Kant\'s Transcendental Idealism: A Hopeless Case?

See Newton (1990, pp.85-109, pp.823-60).
Encyclopædia Britannica Online (2015, l.1-3).
This should not suggest that the intuition actively alters reality. On Kant's philosophy, experience consists in the interplay of the intuition and the understanding, with the former passively receiving information while the latter actively implements a priori concepts so to organise that information into something fit for comprehension (Guyer, 2006, pp.53-4),
Whether the things-in-themselves and noumena ought to be considered synonymous is a topic of debate. See, for instance, Palmquist (1986, pp.121-2).
And it is in this view that Kant may be considered an empirical realist. See Guyer (1987, pp.64-69).
These limitations may, however, pertain only to the human perspective. Kant implements the possibility of God, morality, the soul, etc. existing as things-in-themselves as grounds for his moral philosophy (Guyer, 2006, p.213-38).
Langton (1998) espouses a modernised version of this interpretation, though it retains epistemic themes present in the two-aspects view.
This problem is more systematically presented in Langton (1998, pp.7-8).
Since things-in-themselves cannot be 'given' to the intuition, it follows that the subsequent concepts employed by the understanding cannot be validly applied to them. Noumena are thus not to be conceived within a causal framework (Braiche, 2008, p.9).
Allison's interpretation simultaneously deflects the early refutations of Jacobi.
Kant (1998) defines transcendental reflection in the 'Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection': 'The action through which I make the comparison of representations in general with the cognitive power in which they are situated, and through which I distinguish whether they are to be compared to one another as belonging to the pure understanding or to pure intuition' (p.367).
GEORGE P. SIMMONDS
May 2015, Oxford
KANT'S TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM: A HOPELESS CASE?

ABSTRACT: The interpretive mayhem engendered by Immanuel Kant's Critique has, in the space of two centuries, yet to provide a standard or altogether encompassing exegesis of transcendental idealism, a theory which on all counts lies at the very heart of Kantian philosophy. This paper aims to delineate two of transcendental idealism's most salient readings in hope of proffering a well-considering comparison and, ultimately, a suggestion that neither interpretation provides an account which comports unerringly with Kant's own promulgations.

PART I
KANT'S TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM

The Kantian doctrine of transcendental idealism concerns itself with the distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves, sc. objects as they appear to us and objects as they are in and of themselves. Kant's finishing thesis on the matter posits the human mind as an active contributor to the objects of its perception and thus, in some way, a direct authority upon the nature of reality as we know it (McCormick, 2012, §4).

An exhaustive exposition of transcendental idealism demands a full consideration of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1998), an enterprise well beyond the scope of this paper; in the 'Transcendental Aesthetic,' however, Kant assures us that his views on space and time are of particular relevance here, and it is upon these views that the present section will aim to focus (Janiak, 2012, §6). It may, for the sake of clarification, be useful to juxtapose the Kantian notion of space and time with that of Newton, whose transcendental realism epitomises the conception of external reality with which Kant chooses to compete. With an eye to the Newtonian view he writes:

Those […] who assert the absolute reality of space and time, whether they be subsisting or only inhering, must themselves come into conflict with the principles of experience. For if they decide in favour of the first […], then they must assume two eternal and infinite self-subsisting non-entities (space and time), which are there (yet without there being anything actual) only in order to comprehend everything actual within themselves (Kant, 1998, pp.166-7).

Here Kant presents the transcendental realist position as one that posits space and time as a pair of quasi-objects which exist independently of the human intuition. Without attending to Kant's direct objections to this perspective, it should suffice to say that he does not conceive of space and time as objects, quasi-objects, or indeed even things to be considered independent of human minds. For him, they are to be conceived neither as things-in-themselves nor properties that can be perceived or verified empirically; they are rather 'forms of intuition,' that is, 'a priori elements of sensible perception' that would not 'subsist in themselves' if one were to contemplate them in abstraction from the minds of those to whose perception they are essential (Guyer, 2006, p.53). It is in this that Kant proffers the notion of the synthetic a priori proposition: observations on these necessary forms are synthetic, since 'the predicate […] is not logically or analytically contained in the subject,' but simultaneously a priori because they are 'verifiable independently of experience,' since they essentially constitute it. These forms are not, in other words, borne out of the objects themselves but imposed upon them as necessary conditions of the mind's 'receiving' the external world (Schulting and Verburgt, 2011, p.5). When we look upon a tulip as it is situated within spatiotemporal reality, then, we are not seeing it as it is, but rather as it appears to us following the intuition's attempt to 'tidy' the world into forms more easily digested by the understanding (van Cleve, 1999, p.134).

