Kant 2: Transcendental Idealism

okay welcome to the second of the lectures on Conte so last time we spent a lot of time developing Kant's answer to Hume in his theory of synthetic a priori knowledge so that we could have synthetic knowledge which yields something new tells us some new fact but yet which was also in some sense a priori meaning that it was necessary and universal and we arrived at this theory of synthetic a priori knowledge by examining the structure of our experience in trying to work backwards to what things would have to be true in order to make the kind of experience that we have possible in the first place now that led us to constants tension between phenomena and lumina which is what we're going to be talking about in this lecture so the phenomenal world as Kant uses the term refers to the world as it appears to us it is the world that we see taste touch smell hear and etc so it's just the ordinary everyday things that you are used to calling the real world when you're awake alert and moving around in your environment it's just we have to recall once again that in this tradition starting with roughly Descartes and his argument that we could have exactly the same sensory experience being exactly the same epistemic position and yet would there be nothing at all physical in the way that we think that it is right so the argument from dreaming and hallucination has again forced people to accept in this period the idea that there is what some scholars called the veil of perception of which our representations would stand between us and the objects which they're representing so that we don't ever actually come into contact with these objects in our experience but yet inferred that they exist as the causes of our experience so Conte is working in that tradition so when he says that the phenomenal world is the world as it appears to us what he means is it's the world that is representational this is the stuff that we when you look at a tree when you having your tree like experience we're that's a phenomena so that's just the world as it appears to you whereas the Newman 'el world is the world as it is in itself that is to say it's the world as it is when no one is looking at it so this distinction between phenomena and new manner really isn't anything new with cons in fact it goes all the way back to Descartes as we've already mentioned the difference between thinking for Descartes and represented objects that are the cause is the same for Locke substance for him is something that's outside of their experience and now Berkeley denies that there would be a new mental world at all because he denies there's anything out there in the world when we're not looking at it and so what Conte is doing here is really just renaming the distinction which we have been aware of in the previous lectures so this is why he's going to end up calling his view a version of transcendental idealism because he accepts that the phenomenal world is the world of experience that the world we have access to and could know about and yet he's not an idealist like Berkeley since he thinks that there are things which transcend our experience and that we can know about them by giving what he calls a transcendental argument which is the kind of argument style that we've been talking about where you ask what would the world have to be like in order for our experience to be the way that it is so let's work through this a little bit more carefully now it is part of cons view that really the only things that we've come to know about are the way the experience generated by our minds are going to appear to us and not anything about the new mental world in and of itself so con things that what science is doing is characterizing the way that our experiences appear to us so as long as we can find knowledge to the realm where it's possible inside the realm of experience we'll be fine Khan thinks that we that philosophers and and people in general are always led into some kinds of errors when they try to talk about things outside of their experience and these are the famous antinomies of pure reason that Khan talks about and we won't really discuss these in in this series of lectures or the way that Khan thought transcendental idealism could solve them but that of course is a very important and interesting part of Khan's philosophical views so for now what we just need to get a grip on is the difference between the phenomena and the new mana and the way in which Conte tells us that while we can't know anything about the new mana we can at least know that the new mana must exist and so this is very important for him this is why in his own mind he's not merely Berkeley because he has the new mana and he thinks that unlike Descartes and Locke he can't can actually give an argument that the new man I have to exist so you know Descartes argument relies on God as we've seen in the previous lectures so you have these experiences how do you know that there's anything out there mind independently well because God wouldn't allow you to be so deceived well Conte is not happy with any kind of philosophical argument that relies on God solving some kind of problem like this so Conte wants to give a and that's not to say he wasn't a religious person he was a deeply religious person and does discuss God and the role that it can't cease God playing in morality and practical reasoning about morality and so forth again we won't really be discussing those part that part of his view in this series of lectures but it's not though conside array from talking about religion it's just that he saw his project as a more philosophical one one that relied only on the resources of pure reason and seeing how far you could get there so he doesn't want to invoke this kind of deus ex machina the god from the machine that comes at the end it says though I guarantee that the world is the way that it is there and of course Locke also never gave an argument that there were these mind independent entities which primary qualities resembled the primary qualities as represented in our conscious experience so for Salah just goes and boldly claims oh well you know when you look at a red square the redness