Abstract
Kant’s reputation for making absolutist claims about universal and necessary conditions for the possibility of experience are put here in the broader context of his goals for the Critical philosophy. It is shown that within that context, Kant’s claims can be seen as considerably more innocuous than they are traditionally regarded, underscoring his deep respect for “common sense” and sharing surprisingly similar goals with Wittgenstein in terms of what philosophy can, and at least as importantly cannot, provide.
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Notes
Kant gives some of the historical background to this claim in the Jäsche logic (Ak. IX, pp. 27ff); some of its political implications are developed in the essay “What is Enlightenment?,” Ak. VIII, pp. 35–42, esp. p. 40. It is worth comparing Foucault’s remark in his essay of the same name, “I have been seeking to stress that the thread that may connect us with the Enlightenment is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude—that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era.” “What is Enlightenment?” in Rabinow, P. (ed.) The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), based on an unpublished French manuscript. 42. In Kant’s case, it seems clear that that attitude ultimately cannot be inculcated without adopting some aspect of these “doctrinal elements,” as characterised in terms of Kant’s transcendental strategy establishing conditions that hold a priori.
I have presented a detailed argument for this in “Kant’s Critical Model of the Experiencing Subject,” Idealistic Studies vol. 25, no. 1 (Winter 1995), pp. 1–24.
Kant adds “in speculation” [in Ansehung der Spekulation] for the second edition.
See also Kant’s comment “I shall not boast here of 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” (A831 = B859).
Gibbs, R. “The Limits of Thought: Rosenzweig, Schelling, and Cohen,” Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 43 (1989), p. 618.
These citations are from the Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, I.38, I.111, I.133, I.124, respectively; (New York: Macmillan, 1953).
Tractatus, “Preface.” Translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuiness ((London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961).
Tractatus, Section 6.54. “And again, just as it is not impossible for the man who has ascended to a high place by a ladder to overturn the ladder with his foot after his ascent, so also it is not unlikely that the Skeptic after he has arrived at the demonstration of his thesis by means of the argument proving the non-existence of proof, as it were by a step-ladder, should then abolish this very argument.” Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians II.481; translated by R.G. Bury (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935).
Philosophical Investigations, I.464. As an anonymous reader of an earlier draft remarked, the commonalities here shouldn’t be overemphasized, insofar as Kant preserves a role for the unschematized categories that would be distinct from mere nonsense (Unsinn). The ultimate epistemic significance of the categories, in any case, comes with their schematization, although this is admittedly one of the murkier chapters in a sufficiently murky text. In general, I follow Graciela de Pierris here, who notes that the “unschematized categories derived by Kant from the logical forms of judgment...do not yet have content, and the synthesis introduced in the MD [Metaphysical Deduction] belongs to the combinatorial operations of the understanding, in abstraction from its necessary connection (in knowledge) with space and time.” Review of Guyer, P. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Kant,” Ethics, 104 no.3, p. 657.
See Tractatus, Sections 5.641, 5.632, 5.633. For some discussion on this latter point, see W.H. Walsh, “Philosophy and Psychology in Kant’s Critique,” Kant Studien 57 (1960), pp. 189–195; Jonathan Bennett, Kant’s Dialectic, pp. 69ff.; Thompson, “On A Priori Truth,” pp. 475–476. More general discussions of the relationship are Erik Stenius, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), chapter XI; P.M.S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion (revised ed.) (New York: Oxford, 1986), chapter seven, part four; Leslie Stevenson, The Metaphysics of Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); Jonathan Lear, “Leaving the World Alone,” The Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982), pp. 382–392; S. Morris Engel, “Wittgenstein and Kant,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 20 (1970), pp. 483–513; Meredith Williams, “Wittgenstein, Kant, and the ‘Metaphysics of Experience’,” Kant Studien 81 (1990), pp. 69–88. I’ve discussed the Kantian flavor of some of Wittgenstein’s work in “Was Wittgenstein a neo-Kantian? A Response to Professor Haller,” Grazer Philosophische Studien vol. 45 (1993), pp. 187–202. For a lengthy, informed, but complex discussion of the relationship between Kant and Wittgenstein, and the scholarly interpretations of that relation, see Wallgren, Thomas. Transformative Philosophy (Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2006), esp. 217ff. I would like to thank an anonymous reader of an earlier draft for bringing Wallgren’s book to my attention; it is impossible to do justice to his sophisticated and nuanced treatment of all the issues involved.
