Kant's Transcendental Idealism

hi i want to talk to you today about immanuel kant's copernican revolution in philosophy kant sees himself as doing for philosophy just what copernicus did to astronomy and to our general perspective on the universe kant thinks he's switching our perspective on the entire philosophical universe and in some sense he did richard rorty has said that god is the person who turned philosophy into a profession basically because his thinking was so difficult that you had to be a professional to understand it and kant is difficult nevertheless he transformed the philosophical world in a fundamental way everyone writing after kant whether they approve of his revolution or not nevertheless is in some sense responding to kant and seeing things in the light of what kant argued and what god accomplished what did kant accomplish i think there's a sense in which he was right that he did fundamentally transform the way we think about certain philosophical problems but there's another sense in which he was doing the reverse of what he claimed he really wasn't like copernicus as i'll argue he is somebody who is like the inverse of copernicus somebody who switched our perspective but away from something like copernicus's perspective towards something much more ancient in any event let's take a look at the view that kant describes as transcendental idealism it is from one point of view a kind of idealism nevertheless it's not exactly a traditional kind of idealism and in fact in his greatest work the critique of pure reason kant argues against idealism he has a section entitled the refutation of idealism so if transcendental idealism is an idealism at all it's a very odd kind of idealism as we'll see that phrase critique of pure reason should be understood as ambiguous in part he is critiquing pure reason and pointing out that it has severe limits on the other hand it is also a critique conducted by pure reason it is pure reason's critique and so in that way it is really something like pure reason critiquing itself well what did copernicus do copernicus transformed our understanding of the universe and transformed the science of astronomy by reversing our perspective on our position in the universe he did it by saying look according to an older conception we are at the center of the universe the earth is at the center everything revolves around us however he said that's not right instead something else is at the center at least of the solar system we revolve around it so here is an earlier ptolemaic conception of the universe there in the center is the earth the sun revolves around the earth and then other things revolve around the earth as well including the outer spheres containing the stars copernicus on the other hand said no no it's not like that at all in fact the sun is at the center of the solar system the earth and the other planets revolve around it well kant sees himself as doing something like that now exactly why why does he think he's transforming our perspective in this well he sees himself as responding to the contrast between rationalism and empiricism a contrast that dominated early modern philosophy kant himself was brought up in the rationalist tradition he was a student of christian wolf who was a student of leibniz and so he's thought of things very much as leibniz had he sees himself as part of that rationalist tradition however he says that then he read david hume and hume awoke him from his dogmatic slumber at that point he changed his perspective and realized that he had to do something to try to combine the insights of both the empiricist and the rationalist tradition how did he do it well the rationalists people like alvasena descartes and leibniz had held that universality and necessity the kind you find in scientific laws for example but also in mathematics required synthetic a priori knowledge knowledge of the world that was independent of experience we weren't gaining a knowledge of universality from our particular experiences we weren't gaining knowledge of necessity from our contingent experiences instead they were being supplied from some other source something that was not from experience at all not a posteriori so it had to be a priori but it was really telling us something about the world not just about language or concepts and so it had to be synthetic as well well hume said i think you've got the problem right but the solution wrong you're right that universality and necessity causation and a variety of other things aren't coming from your contingent and particular experiences of the world however they aren't coming from reason at all there is no synthetic ah priori savior waiting in the background to say i have the concepts you need i have the principles you need i'm going to allow you to get to those conclusions instead hume says look here's what's going on you see something happen a bunch of times you get a feeling of expectation that it will happen again it's that feeling it's that sentiment inside you it's not something rational there is no bit of knowledge underlying it instead it is simply a passion it is custom or habit but here not a kind of cultural custom instead a customer habit of the mind the mind does this but why does it do it because it has this feeling inside so it's all based on something internal these internal impressions to use his language kant says i think hume is right that the source is in us but he's wrong to say it's something outside of reason it's just a feeling it's just sentiment kant says instead no it is something inside us in that respect he's right but it's really part of reason itself so in that sense he remains in the rationalist tradition he says descartes leibniz other rationalists basically had it right in that there are synthetic operiori bits of knowledge that supply the gaps here that take us from contingent particular experience to universal and necessary conclusions but it's not as if they are things that are sort of automatic instead once we realize their character we realize they're very limited in what they can do for us they can apply to the appearances the things we actually perceive in experience but they have no further application well how does he get there here's the question kant asks and it's a disturbing but very fundamental question do our concepts revolve around objects as realists for example think or do the objects revolve around our concepts we've talked about the possible gap between