is a secondary property it exists only in your mind but the square that's a primary property and there's some substance outside of the mind which actually possesses that property the property of being square and you can know that the square in reality resembles in some sense the square this as represented in your experience but he never gives any argument for that way of thinking and then of course Berkeley just comes along and says yeah well how can some material object resemble your experience of that material object and this doesn't even make sense so clearly primary qualities are just as mental as secondary qualities now Kant wants to try to show that there's a way out of this kind of problem and he agrees with the Berkeley point that you know we can't say that the things outside of our experience resemble in any way the things that we experience the phenomenal world but nonetheless we want to be able to say that they are there with some degree of confidence so transcendental idealism then is consuela rican siyul all of these problems that he thought he had seen in the history of philosophy so let's just look at some pictures so these here are newman a-- so we can't really say anything about them as you'll see so I just have them here as white in the script squared which already is saying too much about them to be honest with you now one of these pneuma is actually you the transcendental self as cons calls it and the transcendental self is composed of these two elements there's the understanding and the Sensibility and we'll talk a little bit more about these in just a second but basically what their job is is to generate the kind of experience that we have so that the new mana then our taking in other new mana and somehow the manifold a sensor sensory manifold there which is operating on the cup with the concepts of space and time and object and unity and plurality and so forth somehow there's an operation of the mind whereby all that stuff is taken and put together into the very nice kinds of experiences that we have so this is just sort of giving you the overview of how transcendental idealism looks from Kant's point of view or one way of thinking about it of course as I'm sure you're aware if you go on to study any of these things in more detail you'll come to realize a lot of these are contested issues and contra Lee is one of these people and especially Kant who there are many many different interpretations of his work and these are just cartoon overviews of something that could be studied in a lot more detail but generally something like this is a pretty straightforward interpretation of the things that kahn says that there is a phenomenal world which is the world of experience and it's structured in a certain way so you can see earlier now drawing out the implications of how we can have synthetic a priori knowledge concepts look you think about your experience you're having this experience of that tree over there and you can know our priority that anytime you have an experience at all let alone of a tree that it's going to be located at some place so the tree is experience as being in some position relative to your point of view and you see here how I have it is like across the street from the house and a little bit before it and so forth and so on so we can kind of see that where the tree is from our point of view and that requires that there be space in order for the experience to be located but now notice that what has happened is we're not talking about the way the world really is here so Kant thinks that space and time are mental phenomena they are produced by the mind those are the pure concepts that the sensibility operates with and that is actually where space comes from so conte is denying here that space exists apart from our experience in the Newman award we can't say that there is space because to be located in space is a property of an experience of something and not a property of the thing that we experience so notice also the self is located outside of experience and this is going to be Consuela Humes problems so you can already see how this is supposed to work Hume says I look in my conscious experience I never find this thing called the self and even right inside the little bubble there there is nothing that we can really call the self of course there are are representations of ourselves and other people and so forth so there I am in red saying hi and there you are or they're saying hey what's up and of course we do have experience or phenomenal experience of ourselves but of course that's not what we mean by the self because the self is supposed to be something permanent that doesn't change through time and of course our experiences are changing so Hume is right that we never find anything in our experience we never have an impression remember Humes terminology we never find anything in our experience which we can identify as the self and con's going to solve that by saying well the self is the unifying principle of experience it's the transcendental lumina which is putting all this stuff together and we know that it's got to be there because our experience has to be ordered by something we can tell that it's ordered there's got to be something which is putting all that stuff together and so the nominal self is reached as a precondition of having experience at all so this is just constand 'red move here we find the thing that we're interested in that someone is criticized and we show how we can transcendentally deduce that it must exist so transcendentally to do suisse by a transcendental deduction count means we ask this question how could this be possible at all right what would the world have to be like given that this is in fact true and of course what's true is everything inside the bubble there as I haven't represented here so what we're asking is given the stuff inside the bubble how do what else can we know and what Conte is arguing here basically is that well we know that there must be a self because all of the things inside the bubble are put together they're made for us basically they're generated by something in ordered in a certain way as being located at certain places and being