Abstract
Guyer argues that the traditional distinction between “one-world” and “two-world” interpretations of transcendental idealism is misleading; everyone has always recognized that there is a distinction between our representations and things external to them, and the question is only what Kant says about the latter. Does he strip them of spatiotemporality while leaving their existence untouched, as he says in the Prolegomena, or not? Guyer claims that Kant’s position is clear: there are things in themselves, independent of our representations, but they are not spatiotemporal, even though that is how we represent them. He then argues that recent attempts to reconstruct his argument without this dubious premise cannot do without it.
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Notes
- 1.
Karl Ameriks, “Recent Work on Kant’s Theoretical Philosophy,” American Philosophical Quarterly 19, no. 1 (Jan. 1982): 1–24; reprinted in his Interpreting Kant’s “Critiques” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 67–97.
- 2.
Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
- 3.
See Graham Bird, Kant’s Theory of Knowledge: An Outline of One Central Argument in the “Critique of Pure Reason” (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). Bird has more recently defended his approach at length in The Revolutionary Kant: A Commentary on the “Critique of Pure Reason” (Chicago: Open Court, 2006).
- 4.
Allison in turn credited two books by Gerold Prauss, Erscheinung bei Kant: Ein Problem der “Kritik der reinen Vernunft” (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971); and Kant und das Problem der Dinge an sich (Bonn: Bouvier, 1974) for help in formulating his position.
- 5.
Tobias Rosefeldt, “Dinge an sich und sekondäre Qualitäten,” in Kant in der Gegenwart, ed. Jürgen Stolzenberg (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 167–209.
- 6.
Rae Langton, Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
- 7.
Ralph C. S. Walker, “Kant on the Number of Worlds,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 18, no. 5 (Dec. 2010): 821–43.
- 8.
This is the very problem that the earliest critics of Kant’s not-yet-named transcendental idealism, namely Johann Heinrich Lambert, Johann Georg Sulzer, and Moses Mendelssohn, raised in their 1770 letters to Kant about his inaugural dissertation (see C 10:103–10, 111–13, 113–16, esp. 116), the question, namely: how could states of inner sense merely appear temporal when consciousness of them is also a state of inner sense, that is, when they appear to other states of inner sense? There will not be room here for further discussion of this special although important issue.
- 9.
I will use the term “ontological” rather than “metaphysical” because Kant uses the latter term in so many different ways that it might be best to avoid it when trying to talk about his views in one’s own voice.
- 10.
Langton’s approach, on Rosefeldt’s classification an ontological rather than methodological one-world approach, would then turn out to be simply an ontological approach, although one on which spatiotemporality is denied of only one part of things, their thing-in-itself part. To say this is already to suggest how problematic this approach is.
- 11.
Lucy Allais, Manifest Reality: Kant’s Idealism and His Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 28–33.
- 12.
I say this for the moment, speaking in the voice of the one-object theorist. Of course, once Kant denies that things in themselves are spatiotemporal, then there arises a question about how non-spatiotemporal objects can be numerically identical with spatiotemporally individuated objects, and indeed there are arguments, such as the Third Paralogism, in which Kant clearly argues that they need not be and cannot be determined to be. On this issue, see, among others, Dennis Schulting, “Kant’s Idealism: The Current Debate,” in Kant’s Idealism: New Interpretations of a Controversial Doctrine, ed. Dennis Schulting and Jacco Verburgt (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 13–16; and Nicholas F. Stang, “The Non-Identity of Appearances and Things in Themselves,” Noûs 48, no. 1 (March 2014): 106–36.
- 13.
See my review of Henry Allison’s 1990 book Kant’s Theory of Freedom in Journal of Philosophy 89, no. 2 (Feb. 1992): 99–110.
- 14.