In the tradition Kant works, mapped out by such predecessors as Clauberg, Geulincx, and especially Wolff, metaphysics is systematically divided into distinct parts. Metaphysica generalis has as its provenance “being qua being,” and the study of ens in genere, the traditional Aristotelian conception of “First Philosophy.” Importantly, Kant argues that the method of such investigations must be transformed, and that “the proud name of an Ontology that presumptuously claims to supply...synthetic a priori cognition of things...must give place to the modest title of a mere Analytic of pure understanding” (A247 = B303). Metaphysica special is treats the specific questions concerning (rational) theology, cosmology, and psychology. A brief sketch of the history of this division, and of its influence on Kant, is de Vleeschauwer’s “Wie ich jetzt die Kritik der reinen Vernunft entwicklungsgeschichtlich lesen,” Kant Studien 54 (1963), pp. 351–368. As de Vleeschauwer observes (p. 353), “metaphysics as a special discipline at the time of Wolff and Kant was still very young.”
Philosophical Investigations, I.309; cf. Culture and Value, translated by Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 43: “Thoughts that are at peace. That’s what someone who philosophises yearns for.”
Compare the Jäsche logic, Ak.IX, p. 17: “We would then have two parts of logic: the analytic, containing the formal criteria of truth, and the dialectic, containing the characteristics and rules by which we can tell that something does not satisfy the formal criteria of truth, although it appears to. Dialectic in this sense would have its good use then as a cathartic [Katharticon] of the understanding” (my emphasis); here again, what Kant says about general logic is equally characteristic of transcendental logic.
See “Stoff and Nonsense in Kant’s First Critique,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 1 (Jan. 1993), pp. 21–36; the point is developed much more fully in my forthcoming “Necessity and Possibility: The Logical Strategy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason” (Catholic University Press of America, 2008).
Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 334.
Guyer, p. 333.
Quoted in Vaihinger, Hans. Commentar zu Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Stuttgart: Spemann, 1887), vol. 2, p. 136; cf. pp. 35ff.. In his Kant’s Transcendental Proof of Realism (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Kenneth Westphal goes into substantial detail about the issue of the “neglected alternative,” raising issues well beyond what I can consider here (cf. esp. pp. 121ff.). Elsewhere (see nn. 2 and 14, above), I have argued that Kant’s conception of the judging subject is the result of an argument that puts forth as a set of possibilities an empirical/ectypal (Lockean) model, a rationalist/archtypal (Leibnizean) model, and his own. By showing that these three constitute an exhaustive set, and that the first two lead, ultimately, to an intolerable skepticsm, Kant gives an indirect argument for his own remaining “critical” model.
Guyer, p. 339.
Guyer, p. 335.
For the purposes of this discussion, I must ignore the technical distinctions among the thing-in-itself, the transcendental object, and noumena. For an historical overview of the reactions, from Jacobi to Nietzsche, as well as a good account of these distinctions, see Moltke Gram, “Things in Themselves: The Historical Lessons,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 18 (1980), pp. 407–31.
Ak. IV., pp. 314–315.
Melnick, Kant’s Analogies of Experience (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 152.
Thompson, “Things in Themselves,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Society 57 (1983), p. 42.
Gram, “Things in Themselves,” p. 429; compare the argument Kant gives at A104.
Guyer, p. 336.
Guyer, p. 333.
Similarly, the language that suggests human beings only have “access” to objects is through phenomena is to be resisted. Guyer uses such language in rejecting an argument of Allison’s; Allison argues that “objects must conform to the conditions under which we can alone represent them to ourselves as objects,” Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) p.37. Otherwise, we are involved in the contradiction of having “access” to an object stripped of those conditions that would make such access possible. For Allison, this notion of “access” is used in a very weak sense, and only in contrast to what goes on in the human experience of objects. For Guyer, this notion of “access” is used in a strong sense in asserting that Kant assumes we can deny spatiality of objects while “continuing to assume that we have access to such objects even when spatiality is a necessary condition of our knowledge” (Kant and the Claims of Knowledge, p. 339). On the modest epistemic interpretation of Kant’s thing-in-itself, this idea of “access” plays a minimal role; as Melnick puts it, “It is important to understand how little the notion of what we have access to, or what is knowable to us, is the basic one in this interpretation of a thing in itself” (Kant’s Analogies of Experience, p. 153).
Ak. IV, p. 352.