earlier later and so forth so it's got to be something which is putting all that stuff together and that's the self so that's a very interesting view that contest and the same is true of for instance we know that the fire so if we got to the close to the Sun we know that it would cause pain in us in exactly the same way even though we learn what causes what by encountering them we know that given the way our experience is put together we know that it's reliable and so forth we know that this is going to be something which is necessary but remember all of this is just talking about stuff that's inside the bubble so we're talking about the way which we will experience the world encanta saying we can know with absolute certainty that will experience the world as being connected by cause and effect as being ordered by itself and all of these other things which were thought to be problematic so but we haven't talked about newman 'el reality at all we haven't talked about anything which is outside of experience we can't know anything about that except that it's out there and this of course is the reason why some philosophers find Khan to be a bit inconsistent here and there's a large debate over whether this really is an inconsistency in Constantine but there does seem to be something strange in saying that well look you know we know that the numeral world's out there but strictly speaking we can't know anything but if we can't know anything then how can we even know that it's out there right and so but of course this is the problem Khan thinks our language is built to talk about experiences and the way that experiences and the things we encounter and experience it's not used to talk about the Newman --all world and that's a problem because when it whenever we try to say something about it of course we're using these words which are built to describe things which are located in space things which happen earlier or later things which are causes and effects and and so forth but yet we're trying to talk about something which is by definition none of those things so Khan says this is just a problem with language we don't have any way to really express it but yet we can say sort of in Locke's phrase there is a something I know not what which is out lies outside of our experience and is operating in these kinds of ways so as to produce these experiences that we in fact do have okay so I've already said all this stuff but let's go ahead and re sum up some these key claims that contest making so the noumenon mind the the real self for cons has these two components the sensibility and the understanding and what they do is they take in raw unorganised newman a-- and organize it into phenomena so they're taking it in all this raw inputs which is just the world as it is unexperienced by us and it's organizing using certain principles a coherent experienced world so contests saying well look you know the these things are like rose-colored glasses are the categories that's used by the understanding and the Sensibility and of course we can't ever take off our glasses and see what the world look like and every time we try to do that we in effect imagine seeing a table in a room by itself or something well all we have done is seen the table as we would experience it so all we can ever do is say well you know it would look like this it would be located over there it would be this tall it would be that far away from me but that's all ready to talk about things which are phenomenal these things are experienced and the table as it is in itself can't have any of those properties I mean to think about the table being five feet away or being a certain height or something is already talked about the way that I would experience it so we can't ever talk about these Newman objects or saying anything about them so we can't really say much about the way this process operates it's all outside of our understanding and we shouldn't waste our time trying to figure out ways to talk about these things which can't be talked about so we should stick to the things that are within our grasp which are the way that phenomena are organized and the the universal pure categories that our mind uses in constructing this kind of experience so well concepts you can deduce how many categories there are and what the mind is doing so as he's already given you some example of how he deduces that the concepts of space and time have to be used by the sensibility in generating experience so in order for there to be experience there has to be space and there has to be time already so we know that these are fundamental categories that the mind comes equipped with and not something that the world has independently of our experience this is some space is itself built by the mind context the understanding has twelve categories unity being an object plurality being more than one object totality being complete reality being real negation limitation substance or property cause and effect community interactions between things possibility or impossibility existence or nonexistence and being necessary or contingent so these are the categories that the understanding uses right the understanding as that rational part of the mind these are then concepts which are used in organizing the new mana and constructing the kinds of experiences that we have so with these two categories from the sensibility and these twelve from the understanding our experiences are organized in a certain way so but now notice again you can see what's what's going on here you can't say that the new Mona our real-estate something is real is already to talk about it as a phenomena so when you say that something is real what that means is that you can find it somewhere it's doing some work somewhere when you say that something exists that means in your experience you will encounter it when you say that something is a Unity an object or that something is a substance or has a property then you're already talking about the things that we can experience so Cantus you're going to deny the way that Locke would use the word substance to talk about new mana right so locks as well substance is this thing which is outside of our experience but