Category: metaphysics

Mon Oct 31 at 9:22am

Session 1

Kant’s great breakthrough is to redefine what it is to know something. In doing so he shifted the activity of philosophy, moving it away from what some might call wild speculation into the ways and things of the world that made up ‘metaphysics’, into a much more restricted world of ‘epistemology’. He is the key figure in a major turn in philosophy, the epistemological turn.

What is this epistemological turn?

It’s a response to a problem. What is the problem? Let’s call it ‘the scandal of philosophy’.

It’s sometimes claimed that philosophy never gets anywhere, that it doesn’t achieve anything. This claim is often one of comparison, comparing the huge achievements that have been obtained through the scientific method to the seeming emptiness of philosophy. The claim often says things like – philosophers keep talking about the same problems, philosophers can never agree on a solution to any problem, philosophers nit-pick and argue over trivialities. Often the basic problem seems to be that there is no way of learning the results of philosophical activity, there’s no-one there to, as it were, give us an answer to the meaning of life, even though philosophers have supposedly been working on this question for two and a half thousand years.

It’s a strange comparison and one that I would reject.

But of course, you would reject it, someone says, you’re a philosopher defending your futile exercise – you’re biased, you’re self-interested, you’re not being honest. There is, no doubt, a position that I speak from, one that, as a philosopher, as someone engaged in philosophical practice, is a position of the ‘insider’. From inside philosophy I claim that philosophical practice is worthwhile, productive, meaningful and even ‘socially useful’, whereas from outside this can easily be dismissed as self-indulgent hubris.

This is not a new issue, a new problem. Today we might find Brian Cox, or before him Stephen Hawking, decrying the uselessness of philosophy. In Kant’s time, however, a similar problem exists. In fact, we might even say that in Socrates time a similar problem exists. It might even be always the case that philosophy appears as a kind of strange and useless, even actively harmful, activity. The contemporary outcry over post-modernism, or relativism, or Derrida, or whatever, is in many ways just another incident in a long history dating back to the accusations of ‘corrupting the youth’ that were levelled against Socrates.

Kant, for example, is sometimes quoted in the following way:

“it always remains a scandal of philosophy and universal human reason that the existence of things outside us (from which we after all get the whole matter for our cognitions, even for our inner sense) should have to be assumed merely on faith, and that if it occurs to anyone to doubt it, we should be unable to answer him with a satisfactory proof.” (CPR, Bxxxix)

This is in the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, in a footnote. Quite a long footnote. In fact, a footnote that puts forward an argument that tries to prove the existence of things outside us. Now Kant does hold that there is a scandal to philosophy. A few pages earlier, for example, he speaks explicitly of such a scandal (Bxxiv).

But it’s important to actually put things in context and read what Kant is saying, because there’s something interesting here that is one of the keys to both understanding Kant and to understanding why the Kantian problem – more generally, that is, the philosophical issues which Kant addresses – still plays such a crucial role in modern Western philosophy (to such an extent that modern Western philosophy might be said to be haunted by the ghost of Kant, or to pivot around his centre of gravity).
Here is the more interesting point, more interesting that is than merely saying something like “philosophy is a scandal because it can never achieve any answers or results”.

Kant begins from the position that metaphysics is a “remarkable predisposition of our nature” (CPR, Bxxxii). We cannot help but wildly speculate, it is something in us that pushes us beyond experience into making claims about God, or morality, or the true. There is an innate metaphysical urge, a dynamic that pushes us to ask questions that go beyond the world. We are, we might say, born to transcend.

The problem is not in this activity itself, in this desire or urge to go beyond, to transcend, the problem is when philosophers think that this urge can be satisfied by reason, that rational answers to questions such as the existence of God are possible. Kant is direct – the issue is not with the “the great multitude (who are always most worthy of our respect)” (CPR, Bxxxiii) and their desires to go beyond what is in front of them – to find meaning, God, eternity, or souls for example – rather the scandal lies in philosophers who claim to do something that is impossible. Kants’ response is to try and lay out, with as much rigour as possible, exactly what it is that reason can do, and what it can’t. This exercise is logically prior to trying to answer any question. This exercise will produce limits to reason. If there’s a word that is central to Kant, it’s this, limit. What are the limits of reason? What can it do and what can it not do? Put more bluntly, what are the limits to knowledge – what can we know and what can we not know – what is possible, and what is impossible. This, in a nutshell, is the epistemological turn.

