The Revolutionary Kant: A Commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason

Preface

In 1962 when I published Kant’s Theory of Knowledge the standard works in English on the Critique of Pure Reason were the commentaries of Kemp Smith and Paton. Even more recent work, such as T. D. Weldon’s Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, adopted the commentary style but in a more concise way. Since that time renewed interest in Kant as a live philosophical influence has produced a large number of monographs on Kant with a quite different style. They tend to focus on a particular aspect of Kant’s work and to emphasize its philosophical rather than historical significance. Even where such books deal with a single Kantian work such as the Critique of Pure Reason they may focus on only a limited range of its texts in order to underline a philosophical issue. Even where they provide a comprehensive outline of such a Kantian text they rarely comment on it in the detail of those earlier commentaries.

That new philosophical interest in Kant is a welcome development but it has brought some disadvantages. It would not be surprising if some standard accounts of Kant, widely used in teaching, had become so influential that they were treated as a substitute for Kant and generated discussions which had little relevance to his views. My belief is that discussions of the first Critique have, for these reasons, become increasingly detached from the text and from Kant’s own thought. It has consequently seemed natural to me, and not objectionably regressive, to return to the earlier commentary style and to pay a more detailed and comprehensive attention to the text. This is not the first, and will certainly not be the last, call to get back to Kant’s text, but it is not intended to focus on the text and its historical background to the exclusion of current philosophical interest. The aim remains the same as in Kant’s Theory of Knowledge, but I seek also to ensure that that philosophical interest matches Kant’s own discussion. Almost all the material now included was available to me in the late 1950s and in these areas I simply report and update that earlier work.

On the philosophical side my view of Kant’s Critique has not substantially changed, although some work since the 1950s seems to me to throw valuable new light on Kant’s position. I do not believe that a sharp distinction between epistemology and metaphysics can be carried directly over to Kant’s work, but Kripke’s related classification of the necessary/contingent, a posteriori/a priori, and analytic/synthetic contrasts helps to understand Kant’s central account of synthetic a priori judgments. Michael Friedman’s account of Kant’s philosophy of science and mathematics in Kant and the Exact Sciences has thrown a new light on those aspects of Kant‘s work. Martin Schönfeld’s The Philosophy of the Young Kant has similarly clarified Kant’s pre-Critical thought and the change to Critical philosophy in the period after the 1770 Dissertation. Henry Allison’s extensive survey of the whole Critical corpus is a remarkable and valuable revolutionary account to which I am greatly indebted. These, and many other, recent works have helped to extend my understanding of the Critique of Pure Reason.

The central theme in the commentary is to highlight a conflict between what I call traditionalist and revolutionary accounts of the Critique. The former ascribe to Kant an exhaustive idealist dualism of mental states, ideas, and transcendent things in themselves and then note the inevitable tensions and contradictions which arise from Kant’s apparent attempts to escape from that tradition. The latter regards Kant as explicitly denying that exhaustive division in his complex contrast between empirical and transcendental forms of both idealism and realism. Such an account relies on a grasp of Kant’s central transcendental/empirical distinction which is generally dismissed by traditionalists as inscrutable. The revolutionary approach avoids many of the traditional conflicts in Kant because it ascribes almost nothing of the traditional idealist framework to Kant. The traditional inconsistencies which appear when he is represented as both endorsing and rejecting traditional idealism are liable to disappear in the revolutionary account, but the latter is recommended not because it relieves these apparent inconsistencies but because it reflects more accurately what Kant’s text says.

It has seemed clear to me since the 1950s that there is only one acceptable way of resolving that conflict, namely the rejection of the traditionalist position, reflected in the title The Revolutionary Kant. I have been encouraged in that conviction by the acknowledgement of my earlier view in Henry Allison’s and Gerold Prauss’s books, but also by the responses of traditionalists. To dismiss revolutionary accounts as merely anodyne, or as heroic but misplaced, has seemed to me to reflect little more than a prejudice that Kant, as a traditional philosopher in the eighteenth century, must have accepted the framework he inherited despite his own vehement complaints against it. It testifies to the dead weight of the tradition Kant tried to supersede but does nothing to support the traditionalist view.