in which these primary qualities are instantiated and cons can't say no substance is something that's in our experience substance is a thing that we can touch feel manipulate and so that all of these things all of these categories really are phenomenal and don't apply at all to Newman objects you can't say of a Newman a-- that it's one thing or many things you can't say that it's real you can't say that it causes anything or stands in relationships to other things or has properties or is a substance you can't say that it's necessary that they exist or that they don't exist none of these kinds of concepts apply to the Newman and kaan sees a lot of confusion in the way that previous philosophers have talked when they try to talk about things outside of their experiences Plato's theory of the forms for instance has the forms as substances as real things but they're outside of experience in this kind of important way and context well you see you've led yourself into a kind of confusion here it's true that there are think that there's something outside of our experience but we can't say anything definitive about it like that it's blue or that it's one as opposed to many so this is the difficulty that some people find in version of transcendental idealism is as soon as you start really wondering about the new mental world and what role it's playing Khan says well we can't talk that way we can't ask those questions so you can't say that the new mana cause your experience so you having this experience of a tree right here and I can't say that the object itself as as existing as I unperceived by me is the thing which is causing my experience of this green leafy area in my visual field because to say that something is a cause or an effect is already to locate it in the phenomenal world so this is the big price that conte is now paying so we know a lot about our experience we can tell how things are so with the cause-and-effect thing as we've already said the same cause must bring around the same effect because and we can tell that because otherwise our experience couldn't possibly be the way that it is it wouldn't be the case that we have this very structured regular experience we'd have more dreamlike experience so but again the cost here is heavy because we're not talking about the new mental world we're talking about our experience of the world and when we talk about atoms and quarks and electrons and quantum wave collapses and so forth Khan says well all you're describing is the way we experience the world or you're describing these complex relational properties which are all true of things as we experience them with but don't capture anything about the way things are independent of our experience so that these categories of substance and objects and all of the things which we think are real they are real because they're in our experience and that's the way they're generated and the way we must experience the world but they're not mind independent in this kind of sense that when there are no minds these things aren't there so we can't say of the Newman Oh world that they're space or time electrical charge mass or any of the things that we talk about when we do physics and science and so forth but only that there is something some kind of something out there which is the world the the way that things really really really are now of course common objective way things really really are is the way they appear in experience so that he thinks that the barclays kind of idealism is really easily refuted because what do you mean are there objects outside of my own mind of course there are there's the table over there the table is outside of my own mind and it's a real table and it's a mind independent object in cons but of course all that that means is that when I turn my head over there I'll see the table if I leave the room and come back in the table we'll be in the same position but it was before but occupying a different area relative to me and etc so that this whole debate is reinterpreted as a debate about the phenomenal world but and Khan thinks well you know our experiences so the one kind of argument he does try to give to establish that the Newman are there are won the argument from the Newman 'el self being required to order and construct the kind of experience we have and then the other one's a kind of interesting argument where he says look our experiences are ordered in time as before after later than earlier than and in order to order them in time there's got to be something which isn't moving by which we can compare because as we know all motion is relative so that's a kind of interesting idea there's got to be something standing still in order for it to even make sense that this is earlier or that's later or this comes before and that comes after and the things which are permanent can't be found in experience because in experience things are rapidly always in flux so there must be something outside of experience which is permanent by which were able somehow to measure this kind of change and that's an interesting kind of argument that Kant gives but nonetheless science doesn't study this mind-independent world this new in a world what science studies is the phenomenal world and we should just learn to live with that now of course there is another interesting problem for cons kind of view which some people have pointed out along the way and that is that it really can seem like Kant is what's called a solipsistic cyst is someone who thinks that they are the only person that exists and you can see why PM encanta never says this of course but later people when they're reading his stuff come to wonder they come to wonder well why isn't he one so just quickly we'll end on this so here's the kind of picture we had before there's the Newman --kw the transcendental self and then there's the phenomenal world up there and concepts well that's all very nice and we can deduce that there must be a self because what else would be ordering this and we can deduce that the Newman ax is there because our experiences are ordered in time and there has to be something stable there we can't know anything about it we can't say use any of our concepts