mind and world and now we can say well you might not think the problem is that the world is what it is and mind has the job of conforming itself to the world kant says what if it's the reverse what if the mind is what it is and the world has to conform to it that's his revolution there isn't that serious a gap between mind and world not because mind is adapted to understanding the world but because the world is adapted to being understood by mind here's how he puts it it has hitherto been assumed that our knowledge must conform to the objects but all attempts to ascertain anything about these objects are priori by means of concepts and thus to extend the extend the range of our knowledge have been rendered abortive by this assumption let us then make the experiment whether we may not be more successful in metaphysics if we assume that the objects must conform to our knowledge well that is his remarkable revolution he says the problem isn't getting our ideas to conform to the objects in the world instead it's the object's problem to conform to our mind now that's a bit surprising right i mean you might think look it's my job to investigate to find out about the world god says relax it's the world's job to conform itself to you now at first glance that seems bizarre uh you might say no i don't think it's really like that it's a little harder than that right why would i have to go to school if it's the world's job to conform itself to my mind it looks like i don't have to learn anything i don't have to exert any effort it's the world's job to match me but of course that's not quite what he means what he means is that our minds are constituted in such a way that they can only process the information that our bodies and our minds are receiving from the world in certain ways and they form out of that information they're receiving a conception of objects those objects as we understand them are constructed by the mind humans right about that objects are being constructed by us but he's saying it to that extent the objects have to conform to the mind because the mind is building them but the world is giving us this information it's not as if that's a bizarre idea no the world is somehow transmitting information to us but then we are processing that information and what we do with it forces it to conform to the structures of our mind so the objects as we understand them are part of the output of that process so of course they conform to the mind it's not the mind's job to conform to those objects those objects are constructed in such a way that they do conform to the basic structures of my mind that's how it's possible for me to know something operatory about them let's take a look at how kat compares himself to copernicus he says we may make the same experiment with regard to the intuition of objects if the intuition and hearing means intuition in the sense in which avicenna used the term it's something like sensation or perception not just sort of what we mean by intuition where i can't really explain it but i have this feeling it's not feeling it is really a matter of sensation or sensibility anyway if the intuition must conform to the nature of the objects i don't see how we could know anything of them a priori if on the other hand the object conforms to the nature of our faculty of intuition that is to say our faculties of sensation and of understanding i can then easily conceive the possibility of such an a priori knowledge so if it's my job to match the world i have no reason to think that my mind is built in such a way that i could have a priori knowledge of the way that world is that world is independent of my mind it's foreign to my mind i have no reason to believe that my mind matches it and certainly no guarantee that it will so it looks as if i can't know anything about it a priori independently of experience of it but if the world is something that has to conform to me or let's be more precise really if the objects have to conform themselves to me because i'm the one constructing out of all this information i encounter those objects then i can know something about them a priori so khan says we here propose to do just what copernicus did in attempting to explain the celestial movements when he found that he could make no progress by assuming that all the heavenly bodies revolved around the spectator he reversed the process and tried the experiment of assuming that the spectator revolved while the stars remained at rest so earlier people thought the heavenly bodies are revolving around us but instead copernicus said what if we're revolving around this particular heavenly body the sun that changes the perspective we're revolving it's stationary it's not the case that we're stationary and everything's revolving around us now i mentioned that i think kant is in a sense doing the reverse why because realism would say our concepts have to revolve around an external world a world that is external a world of objects that are independent of our minds but kant says no no no the world of objects revolves around us the world of objects has to revolve around our concepts our concepts aren't revolving around those objects so i think there's a sense in which this is really a ptolemaic revolution kant is really taking us back to a picture where we're at the center of the world we're at the center in the sense that our minds are constructing the objects in the world and so the structure of the world is the result of the structure of my mind think of it this way earlier philosophers thought of let's say a window on the world or a mirror in fact a common image was the mind is the mirror of the world and so the mirror might get cloudy it might get dusty it might get broken but the understanding was look it's essentially a mirror of the world at least when it's working well that's the ideal khan's saying what if it's more like a projector the world is something like what's displayed on a screen and the world is the projector projecting it onto the screen now of course there's some input into the projector i mean it's receiving some information from something it has a film strip or a digital file it's doing something that it's processing and producing that projection nevertheless you might say if i know something about that projector then i can know something before i even see the images projected about what they're going to be like i might know okay the projector is like this suppose i know for example it just produces