Traditionalists typically claim that Kant’s text commits him to a belief in the reality of things in themselves, or noumena, even though this leads to transparent contradictions. That verdict was supported most comprehensively from the text in Erich Adickes’s Kant und das Ding an Sich, but even in the 1950s I thought his position mistaken. I did not at that time document my objections in Kant’s Theory of Knowledge, but since the issue is fundamental to the distinction between traditionalist and revolutionary accounts I devote some space to Adickes’s evidence. It is not my primary intention to appeal extensively to other accounts of Kant but I have noted cases which demonstrate a marked convergence on, or divergence from, my views. The critical comments are mainly directed at undoubted examples of a traditionalist position and at apparent inadequacies in supporting it. The general aim is to show that there can be no justified assumption of Kant’s traditionalism, while a detailed survey of the text offers a clear expression of a quite different, revolutionary, position.

The commentary style has the advantage of making explicit the detailed textual evidence for its claims, but it has other benefits and other disadvantages. One potential benefit is that in surveying the text in the order of Kant’s exposition it provides a step-by-step introduction to his argument. It may consequently be useful in providing students at all levels with such a guide to a notoriously complex and difficult work. It enables students to focus on specific sections without feeling that they have immediately to read all the others, or immediately to pursue in detail the related philosophical issues. The preliminary expositions and summaries of each section offer initial guidance supplemented by separate philosophical discussion. For the reasons given I would like students to be encouraged by the survey to examine Kant’s text for themselves and to reach their own view about his final position, rather than to accept the authority of existing interpretations. I would like them, of course, to abandon the temptation to understand Kant in a traditionalist way but I recognize that traditions are inherently hard to dislodge. In this case the embedded tradition consists not only of an orthodox account of Kant as a confused enlightenment idealist but also of a Cartesianism which still haunts contemporary philosophy.

Corresponding disadvantages are that the commentary style makes for some repetition and allows less room for further philosophical development. I have tried to minimize repetition but do not expect to have succeeded, and I recognize that there are inevitable restrictions on the further pursuit of the philosophical issues. Kant’s views point to many issues which I would like to have pursued but cannot do so within the given constraints. On the other hand, in the context of an account of Kant’s philosophy it would be wrong to pursue current developments in philosophy which have no real connection with his views.

I gratefully acknowledge discussion, support, and valuable comments from many members of the North American and United Kingdom Kant Societies, but especially from Henry Allison, Sally Sedgwick, Michael Friedman, Gordon Brittan, Howard Williams, and Richard Aquila. I would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for help with secretarial work, and Cindy Pineo for her patience and guidance in copy-editing.

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Introduction

Any attempt to understand historical philosophers is a two-way enterprise. It must be anchored in the philosophers’ own texts but it may trade on later, and current, philosophical discussion. Fruitful interaction between these will throw light both on the historical figure and on current philosophy but only within certain limits. Too slavish an attention to the text may inhibit philosophical interest; too enthusiastic a link with current work may be anachronistic. These lessons hold for any attempt to understand Kant’s Critical philosophy. It is necessary to draw firm, even if not quite precise, boundaries between what Kant actually says, what his words may evidently mean, what we might develop out of his insights, and what goes beyond his own understanding. In particular it is necessary to avoid any sheer prejudice against evidence which puts an historical figure like Kant at odds with his contemporaries.

Just as overenthusiasm for current issues may generate anachronism, so commitment to a supposed historical tradition may distort by concealing novelty and originality.¹ That is particularly true of historical figures who explicitly represent themselves as revolutionaries breaking away from the very tradition they inherit, and Kant is preeminently such a revolutionary philosopher. Everyone recognizes the revolutionary aspirations of Kant’s Copernican experiment, called a revolution in our way of thinking, (Bxxii) and the new direction implicit in the title Prolegomena to any future Metaphysics conceived as a Science.² The question is not whether Kant is a revolutionary but only of the nature and extent of his revolution. In this section I sketch an opposition between two general ways of attempting to understand Kant: the traditionalist which locates him in the previous tradition, and the revolutionary which places greater weight on his evident wish to break with that tradition.