to describe it but nonetheless there's got to be something out there in some sense and you know I have my phenomenal experience here of you know seeing other people but then of course that's the problem is all of you every person I encounter in my day-to-day life are phenomenal right I have an experience of you you have an experience of my voice I see you I smell you hopefully not in the bad way cetera et cetera et cetera but I can't ever know that there's a new mental self there and of course the same is happening from your point of view right your new mental self experiencing the world and yet somehow we are communicating with each other we think at least and so some people have wondered well how do you make sense of this right calm each person is locked in their own phenomenal world it would seem and how do we know that the other people that are in our phenomenal experience really are representative of other new mental selfs other transcendental entities as opposed to you know the kind of non-player characters that you find in your standard video game they're there they're doing things but in some sense they're all fictional and developed by the by the the thing which is generating the images in this case the game so now comps says talks in some ways as though he is a subsystem people who read the critique have commented on this and I don't mean to solve it here but merely to raise it up for something that's interesting about Kant's view is there there it's this it is a solution to Humes problem right if you adopt Consuelo case stuff you do get a solution because you can say that even though we don't have experiences or there's nothing phenomenal which we can trace these concepts back to we can still say that they're meaningful because they tell us the way our experiences are structured so that we can still know a priori that these kinds of things will be true and that the self exists and that cause and effect must be necessary and so forth but it comes at the very high cost of accepting transcendental idealism accepting the idea that all we ever do or all we ever can do all we ever should do is talk about experience particularly rien cies which follow each other and in the general conditions under which experience is possible and some people have thought well if that's the cure then the cure is worse than the disease but of course there are people who defend cons view and there are people who defend him as not even holding some kind of two worlds view like we've been talking about here but so as I've said the understanding cons is a difficult task and there is a lot that one could say about it in general though let's just sum up what we've been saying with words put this all together Kant tells us that he thinks that this is and these are his own words he thinks that this is a Copernican revolution in philosophy so remember Copernicus Copernicus reversed the position of the Sun and the earth it was thought for a long time that the earth was at the center and the Sun where the earth was stationary and the Sun revolved around it and of course in the Copernican scheme it's the opposite the earth is not stationary it's in orbit around the Sun and the Sun is at the center stationary now of course as we've already talked about both those views are wrong neither of these things are an absolute rest but it is more correct to say that the Sun is at the center of our solar system and the earth is in motion around it so Khan sees himself is doing something like what Copernicus did it used to be that the the world was out there and the mind acted kind of like a passive recorder of an outside reality so that it was just kind of accepting these inputs passively and sort of faithfully mirroring or resembling the stuff that was outside of it whereas Cohn sees it the other way around the human mind is constructing reality reality is something that's mental reality in its totality is a mental construct produced by the mind behind the scenes working according to certain universal laws and of course this is the way that he sees the coming together of rationalism and empiricism he's an empiricist in the sense that he thinks that science is a synthetic activity that science generates new knowledge and without doing the science we can't tell what's going to follow from what but at the same time he endorses our priori rationalist knowledge because we can know certain general facts about features of our experience which don't come from any particular experiences so they have to be based just purely on reasoning about what would make the kinds of experiences that we have possible and so Kant thinks that one of the greatest arguments for transcendental idealism is that it solves so many of the problems which is predecessors has so it solves Humes problem we can say we know there's a self we can say we know there's a mind-independent world we can say we know that cause and effect is necessary it solves problems about free will and determinism so conce is happy to say we'll look in the phenomenal world everything is determined by cause-and-effect but in the new monel world there is no cause and effect because there it so there is no determination by cause and effect because it's not those concepts don't even apply out there so we can have libertarian freedom we can be completely free free in a sense of being uncaused even though everything we experience in the phenomenal world is itself a product of causes and effects so you get a kind of reconciliation there now of course how it is that free acts of in the new mental world give rise to anything in the phenomenal world is of course another very deep question because it's not going to be by any way of knowing about cause and effects in a way that we know about them since those things don't operate in the númenor world okay well that draws us to a conclusion of this lecture on content of course there's much more that we could say but we're just going to have to leave it there for now

Channel: Richard Brown

Views: 59,363

Rating: 4.9099436 out of 5

Keywords: phenomena, noumena, Noumenon, a priori

Id: HE40mKqUkos

Length: 35min 50sec (2150 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 06 2011