black and white images then i'll know that what i'm about to see is in black and white it's not going to be in color right and i can know that before i even see what's on the screen because i understand the structure of the projector now if this is something like a mirror you might say look i don't know what's going to be on the mirror i have to know what it's reflecting that's the more traditional perspective but if the mind is like a projector then if i understand the nature of the projector i'll understand something about the nature of what's going to be projected before i even have any experience of what is actually projected in just the same sense if the mind is like a projector if it's the mind that is giving structure to the objects of the world then it is possible for me to know something about those objects a priori independently of experience of them because i can understand something of the nature of the projector so there is a sense in which kant is really saying look the mind doesn't have to revolve around the world the world revolves around the mind and by putting ourselves at the center that's the sense in which i think he's really doing something like the reverse of the copernican revolution well here is how he describes it and he'll see here how he gets to rationalist conclusions he says before objects are given to me that is a priori i must presuppose in myself laws of the understanding which are expressed in concepts a priori to these concepts then all the objects of experience must necessarily conform so in order for me to be able to understand anything about objects a priori independently of experience there must be certain laws of the understanding in other words if before i know anything independently of experience about what's going to be projected on that screen i have to know something of the laws by which that projector operates and there better be concepts i have a priori concepts ways in other words i have of understanding things that are independent of what i'm getting off the images on the screen so i have to have some innate ideas i have to have some synthetic a priori knowledge these laws of the understanding so kant does turn out to be a rationalist in something like the traditional sense there are innate ideas these pure concepts of the understanding something that he calls the categories and we'll talk about those separately there also have to be synthetic a priori truths which he calls the laws of the understanding if there are these categories built into the mind these a priori concepts or innate ideas and there are also synthetic operary truths or laws of the understanding understanding those is going to enable me to understand the nature of this projector and that will enable me to understand something universal and necessary about what is about to be projected an experience even independently of and prior to experience however something important is you might say a byproduct of this way of understanding things these things apply only within the realm of experience i can say something universal and necessary about what's going to appear on that screen i can say okay it's going to be black and white and it's going to be of a certain kind of resolution because i know something about the nature of the projector but now if you say okay fine tell me something about the input that projector is receiving i have to say i i don't really know okay or maybe i do maybe i know enough about the projector to say a little bit about it to say well it's it only understands digital files you know or it's an old-fashioned one it only takes a film strip you can't take a flash drive and do anything and it won't play a dvd and so forth so i might know something very general about the input but i'm not going to know much about it if you want to say but yeah i know i want to know what's in these digital files for example if that's the input i don't know i can tell you here's what it's capable of doing with them and so i can tell you it's going to be of this resolution and it's all going to be in black and white and it's going to be a projection on this screen of that size but that's all i can say i can't tell you anything about what is actually going to be in the input and so i can only say something about things as i'm going to experience them i i can tell you something about what will be on the screen i can't tell you anything about the world beyond what's on the screen so i can't tell you anything about the inputs and just so kot will say i can come up with universal and necessary knowledge independently of experience now and that's a beautiful thing but it applies only to the realm of experience if you then say well i'm interested in things going beyond experience like i'm interested in the nature of god i'm interested in the nature of the will and whether the will is free i want to know whether we have a soul and whether that soul is mortal or immoral if it exists god says i i can't tell you any of that okay that's not something that's covered here i can't say a word about any of that i can tell you something about what kinds of experiences you're capable of having but that's all i can't tell you about anything and in fact it will turn out i actually can't tell you anything about things as they are in themselves i can tell you something about the appearances something about the way they're going to look to us and experience i can't tell you what they really are independently of that experience god gives us a kind of transcendental argument we've seen this in descartes but kant is the one who makes this form of argument really famous here's the general structure of it q is a necessary condition for the possibility of p in other words p would not even be possible if it weren't the case that q but p is the case p is not only possible it really is actual therefore q well in the form kant uses it it takes on this structure remember descartes had talked about clear and distinct ideas using this form of argument kant says this ah priori concepts and laws of the understanding are necessary conditions for the possibility of experience experience would not even be possible unless we had some of these a priori concepts and laws of the understanding to put it in terms of my metaphor it's as if he's saying look nothing would be on that screen if we didn't have a projector and that seems possible it's like look in order for anything to appear on the screen of experience something has to be