Kant’s revolutionary aims offer to resolve the central and familiar conflicts in the modern tradition, associated above all with Descartes, between the subjective origins of our experience and its supposed objectivity. That has been widely accepted, but it has also been generally thought that his attempt failed. That supposed failure is marked in a spectacular conflict between what Kant calls appearances (Erscheinungen) and things in themselves (Dinge an sich). Kant restricts our knowledge and experience to appearances and denies that we can ever attain knowledge or experience of things as they really are in themselves. It would be natural to conclude that such a doctrine pessimistically denies us any knowledge of reality, of things as they really are, and confines our experience to the way those things merely appear to us. It may seem to legitimize only a subjective experience and to reject the very objectivity which Kant claimed to establish. Kant himself was adamant that no such conclusions could be drawn from his account. For him appearances themselves provide the required objectivity, while the claim to know things as they are in themselves is no more than an illusion. Commentators have recognized that Kant deploys a complex apparatus to explain this position, but there is still no agreement about that apparatus or about the consequent understanding of his view.

An illustration of such conflicts in understanding Kant is provided by one of his earliest published critics, namely, Christian Garve, and by Kant’s response. The two reviews of Kant’s work by Garve, supplemented by Feder in 1782–83 (Göttingischer Anzeige von gelehrten Sachen),³ and Kant’s response in a letter of 1783 and in the appendix to the Prolegomena are well known, but it is worth emphasizing their central points. In the reviews Kant’s transcendental idealism is characterized in the following way:

(1)The world and ourselves are transformed into ideas, and all objects originate thereby out of appearances. . . . All knowledge originates from certain modifications of ourselves which we call ‘sensations’. . . . If there is a real thing in which ideas inhere—if there are real things independent of us—we know nothing of the least properties of either. Nevertheless we assume, or postulate, objects. (Landau 1991, 10)

Kant’s position is said to be:

(2)just like Berkeley’s in building on sensations as mere modifications of oneself . . . out of which the understanding makes objects. It makes them and creates nature. . . . Just as understanding makes a series of objects out of our sensations . . . so reason aims to extend the series to its initial and ultimate members. But all principles of reason lead to illusion or contradictions if they are extended to establish real things and their properties. . . . (Landau 1991, 10–14) [Our sensations tell us nothing of the real qualities of things; they are only changes in us brought about through certain qualities in the objects which are themselves unknown to us. These modifications appear to us as objects. So a contradiction emerges between sense and reason: The former says: ‘There are objects’, but the latter says: ‘We know nothing of their properties’; so the existence of things remains doubtful. It is a matter of indifference whether we reduce things to ideas, or transform the ideas into things . . . though the latter conforms better to our ordinary language.] (Landau 1991, 54–55)

Given this background view of Kant it is not surprising that the reviewer reaches the conclusion:

(3)(For Kant) it is a fallacy to infer absolute properties of oneself from inner sensations, just as it is to infer bodies from outer sensations. In this way common, or ‘empirical’, idealism is disarmed; not by proving the existence of bodies but by the disappearance of the benefits associated with a conviction of our existence over that of bodies. (Landau 1991, 15)

Garve’s framework is that of a traditional normative epistemology within which Kant is said throughout to adopt a higher idealism. The discussion makes clear that the central issues concern the justification of our beliefs about outer objects, but there is some unclarity about whether those outer, or independent, objects are regarded by Kant as illusions generated by reason, or constructs generated by the understanding out of our subjective sense experiences. The following claims stand out: Kant’s idealism accepts the initial reality of ideas, as sensations or private mental states, and gives the understanding the task of making or creating objects and nature from this base. But it seems that that creative task cannot be completed by understanding or reason, so that its outcome in genuine knowledge of real independent objects remains doubtful. If the aim was to establish that antiskeptical conclusion, then it fails, or as the review more discreetly puts it: [This contrast between appearances (phenomena) and unknowable things in themselves (noumena), leads to unavoidable and unanswerable questions] (Landau 1991, 41, 51). It fails not merely by leaving the existence of such real independent objects dubious, but also by abandoning the traditional idealist security of genuine knowledge of ourselves.