But what is the nature of objects beyond the veil of the mind's duplicity? It is when we ask questions like these that we stumble upon Kant's controversial distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves or, more concisely, phenomena and noumena. While on the one hand we have the phenomenon, an object as we perceive it through the prism of our intuition and understanding, on the other we have the noumenon, an object 'unembellished' by the mind and thus in possession only of those properties that are intrinsic to it (Walsh, 1901, pp.464-5). Things-in-themselves are on all interpretations considered inscrutable: while Kant claims we are able to perceive phenomena and acquire empirical truths regarding their relations, he insists that we will never make the acquaintance of the 'unknown somethings' of which appearances are mere representations (Kant, 1998, pp.276-96). This, he says, is impossible from the human perspective.

As noted in Braiche (2008), a great deal of tension exists among Kantian scholars where transcendental idealism is concerned. While some interpret it as a doctrine interested in making ontological claims, others read the Critique to be propounding a more epistemic thesis (pp.2-3). The question of whether Kant intends to suggest that reality consists in two ontologically-distinct worlds—one phenomenal, the other noumenal—is pivotal here; and it is around this question that the following sections will work.

PART II
STRAWSON & THE NOUMENAL WORLD

Needless to say, it tends to be the thing-in-itself that provokes these interpretive disputes. Even Jacobi, one of the Critique's earliest commentators, famously claims that 'the "thing-in-itself" is the kind of concept without which it is impossible to enter Kant's system, but with which it is impossible to get out of the system' (Jacobi, 1912, p.304). Strawson's The Bounds of Sense (1996) takes similar issue with Kant's reliance on noumena and attempts to release transcendental idealism from its inconsistencies by attributing its metaphysical system to Berkeleyan idealism, that is, the notion that external reality is but a phenomenal illusion. 'The only element in transcendental idealism which has any significant part to play in those structures,' he writes, 'is the phenomenalistic idealism according to which the physical world is nothing apart from perceptions' (p.246). Despite this somewhat radical solution, Strawson's 'sortings of wheat from chaff' are broadly acknowledged and stand among transcendental idealism's most canonical interpretations (Bennett, 1986, p.340).

In reaching these conclusions Strawson occupies himself with the troublesome relationship between phenomena, noumena, and our cognitive faculties. He begins from what has become known as the 'two-worlds' reading of transcendental idealism, a view from which things-in-themselves and their appearances occupy two distinct realities to which humanity is privy to the latter alone. The former, that noumenal 'sphere of supersensible reality,' must on Kant's view transcend our intuitive notions of space and time as well as those 'pure concepts' which follow from them (such as that of causation) (Strawson, 1996, p.236). This interpretation is not without textual evidence. In Kant's own words:

We should consider that bodies are not objects in themselves that are present to us, but rather a mere appearance of who knows what unknown object; that motion is not the effect of this unknown cause, but merely the appearance of its influence on our sense (Kant, 1998, p.435).

On this reading, then, we are to consider phenomena and noumena as ontologically-distinct objects, one inhering within space and time and the other in some sort of transcendental realm of aspatiotemporal things-in-themselves. This is not to say that these worlds do not interact, however: Strawson insists that human experience must be the result of some 'complex quasi-causal relation' between phenomena and noumena, a connection he terms the 'A-relation' (Strawson, 1996, p.236). It is by way of this ostensible quasi-causality that noumena and human minds are able to 'collaborate' in their formation of the phenomenal world (Braiche, 2008, p.9).

But Strawson does not believe this relationship comports with Kant's earlier conception of things-in-themselves as unknowable objects that do not conform to the modes of experience to which phenomena are subject. In support of this thesis he questions two aspects of the transcendental-idealist system in hope of bringing the notion of the thing-in-itself into question (Matthews, 1969, pp.206-7).

First, if noumena are unknowable and cannot be cognised, how is that we are able to know that they cause phenomena, or that they are in fact there at all? On Strawson's reading of Kantian epistemology, things-in-themselves do not fall within the category of 'possible human experience' and thus possess neither the capacity to be verified nor any significant meaning as theoretical concepts. To insist that noumena exist despite this would be to approach transcendental idealism as a rationalist, where to claim that they do not would be to fall worryingly close to the extreme idealism of Berkeley (Strawson, 1996, pp.237-40). Kant here faces a dilemma, for he fits comfortably into neither camp. Second, if such notions as space, time, and causation do not exist beyond the realm of appearances, how is it that the A-relation is possible? How is it, in other words, that noumena are able to provide us with the material from which our cognitive faculties are able to construct phenomena? This, too, is a problem for Kant since it is not clear how this might occur without presupposing concepts of causation and, by extension, the forms of space and time (Ibid., pp.246-8). While his epistemology is challenged on the first confutation, his ontological account of things-in-themselves is undermined in the second.