Pistorius’s review was originally published in Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek 66 (1786): 92–123; and is reprinted in Albert Landau, ed., Rezensionen zur Kantischen Philosophie 1781–1782 (Bebra: Landau, 1991), 326–52; and Bernward Gesang, ed., Kants vergessener Rezensent: Die Kritik der theoretischen und praktischen Philosophie Kants in fünf Rezensionen von Hermann Andreas Pistorius, Kant-Forschungen Band 18 (Hamburg: Meiner, 2007), 3–25. Trendelenburg made the objection in 1840 in the first edition of his Logische Untersuchungen (Berlin: Bethge); in the third edition of 1870 (Leipzig: Hirzl), the objection is found at vol. 1, 158–70. In Frederick Beiser’s words, the objection is that “all Kant’s proofs for the subjectivity of space and time in the ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ do not exclude the possibility that they [space and time] are also valid of things-in-themselves” (Late German Idealism: Trendelenburg and Lotze [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014], 112). Beiser’s discussion of Trendelenburg’s debate over this objection with Kuno Fischer extends from pp. 108–21 of this book. Another recent discussion is Andrew Specht, “F. A. Trendelenburg and the Neglected Alternative,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22, no. 3 (May 2014): 514–34.
- 15.
On the contrast between the methods of the Prolegomena and Critique, see my “The Prolegomena and the Critique of Pure Reason,” in Kants “Prolegomena”: Ein kooperativer Kommentar, ed. Holger Lyre and Oliver Schliemann (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2012), 277–98.
- 16.
Kant suggests that there are two exceptions to the major premise of this argument, namely “the feeling of the pleasure and displeasure and the will [den Willen]” (B66). This may not have much bearing on Kant’s present argument, but his exception of the feeling of pleasure and pain is inconsistent with his “transcendental definition” of pleasure as a state in which we wish to remain and pain a state that we wish to leave (e.g., FI 20:230–31; CJ 5:222). Both pleasure and pain then involve a relation between among the present state of a subject and its wishes concerning its future state. The case of the will may be more complicated: if Kant means by this Willkür, that is clearly relational, involving the subject’s choice of (relation to) maxims, fundamental or otherwise; if by Wille Kant means, as he later does, pure practical reason, then perhaps what he is alluding to is his position that the pure practical reason, unlike merely prudential practical reason, is not determined by any relation to an external end but by its own form, and in this sense is non-relational.
- 17.
See note 6 above.
- 18.
I have tried to show how the antinomies can be resolved without transcendental idealism in Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), ch. 18 (pp. 385–415). For other arguments that Kant’s resolution of the antinomies requires what I am calling the ontological rather than merely conceptual interpretation of transcendental idealism, see Robert Merrihew Adams, “Things in Themselves,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57, no. 4 (Dec. 1997): 801–25; and Karl Ameriks, “Kant’s Idealism on a Moderate Interpretation,” in Kant’s Idealism, 38–40.
- 19.
In addition to “Kant’s Idealism on a Moderate Interpretation,” which is also reprinted in Ameriks’s recent collection Kant’s Elliptical Path (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012), 75–99, see in the same collection “On Reconciling the Transcendental Turn and Kant’s Idealism,” 100–119.
- 20.
Allais, Manifest Reality, 7.
- 21.
Robert Adams in particular has emphasized the practical dimension of Kant’s transcendental idealism. See Adams, “Things in Themselves,” 813–16.
- 22.
The review drafted by Garve but redacted by Feder appeared in the Zugabe zu den Göttingischen Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen, 19 January 1782, 40–48; and is reprinted in Landau, Rezensionen, 10–17. Translations of both the published version and Garve’s original text, which was subsequently published in Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, supplement to vols. 37–52 (1783): 838–62, can be found in Brigitte Sassen, ed., Kant’s Early Critics: The Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 53–77. Feder subsequently defended his own, empiricist approach to both sensibility and understanding in Über Raum und Caussalität (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1787).
- 23.
See also Adams, “Things in Themselves,” 819–20.
- 24.
See Kant’s first publication in pure philosophy, the NE of 1755, Proposition IX, 1:400–405.
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Guyer, P. (2017). Transcendental Idealism: What and Why?. In: Altman, M. (eds) The Palgrave Kant Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54656-2_4
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