Garve’s claims stand as an example of traditionalism in virtue of their inherent and exhaustive dualism of subjective sensations and real independent things (in themselves) which must be created or postulated but remain problematic. In what must be one of the first occasions of its use, Garve’s phrase the mind making nature is intended to capture that traditional dualism as Kant’s basic position. But the specific idealist problem occurs within the more general scope of a normative epistemology which responds to skepticism about an adequate foundation for our knowledge. Garve can find only two possible responses to this issue in Kant. Either he appeals to common sense, which is notoriously insufficient, or he returns to a traditional foundationalist idealism. In Garve’s eyes such a return is particularly unhelpful in this case since Kant has abandoned the standard idealist certainty of self-knowledge.

This is the fundamental idealism which Garve accepts from the tradition and which he ascribes to Kant. It leads, in Garve’s mind, to the noted confusions between outer, independent objects constructed by the understanding from sense experiences and illusory objects of reason. The connecting link between these two conceptions arises from the assumption that a construction of the outer world from private sensations will fail and consequently make reference to the objects of that outer world transcendent, that is, objects of reason. The idealist problematic itself puts outer objects, at least initially, beyond the veil of perception, but if the proposed construction fails then those objects must remain inaccessible, as Kant himself insists. Garve evidently believes that Kant never succeeds in resolving these ambiguities.

It was that background idealist epistemology to which Kemp Smith appeals in his claim that Kant was in the end the victim of conflicting tendencies.⁴ On one side is a Berkeleian idealist tendency to attach a fundamental priority to our subjective sensations as the sole material content of experience in order to generate a justified belief in independent objects. On the other side is a realist tendency to accept the existence and properties of independent objects beyond any experience verifiable in the medium of ideas. Kant is represented as an idealist in the existing tradition seeking to resolve those problems about the existence of independent objects, but falling into confusions about their status either as subjective ideas or as unattainable objects of reason. That assumed normative, idealist dualism of subjective ideas and independent, transcendent objects is the core of what I will call traditionalist accounts of Kant.

After the first review, Kant had an apologetic letter from Garve (July 13, 1783) to which Kant gave a friendly reply (August 7, 1783) with relatively little philosophical substance (Vorländer 1964, 180–99; Landau 1991, 10–17, 34–55). Kant explains that he had objected not to the disagreements but to a persistent tone of disparagement and arrogance which he found in the original review. Beyond that he stresses the twofold significance of representing objects as appearances or as things in themselves, and also the extent of the revolution he envisaged for metaphysics: "If you look again at the whole account you will notice that I am not just reworking metaphysics in the Critique, but developing instead a quite new and so far untried science, namely the critique of a reason which claims to judge a priori." Even in this brief, initial comment Kant expresses his revolutionary intention to break away from Garve’s tradition, but in the appendix to the Prolegomena (Ak. 4.372–82) Kant gave a more detailed and more aggressive response with the same general message. I list summarily the central points in that response.

Kant begins by distinguishing two ways of judging such a book as his. In one the current assumptions of metaphysics are endorsed and the new work is judged against that background. In the other it is recognized that the work conflicts with those assumptions on a reasoned basis, and the focus of attention is on the argument against them rather than on the novel conclusions. Kant leaves no doubt that Garve chose the former, inappropriate method rather than the latter. Since Garve’s central claims ascribe a traditional, Berkeleian idealism to Kant, in (1) and (2), it is natural to see Garve’s ascription of idealism, with the resulting insoluble problems, as Kant’s primary target.

The reviewer is said not to have grasped Kant’s project, for example, in confusing the transcendent with the transcendental. Kant offers as explanations for these failures either Garve’s impatience, or his disinclination to reform metaphysics, or his inability to question the assumptions of an unthinking school metaphysics. This point is repeated several times. The claim that Kant’s position depends on the two appeals to common sense and to idealism is said to show Garve’s complete lack of understanding in fighting with shadows. Kant may well have had in mind the passages in (2) above which refer to reason’s inability to establish truths about objects. Garve plainly confuses the illusions of a transcendent reason with the constitutive principles of an immanent understanding, partly through failing to grasp the contrast between the transcendent and the transcendental (Ak. 4.373n). Since those terms apply both to inner and outer objects, both to mind and world, to treat the transcendental as transcendent is bound to leave Kant, as Garve thinks, without an adequate foundation in either. Garve’s complaint of a lack of proof of bodies’ existence may have encouraged Kant to provide his new formal proof in the second-edition preface (Bxl) and Refutation of Idealism (B274–79).