The Critique provides no easy way out of these difficulties and this, for Strawson, 'tolls the death knell' for transcendental idealism (Braiche, 2008, p.2). If we recall his statement that the doctrine's only remaining foothold 'is the phenomenalistic idealism according to which the physical world is nothing apart from perceptions,' we see that Strawson chooses to equate Kant with Berkeley, for they each deny the external existence of phenomena yet fail to affirm the things-in-themselves that would otherwise ground them in reality (Strawson, 1996, p.260). And thus Kant is, in terms of his idealism, nothing more than an 'inconsistent Berkeley' (Allison, 2004, p.4).

PART III
ALLISON'S TWO ASPECTS

How might transcendental idealism be navigated from Strawson's impasse? According to the account proffered in the Bounds, Kant is describing two different classes of objects: the tulip as we see it, and the tulip as it is in and of itself. This is a metaphysical interpretation, and from this approach arises Strawson's refutation. Allison does not read transcendental idealism this way; rather he views it as an appendage to Kant's epistemic concerns. For him, the Critique does not intentionally discuss the ontologies of two distinct-yet-somehow-interactive tulips, but a single tulip considered in two different ways (Allison, 2004, pp.229-35). This, at least theoretically, diverts transcendental idealism away from the ambush Strawson prepares in his own exegesis.

Allison does not contend that there is nothing to be considered beyond phenomena: while he does not award things-in-themselves their own ontological status in the way of Strawson, he nonetheless acknowledges them as an important aspect to Kantian philosophy. On his view, sometimes linked with the 'two-aspects' position, what distinguishes a thing-in-itself from its appearance is not the domain of existence it occupies but the way in which the human mind considers it. Given that our cognitive faculties actively process and order the external world, thus giving rise to phenomena, it follows that an object of this reality may retain its own sort of existence where these devices are not present. This does not, however, entail the treatment of this existence as a separate, ontologically-distinct entity, for it is simply an object of the phenomenal world considered in abstraction from the conditions under which we perceive it as such (Allison, 2004, pp.33-6). This interpretation is no more lacking in textual evidence than Strawson's:

We can have cognition of no object as a thing in itself, but only insofar as it is an object of sensible intuition, i.e. as an appearance […] We [presume] the distinction between things as objects of experience and the very same things as things in themselves (Kant, 1998, p.116).

As suggested above, phenomena and noumena are 'the very same things' but thought about within different contexts. We consider phenomena as they appear to us within space and time, adorned with all the concepts part and parcel to human experience; while noumena are these same manifestations considered (via transcendental reflection) in the notional absence of such conditions. In this they retain a sort of methodological or formal status, but by means an ontological one. This kind of formal significance is in no way peculiar to human thought: within the discipline of theoretical physics we often consider objects beyond a selection of their properties, but we do not insodoing commit ourselves to the belief that these abstracted entities 'exist' in any real sense of the word (Allison, 1978, pp.53-4).

To avoid Strawson's critique, Allison emphasises noumena's negative role as more a description of what phenomena are not than an account of what might exist beyond the realms of possible experience. This account gives things-in-themselves a viable position within Kantian epistemology without forcing upon them the unwieldy metaphysical significance found in two-worlds interpretations. It shifts, in other words, the axis of the phenomena-noumena distinction from the way that things are to the way (or whether) our cognitive faculties respond to them (Braiche, 2008, p.14).

PART IV
A HOPELESS CASE?

It seems fair to say that the accounts of both Strawson and Allison more-or-less conform to Kant's original proposition; they would not, otherwise, be so widely discussed as valid interpretations. It is worth considering, however, that throughout the Critique Kant himself appears to oscillate between a two-worlds and a two-aspects position. Transcendental idealism is by no means a straightforward discipline to interpret, and it could be that our failure to reach a univocal reading of its conclusions owes to the indecision of its author (Matthews, 1969, p.204). To end on a quotation from Wood (2005):

I think much of the puzzlement about transcendental idealism arises from the fact that Kant himself formulates [it] in a variety of ways and it is not at all clear how, or whether, his statements […] can be reconciled or taken as statements of a single, self-consistent doctrine. I think Kant's central formulations suggest two quite distinct and mutually incompatible doctrines (pp.63-4).

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