projecting it if we don't have a projector and if it doesn't work if it doesn't have any way structure and it won't do anything nothing will appear on the screen experience wouldn't even be possible but experience is possible we're having an experience right now so he says there have to be a priori concepts there have to be laws of the understanding but what results is well we only know in things our priori what we ourselves place in them we know nothing about what they are in themselves we only know what we put into them so the laws that govern the realm of experience are in us those are those laws of the understanding but that does mean that we can know things only as they're experienced by us not as they are in themselves so i mentioned at the outset that kant does end up being a rationalist but an odd kind of rationalist he ends up being well kind of an idealist but an odd kind of idealist something of a realist you could argue but an odd kind of realist here are the questions on which he agrees with either descartes or hume descartes here being the paradigm of a rationalist of the early modern period and hume being the paradigm of an empiricist of the early modern period is there synthetic a priori knowledge descartes the rationalist says yes hume the empiricist says no kant says yes it's based on those laws of the understanding it applies only within the role of experience but we do have synthetic operatory knowledge so there he's agreeing with descartes and leibniz and the other rationalists does that knowledge extend beyond experience descartes says yes i can prove the existence of god for example i can talk about primary qualities matching our ideas that is to say primary qualities matching the qualities that are really in the thing hume says no we don't have any knowledge beyond experience all of our knowledge that is not purely verbal is merely a posteriori kat says no he agrees with hume about that we can't have synthetic a priori knowledge but it does not extend beyond the realm of experience can we know the world as it is not just as it appears to us but as it really is independently of us descartes leibniz and the other rationalists say yes hume says no in fact i'm not even sure what you mean you would say about this world as it is beyond the realm of experience what's that you're talking about substances you're talking about actual ah none of that makes any sense kant agrees with hume here he says no you can't have any knowledge of the world as it is and so we can't know anything beyond experience we can't know the world as it is we can only know something about it as it appears on the screen of experience but of the things that we ordinarily think of as objects that he calls objects of experience or appearances well we can know lots of things about those let me show you what kant is really doing kant is transforming our way of understanding how the mind relates to objects so let's start with plato in the little picture we've drawn here is a mind and a thought of an object let's say a triangle since i've been talking about those all semester what's going on there according to plato well in part it's that triangle affecting the mind causally in some way through perception we recognize that thing as a triangle so i'm able to think of this thing as a triangle only by virtue of having access somehow to a form an abstract universal triangularity and so the mind is also turned toward that form of triangularity that's the form and the object participates in the form so i'm actually capable of knowing that's a triangle because my mind manages to relate itself to the form that actually is in the object so this constitutes not only thinking that this object is a triangle but also if it really is a triangle then getting it right and having knowledge that it's a triangle the first thing that kant does is to say hmm these forms and these innate ideas really along the way i have something like an idea of triangularity that relates that form this particular thought that that thing is a triangle is mobilizing that general concept or idea and according to plato then that would be an idea of triangularity would relate to this directly khan says um really i i don't think there's anything out here i'm talking about pure concepts of the understanding so actually let's think of the mind as extending to include that form that is to say the forms could really be understood as identified with the concepts now i don't even have to draw that distinction i can just say this is now a pure concept one of these ah priori concepts and then i can say aha what's going on here the object participates in that actually the object is formed by my conceptual activity so this arrow goes in one direction this is something like a relationship not just a participation but of projection so the mind is projecting this object of experience now wait that object of experience was causing me to have this thought that's a triangle right kant says well not exactly not exactly this is really a creature of the mind now something is my mind is presumably getting some kind of input here through perception so i've got a faculty of sensibility here i'll say you know this is like my eye and something is giving me this this is the thing in itself the thing as it is independently of my mind but this thing the thing that is being projected by my mind that's an object of experience or an appearance so he does talk about these in several different ways an object of experience which is the same thing in his language as an appearance and he then introduces a technical term for that drawing from ancient greek sources and says objects like this are phenomena phenomenon for one of them but i'll make them all plural here since i made that one plural the phenomena are the appearances they're the objects of experience and now we can say oh wait i see what's going on here something it's something like look the projector is getting some kind of information right it's some got some kind of input it's projecting this stuff on the screen so this is something like the image on the screen being projected by the projector this is whatever the projector is using to generate what it's doing and doing the projection well what is that exactly i don't have direct experience of that or at least let's put it this way it does seem like i do in the sense that it's i guess having some effect on me in the first edition of the critique of pure reason he's happy to say yes