Melnick, Kant’s Analogies of Experience, p. 56.
Kant’s own reference is to a strategy that is analogous to “the first thoughts of Copernicus” (Bxxii n.); strictly speaking, hypotheses are found only within empirical science. Kant addresses the topic in “The Discipline of Pure Reason in Regard to Hypotheses” at A769ff. = B797ff.
Critique of Judgement Ak. V, p. 66 (Section 21).
For a sustained treatment of some of these views, see Kant’s relatively early (1766), empirically-oriented “Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics.”
Prolegomena, Ak.IV p. 263, 260.
Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Ak.IV, p. 404.
One example of this would be the famous “alleged” right to lie from benevolent motives; see Korsgaard, C., “The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing with Evil,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 15.4 (1986), pp. 325–349.
Walsh, W.H. Kant’s Criticism of Metaphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 254.
Kuehn, Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768–1790 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987), p. 202. As Kuehn notes, Kant “had to show as convincingly as he could that his own critical philosophy was rather different from naturalism” (p. 193), and this led Kant to emphasise his differences with the Scottish philosophers who, as Kuehn persuasively argues, had such an effect on Kant’s thought.
McGowan, Postmodernism and Its Critics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) p.33.
Ameriks, Kant and the Fate of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 38.
Transformative Philosophy, p. 93.
This raises an important distinction between “logical illusion” (here in the sense of general logic), and “transcendental illusion”: when an error in reasoning in general logic is made perspicuous, the illusion disappears (or at least should disappear), while transcendental illusion persists, is “inseparable from human reason,” and continues to call for correction (A298 = B354–55). I once heard Paul Ricoeur characterize the latter quite nicely as “the tragedy” of human reason.
These are the terms Wallgren uses to characterize the positions (Transformative Philosophy p.128 n.326). In addition to Wallgren, others engaging in this debate are Cora Diamond, Kenneth Westphal, John MacDowell, James Conant, and many others. Important considerations, which obviously can’t be addressed here, have also been introduced by Karl-Otto Apel and Donald Davidson; often neglected in these discussions are the insightful remarks of Jürgen Habermas (e.g. his collection Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1999), Hilary Putnam (e.g. his collection Realism with a Human Face, including a valuable introduction by James Conant (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), and Penelope Maddy (e.g. Second Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Here, of course, we see a contrast between Kant and Wittgenstein. Whereas Kant insists that philosophy will always be required to defend human reason from the seductive hazards of dialectical illusion, this conflicts with the well-known goal Wittgenstein sees for philosophy correctly carried out: to stop doing philosophy. In terms used earlier, Kant may be less sanguine than Wittgenstein about arriving at a place where “thoughts are at peace.”
This picks up on an image from the “A Preface,” where Kant cites Persius: “Tecum habita, et noris quam sit tibi supellex” (Axx), translated by G.G. Ramsey in Persius and Juvenal (London: Heinemann, 1918), IV.52 as “live in your house, and recognise how poorly it is furnished.” Kant makes a similar point in the much earlier “Dreams of a Spirit-Seer,” at a period when his thought was perhaps closer to Hume’s than at any other, by having Socrates exclaim “How many things there are, and see how I don’t need all of them!” (Ak. II, p. 369.) It is worth noting in this context Wittgenstein’s remark that “I have arrived at the rock bottom of my convictions. And one might almost say that these foundation-walls are carried by the whole house.” On Certainty, translated by Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), Section 248.
As Cora Diamond describes this “Kantian spirit,” this involves laying down “internal conditions of language’s being language, or throught’s being thought”; The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 32–33. The modal status of such conditions, and how one interprets what follows from adopting those conditions, is a topic of much dispute among scholars of Kant, of Wittgenstein, and, of course, those who consider the relationship between the two.
A more colorful way of making the point is provided by Franz von Herbert, as quoted by Ameriks (Kant and the Fate of Autonomy, p. 65): “experience is...presupposed, postulated, or however one calls it. Now if a skeptic were dumb and shameless enough to say ‘But is there experience?’ there is really no answer for such a type other than a beating.”
Tractatus, Section 6.51.
Norris, “What is Enlightenment?,” p.162.
I would like to thank an anonymous reader of an earlier draft of this material for some valuable references (see nn. 9, 10, 43 above) and very helpful comments.
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Mosser, K. Kant and Wittgenstein: Common Sense, Therapy, and the Critical Philosophy. Philosophia 37, 1–20 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9140-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9140-x