AA 3: 343.26–28) and B535=A507. See further Allais’ own references at 2007, 463n.19.

  14. 14.

    See e.g. A101; B234–235=A189–190; B243=A198; A248–249; cf. Prauss (1971: 16–18). Prauss (1971: 19) also rightly points out that, in the Dissertation and afterwards, Kant made a distinction between ‘apparentia’ (Erscheinung) and ‘phaenomenon’, the former being mere appearance and the latter appearance as determinate object.

  15. 15.

    She sees this as one of the advantages of Langton’s interpretation, because Langton “says that the same things which we know as they appear to us have an unknown intrinsic nature, specifically, the same things whose causal powers we know have an unknown intrinsic nature” (2006: 146).

  16. 16.

    Cf. Wagner (2008: 74, 76). Wagner speaks of “reine Noumena”. See also Martin (1969: 168–169).

  17. 17.

    Interestingly, the passage in the Prolegomena that Allais quotes in support of her view that Kant is committed to denying two-worldism appears to invite the phenomenalist interpretation. Kant says that appearances are not things, nor determinations of things in themselves, but rather modes of representation. Kant obviously cannot mean that appearances are not objects of experience. The passage cannot be used to dispute two-object views of the distinction appearance/thing-in-itself, as it is clear that appearance as object is not a thing in itself, but more importantly, not even “determinations belonging to things in themselves”. So appearance must be a distinct entity from the thing in itself.

  18. 18.

    See A265=B321; A277=B333; cf. Warren (2001: 44ff., 52ff.).

  19. 19.

    This is a general problem with two-aspect interpretations, which had already been pointed out by Hoke Robinson’s (1994) critique of Allison (see e.g. Robinson 1994, 422). As Willaschek (1998: 349–350) has argued, for Kant it is the case that, whilst he distinguishes various types of ‘object’, phenomena and noumena in a negative sense are distinguished only qua intension; the terms point to two aspects indeed of the same object of experience. Noumena in a positive sense, however, have a greater extension, and can mean things that are not objects of experience. Willaschek notes that the two-aspect theory falls short of clarifying these distinctions.

  20. 20.

    This is precisely contrary to what Prauss (1971: 22) asserts, namely that “Erscheinungen und Dinge an sich, transzendental-philosophisch verstanden, numerisch-existenziell identisch [sind]”.

  21. 21.

    Cf. Friebe (2007: 230–231): “Phaenomenon und Noumenon […] sind […] überhaupt keine Namen für Gegenstände—nicht einmal für bloß einen—sondern wenn überhaupt Namen, dann solche für Betrachtungsweisen. Und die sind natürlich numerisch verschieden. Schon die Eingangsfrage des Einwands—ob Erscheinungen und Dinge an sich numerisch verschiedene Gegenstände seien oder nicht—versteht man also nur innerhalb der Zwei-Welten-Lehre, weshalb der Einwand unzulässig ist.”

  22. 22.

    Collins does the same by asserting that “in any case [Kant] is plainly not an idealist when it comes to things in themselves” (1999: 27–28) and “Kant’s is an idealist view about appearances and a realist view about things-in-themselves” (ibid., 29). This is an odd view to hold, as Kant would on this view be both a transcendental idealist and a transcendental realist. Allais’ claim that idealism only concerns appearances, not things-in-themselves, is in fact begging the question in favor of her own dual-aspect reading; it already assumes a realist conception of the thing in itself, which is supposedly given and is then said to have two ways of being considered, namely as appearing, which is the ideal aspect of the thing, and as being in-itself, which is its real aspect.

  23. 23.

    Cf. Van Cleve (1999: 147). See also Robinson (1994: 422).

  24. 24.

    This last fact is not a worry for interpreters who dismiss the doctrine, but it is for Allais since she endorses it; notice that Allais also says that space and time “are merely the subjective form of our intuition, and represent no property of things in themselves at all” (2006: 165); hence, they “are not the way something unknown as to what it may be in itself appears to us” (ibid.) and so space and time are not the way to describe, to put it in Allais’ terms, things in themselves opaquely.

  25. 25.

    See Kant, AA 11: 395.

  26. 26.

    Cf. Van Cleve (1999: 134): “[Things in themselves] do not depend on human beings either for their existence or for their being the way they are.” Van Cleve is thus, rightly, careful to distinguish between the notions ‘object’ and ‘thing in itself’.

  27. 27.

    See Van Cleve (1999: 71).

  28. 28.

    See Van Cleve (1999: 123–124).

  29. 29.

    Cf. A114. See also Kant in the same letter to J.S. Beck quoted earlier, where he quotes Beck: “The union [Inbegriff] of representations is itself the object, and the activity of the mind whereby this union [Inbegriff] of representations is represented is what we mean by ‘relating them to the object’.” (AA 11: 314 [Kant 2007, 399]). ‘Inbegriff’ is translated here as ‘union’, but the translator’s use of ‘uniting’ for ‘Zusammensetzung’, to which Kant adds ‘synthesis’ in brackets, indicates that what is meant here by Kant is composition or synthesis (see Kant 2007, 399 note).

  30. 30.

    Cf. Allais’ critique of Langton in Allais (2006) and Langton’s response in Langton (2006).

  31. 31.

    Cf. Ameriks (2003b: 154–155, esp. 155n.42, 43) regarding Langton’s too strict “severing [of the] relations between things in themselves and phenomena”. Ameriks does not see why the line between relationality, that is inbuilt in e.g. causal power, and intrinsicality should be drawn so sharply as does Langton. There must be some grounding relations between things in themselves and phenomena, and also transcendental affection shows that there is something both non-phenomenal and relational (Ameriks 2003b, 156–157); cf. Westphal (2004: 38ff.) on noumenal causal affection.

  32. 32.

    See further on inner absolute and comparative determinations Warren (2001: 37–58).

  33. 33.

    Cf. Westphal (2004: 56n.37). Westphal also asserts that noumena need not be non-relational, and more importantly, as he writes, “the alleged nonrelationality of noumena in any positive sense would thwart Kant’s account of moral agency ab initio”. See also Quarfood (2004: 61–65) and Wagner (2008).

  34. 34.

    Incidentally, Quarfood suggests in a note that “Kant’s development from the Dissertation to the critical philosophy of CPR might be seen as the transition from a metaphysical to a methodological two-aspect view” (2004: 47, 48n.65), rather than from an ontological two-world view to a methodological two-aspect view.

  35. 35.

    See for an additional critique of Langton’s interpretation Falkenstein (2000).

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Acknowledgements

I want to thank Christian Onof and Cristiana Battistuzzi for their comments and suggestions. Many thanks in particular to Jacco Verburgt for his meticulous comments on this article and, in general, for our excellent collaborative work on this volume.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam, 1012 GC, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Dennis Schulting

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  1. Fac. Humanities, Dept. Philosophy, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Doelenstraat 15, Amsterdam, 1012 CP, Netherlands

    Dennis Schulting

  2. Department Philosophy, VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, Amsterdam, 1081 HV, Netherlands

    Jacco Verburgt

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Schulting, D. (2010). Kant’s Idealism: The Current Debate. In: Schulting, D., Verburgt, J. (eds) Kant's Idealism. The New Synthese Historical Library, vol 66. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9719-4_1

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