i'm gathering information and this thing in itself is in some way causing my mind to start this process causing me to have this perception and so on but as we'll see later cause turns out to be one of these categories that applies only within the realm of experience and by the realm of experience he means the kinds of things that are projected on that screen so these aren't projected so well or in a certain sense they are but they don't appear there as anything like this form so in the end he says i i can't actually officially save it this is causal so really i'm going to take this arrow and kind of make it dotted to indicate there's something happening here right something is going into the projector i guess if i can even say going in but what the relationship is between my mind sensibility and the thing in itself i can't really quite say now once we've got something like this picture and by the way this is something that is already in a sense in barkley even in a sense in descartes and lock because now the question is this thing is what we've referred to as the cause here i'm going to put cause in scare quotes since we can't officially say that in cotston not really a cause it's not clear what it is over here we've got something like what actually appears and now the question is what's the relationship between these two what's the relationship between that triangle as it appears in experience and the thing in itself whatever is affecting the mind ultimately to lead it to experience that triangle as we experience it there are different approaches we might take so for example aristotle would say well i'll tell you what this relationship is it's identity the cause of perception is represented in the perception and is represented in the way these objects of experience are so actually the object of experience the appearance that is just the thing in itself that is the cause of perception well that's one answer descartes and locke say well that's a little too simple because after all it's really the atoms it is something described by physics that is having an effect on our bodies and that our minds project something but it includes primary qualities as well as secondary qualities and the primary qualities are really in the thing itself but the secondary qualities aren't so the shape the motion yeah that's in the thing itself however the color the texture the taste the smell that's something being supplied by the mind that's only part of the phenomenon so if you're descartes or lock you're going to say this isn't exactly identity but there is a relation of similarity between them they're going to share primary qualities but they won't share secondary qualities in fact the secondary qualities won't be down here at all what else could we say well barkley looks at this picture and says i don't like this at all because once we get rid of the identity now the skeptic can come in and say aha there's this unbridgeable gulf between the objects of experience and the things themselves how can we ever know anything about the world we can't and so indeed this is the point of the argument from comparison in philo and in sextus we can never get across that gap we have no idea whether our objects as constructed whether the appearances match anything in reality and so we'd end up in skepticism berkeley says well it'd be great if we could identify these as aristotle does it would be great if we could say the primary qualities at least match as descartes and loch do but he says since i can't experience these i got no way to do that so what does barkley do he says get rid of those okay get rid of the things in themselves then no problem you're an idealist and so idealism is usually construed does exactly that yeah get rid of the thing in itself and we're going to look at the philosophy of hegel that is one of the main criticisms that hegel makes of khan he says you don't need the thing in itself get rid of it and then we've got idealism in its traditional form well what is kant doing he doesn't identify them he doesn't say they're similar and i'll tell you in what respects they're similar as descartes and loch do he doesn't get rid of the thing in itself entirely as barkley and hegel do so what does he do he leaves it a question now when it first says well that's just great kant but i think that is precisely the way it gets left in the end he says there are the objects of experience the appearances the phenomena we can know about those we can know things about them in a synthetic a priori fashion i can really know about the world not just verbal truths about these not just logic not just math even but i can know all sorts of things about these because i can know something about what's going to be projected on the screen by understanding the projector so i can know something about these in a synthetic operatory fashion i can't know anything about these i can't know anything about them synthetic a priori but actually he's going to say i can't know anything about this relation now he will argue in that section i referred to the refutation of idealism they have to be here don't get rid of them they're doing something but i can't tell you what they're doing and in principle i can't tell you what they're doing they lie beyond the realm of experience they're not on the screen and i can only base my knowledge on what's in my mind and what's on that screen so i can't know what the relationship is in fact i can't officially even say they exist because existence is something i use for the things that are on the screen but but look i can say um i can't get rid of them if you say but they don't exist i i said no i i that that it won't work if we do that and so we'll see why later but that as i see it is where kant leaves us we're in a picture where something like the forms these abstract universals they're in the head it's these operary concepts of the understanding we project the objects of experience so we can know something about the objects of experience before we even encounter the inexperience we can know this ah priori because we can understand the nature of this projection but can we know anything about the inputs to the process and how they relate to what appears on the screen of experience no in the end we can't know anything about that at all

Channel: Daniel Bonevac

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Id: JE-pY-1J_WA

Length: 35min 16sec (2116 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 03 2021