Now we have to back up a bit and distinguish two distinct components here – let’s call them the general desire towards metaphysics and the limit finding role of critique. It’s crucial to remember both these elements, in large part because in modern Western philosophy, when it comes to epistemology, the first of these tends to be forgotten. We tend to find a focus on knowledge, its limits and functions and various lines of dispute about possible ways to respond to the question ‘what can we know’? What is less thought about, written about and discussed is this first element, the general desire for metaphysics, ways in which we might respond, for example, to a question such as what do I want to know?

The tension between what I want to know and what I can know is important and runs throughout Kants’ works I believe. When, for example, he writes in the same Preface that he had to “deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (CPR, Bxxx), this is too easily read as simply religious faith, and in some ways dismissed for the vastly secular audience of contemporary philosophy. We don’t need to find room for faith, it might be claimed, so really all the matters in Kant are the ways in which he denies knowledge.

In some ways this is fine, it’s a partial reading of Kant, it adheres to the key ‘productive’ moment of his philosophy – the limits and arguments for the limits that Kant discovers. However, it’s neither a rounded account of Kant, nor one that is – outside philosophy – of that much interest. Maybe a little, but not much. Outside philosophy people are still most interested in those metaphysical questions – and the philosophers who have learnt from Kant simply respond with something like, well we can’t say anything about those things, we can’t know anything, you’ll have to just stick with faith. So, philosophy now becomes something deeply disappointing in a different way to the previous scandal of getting a different answer from every philosopher. Now philosophy becomes a source of almost arrogant disappointment, a little like the grinch adults who take pleasure in telling the young child that Father Christmas isn’t real.

Kant is more interesting than this. He has both components – knowledge and desire – and takes both seriously. When we approach Kant, when we try to get to grips with him, we need to hold onto that idea that both knowledge and desire are fundamental, and to be clear that desire is not somehow opposed to or inferior to knowledge. Both knowledge and desire are fundamentally important, the task is not to deny one in favour of the other, rather the job of the epistemologist (the speculative philosopher, the transcendental philosophy) is to try to diagnose bad mixtures from good mixtures. The transcendental philosophy is closer to the art of the poisoner than the skills of the scientific experimenter. It’s a matter of dosages, contexts, purposes. In particular the ‘disease’ to be diagnosed is called ‘transcendental illusion’. This wonderful phrase – transcendental illusion – is something to pay attention to as, in many ways, it’s the key problem that the Critique is aiming to overcome.

First let’s distinguish between empirical illusion and transcendental illusion. The former is something like an optical illusion. One of the things that is fascinating about an optical illusion is that, even when it is pointed out to you – in other words, even when you understand that it is an illusion – it can still operate. Illusion is not error, rather it is a particular way in which things appear. If you understand an optical illusion, for example, whilst you may not be able to not see it, you can correct for it in your understanding and in any implications you draw.

A transcendental illusion, however, is not quite so simple. Fundamentally, a transcendental illusion is not one located within the use of the senses, like an empirical illusion, but rather arises from an inherent dynamic in the use of reason. It is not a logical illusion, Kant claims (CPR A296/B353), because a logical illusion is dispelled as soon as attention is paid to the rules of logic that are being used. In other words, logical illusion is more like an error that can be corrected – we went wrong somewhere in our logic, and we go over it again and find our mistake, the illusion dissipates. Let’s quote Kant here:

“Transcendental illusion, on the other hand, does not cease even though it is uncovered (e.g., the illusion in the proposition: “The world must have a beginning in time”). The cause of this is that in our reason (considered subjectively as a human faculty of cognition) there lie fundamental rules and maxims for its use, which look entirely like objective principles, and through them it comes about that the subjective necessity of a certain connection in our concepts on behalf of the understanding is taken for an objective necessity, the determination of things in themselves. This is an illusion that cannot be avoided at all, just as little as we can avoid it that the sea appears higher in the middle than at the shores, since we see the former through higher rays of light than the latter, or even better, just as little as the astronomer can prevent the rising moon from appearing larger to him, even when he is not deceived by this illusion.” (Kant CPR, A297/B354, emphasis added)

But if we cannot avoid it, then how do we deal with it? Like an empirical illusion, we can correct for it. This is the role of a major part of the Critique, called the Transcendental Dialectic, which aims to show us how to identify the differences between subjective principles (and necessities) and objective principles (and necessities). Whilst this is a complicated procedure in practice, the basic idea – that there is something that easily can go wrong with reason and that it rests on a confusion between the subjective and objective – is enough to work with for now.