Abstract
For many interpreters, the holy grail of Kant scholarship is to find a meaning for the doctrine of transcendental idealism that is not only consistent, understandable in its origins, and not immediately absurd, but also does full justice to the complex fact that Kant insists on claiming both that there are ‘real appearances’ (Erscheinungen in contrast to blosser Schein), that is, appearances disclosing to us features of physical objects that are empirically real, and also that these features are nonetheless ‘mere appearances’ in contrast to ‘things in themselves’.
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Notes
- 1.
See e.g., McDowell (1994: 42ff.); and Wood (2005). See my discussion of Wood’s treatment of idealism in Ameriks (forthcoming).
- 2.
- 3.
In the light of points made by Lucy Allais, I have come to prefer the term ‘moderate’, rather than terms such as ‘modesty’ or ‘humility’, because this term more directly indicates the ‘in-between’ status that is crucial here. On many points related to these issues I am very indebted to discussions with participants at conferences on this topic in London and Amsterdam.
- 4.
See especially Allais (2007); Rosefeldt (2007); and my Interpreting Kant’s Critiques (Ameriks 2003, Chaps. 12, 13, and 14). Brief anticipations of this approach can be found in a remark about idealism as “a principle of modesty” in my Kant’s Theory of Mind (Ameriks 1982, 7), as well as in my review of Kantian Humility, by Rae Langton, in Ameriks (2000c). More extensive defenses of this general approach are given in my Interpreting Kant’s Critiques, ‘Introduction’, and Kant and the Historical Turn: Philosophy as Critical Interpretation (Ameriks 2006, Chaps. 3, 5, and 6). In this essay, I am primarily concerned with explaining just the general idea of the Moderate Interpretation, and for a more direct discussion of specific passages in Kant’s texts the reader is referred to the works cited in the footnotes.
- 5.
- 6.
For details, see again the works cited above in note 4 above.
- 7.
See Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), §14. Stroud happens to discuss the example of green from a somewhat similar perspective in Stroud (1999: 170–171).
- 8.
Kant contrasts his position with that of Locke and others in the Critique at Aix; A29=B45, and Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics that Will be able to Come Forth as a Science (1783), First Part, Notes II and III (AA 4: 288–294).
- 9.
- 10.
Hence I take Kant’s claim (Bxxvii) that it is absurd to speak of an appearance without anything that appears to be a substantive point with realist implications that are both empirical and not merely empirical.
- 11.
A28=B44 (translations of the Critique of Pure Reason are from the Kemp Smith edition). Kant jumps hastily to presuming that space and time are the “only” such forms, because these forms have a special universal significance. He thereby overlooks the fact that even space may not be a fully universal structure of appearance (sounds, for example, might appear without appearing as spatial), and there may be other ways in which (other less than fully universal) features such as color and sound can also involve necessary structures, even of a synthetic a priori kind, that supplement the more general structures of space and time.
- 12.
See B112. This point is already made in Metaphysics Herder, in Kant (1997: 3) (AA 28: 39).
- 13.
I use the plural term for convenience here. Kant does not provide a theoretical argument for a plurality of things in themselves, but it is clear that he never takes monism very seriously.
- 14.
See A226=B273. A ‘non-accidental modification’ would be one, for example, that would allow us, even ‘in this world’, to know things in a determinate non-sensory way.
- 15.
- 16.
See Beiser (2003).
- 17.
See especially Kant’s essay ‘contra Eberhard’, On a Discovery whereby any New Critique of Pure Reason is Made Superfluous by an Older One (1790) in AA 8: 185–251, and see above note 8.
- 18.
Even though Kant’s view is more metaphysical in his Inaugural Dissertation (On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World), it is worth noting that even then, when he claims that there are some truths about things in themselves that we can determine, he does not go so far as to relapse into a Leibnizian view that there is an in principle analytically traceable connection that reveals the positive nature of particular finite things in themselves to be a full explanatory ground of the nature of corresponding particular appearances.
- 19.
Here I am merely explaining the basic meaning of Kant’s position, and not endorsing or even trying to analyze in detail the Dialectic’s specific arguments. I concede that these arguments rest on several controversial presumptions, especially about the kind of quantitative determinacy that features supposedly would require in order to characterize things as things in themselves. See my Interpreting Kant’s Critiques (Ameriks 2003, Chap. 3).
- 20.
- 21.
I will avoid the term ‘intrinsic’ here because it is now much disputed, after Langton’s interpretation and reactions to it, whether features of things in themselves must (as she contends) be non-relational, or non-dispositional, or (by definition, given, the mere addition of something like ‘the non-reducibility thesis’) non-phenomenal. On critiques of views in Langton’s Kantian Humility (Langton 1998), see Allais (2006); and my Interpreting Kant’s Critiques (Ameriks 2003, Chap. 5).
- 22.
- 23.
It may look as if I am concluding that there is nothing very odd about Kant’s doctrine of the ideality of all our determinate theoretical self-knowledge—but in fact this doctrine can be considered quite questionable as long as it rests on the general controversial doctrines that all our determinate self-knowledge really does have to involve spatiotemporal characterizations and that the metaphysical status of temporality in particular is in no way absolute.
- 24.
Hanna (2006: 5).
- 25.
Hanna (2006: 30).
- 26.
Hanna (2006: 14).
- 27.
Hanna (2006: 32).
- 28.
Hanna (2006: 142, my emphasis; cf. ibid., 29).
- 29.
I am using ‘noumenal’ in a broad sense, at first just to contrast with what is manifest or phenomenal, and leaving other characteristics open for the discussion that follows.
- 30.
- 31.
This is a term that Hanna invokes near the end of his book (2006: 439), for his own purposes in trying to construct a broadly naturalistic Kantian practical philosophy. See below, at n.39.
- 32.
See Greene (2004: 472).
- 33.
See above note 21.
- 34.
See above note 21.
- 35.
Hanna (2006: 32; cf. ibid., 169).
- 36.
A802=B830.
- 37.
Critique of the Power of Judgment, §90 (AA 5: 468; translation Pluhar).
- 38.
Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Preface (translation Gregor).
- 39.
Hanna (2006: 444).
- 40.
Hanna (2006: 444).
- 41.
Hanna (2006: 447).
- 42.
See Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §90 (AA 5: 464n.); and see my ‘The End of the Critiques: Kant’s Moral “Creationism”’ (Ameriks 2008).
- 43.
See A537=B565, where Kant writes that “if […] appearances are not viewed as things in themselves […] they must themselves have grounds which are not appearances […][and] the consequence of insisting upon the [absolute] reality of appearances is to destroy all freedom” (translation modified).
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Ameriks, K. (2010). Kant’s Idealism on a Moderate Interpretation. 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_2
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