Kant also complains that the review wrongly objects to his new technical vocabulary, and says that this would be like objecting to Euclid that he provides a needless language to make incomprehensible claims which would be better expressed without it. The comparison with Euclid is an important underlying thought in the Critique. Although Kant distinguishes sharply between mathematics and metaphysics (B740–66), he nevertheless sees significant parallels between them. In a similar way he consciously models his own Copernican revolution on his understanding of methods in natural science (preface, Bxviiin). I suggest later that formal mathematics, and especially Euclidean geometry, provided a model for his own primary project of drawing an abstract map of the fundamental concepts (Grundbegriffe, Elementarbegriffe) in our experience.

Kant returns to the issue of idealism in an important passage (Ak. 4.374–76) by sharply contrasting his own doctrine with that of Eleatic idealists up to and including Berkeley. The latter hold that "all knowledge through the senses and experience is illusion, and truth lies only in the ‘Ideas’ [Ideen] of pure understanding and reason."⁵ Kant by contrast holds that all knowledge of things from pure understanding or pure reason is illusion, and truth lies only in experience. Kant repeats this often misunderstood and sometimes disbelieved claim in Prolegomena §13, that his view is precisely the opposite of traditional idealism, and elaborates this with reference to the treatment of geometry. According to Kant, idealists such as Berkeley treat space as an empirical idea known only through experience, while he treats geometry, rightly, as an a priori discipline. This is an important point because it raises the questions How does Kant understand empirical idealism? and What is meant here by the expression empirical idea? One answer is that the relevant empirical idealism treats space as an a posteriori idea and so treats formal a priori geometry, wrongly, as an a posteriori natural science. That answer, however, implies that Kant’s objection is directed against empiricism rather than idealism, even though the latter is the target on this occasion.

Another answer is that the empirical idealist treats space as an idea in an empirical sense, that is, as an occurrent mental state from which it would be impossible to obtain an a priori formal geometry. That latter answer is supported by Kant’s repudiation of the idealism ascribed to him by Garve with its exhaustive dual contrast between mental sense experiences and transcendent ideas of pure reason, and by paragraph 3 of A24. Kant’s considered view of geometry, as of experience generally, is that its objects are neither mere sense experiences nor transcendent. That is how Kant summarizes the contrast between his view and that of the idealists at the start of the passage, and how he presents it subsequently in a footnote (Ak. 4.375). There he associates idealism with Platonism and its Schwärmerei in regarding pure reason as providing genuine knowledge of reality and sense experience as illusion. Kant reverses that verdict in treating the claims of pure reason as illusory and those of the senses as providing truth. For Kant the existence and character of outer, physical objects has to do with the senses and not with a realm of objects of pure reason beyond the veil of sense experience. Objects of pure reason are for Kant transcendent, and beyond our knowledge, but are not to be identified with outer spatial objects in our experience.

Kant’s powerful hostility to Garve’s account yields some conclusions and raises some questions. Garve has failed to understand the extent to which the Critique rejects current metaphysics, and has reached his unfavorable verdict by measuring its claims within and against a framework of traditional philosophy, a school metaphysics, which Kant rejects. Kant evidently believes that a reviewer should have noticed the intention to reject that framework, and then evaluated the book by considering the grounds for that rejection without assuming previous metaphysics. Such an attitude expresses the strength of Kant’s hostility to the tradition but raises the question how far Kant wished to go in rejecting it. Garve’s criticisms are made within the framework of both a normative and an idealist epistemology, and Kant might have rejected either or both of these aspects of the tradition.

On one side he certainly rejects a traditional idealism in which knowledge can be only either of the senses and illusory, or of pure reason and transcendent. On the other he rejects Garve’s belief that his answer to skepticism appeals either to transcendent objects of reason or to common sense. Garve thought both responses inadequate and Kant evidently agreed. He bypasses idealism in the Refutation of Idealism, which proves the existence of outer empirical objects, not transcendent things in themselves, and he rejects an appeal to common sense against skepticism in the Prolegomena preface. [Hume’s critics] found a more congenial resource, dispensing with any insight, namely the appeal to common human understanding. . . . Properly viewed it is no more than an appeal to the judgement of the masses: a chattering at which philosophers may blush, but where popular wits can criticise and triumph. (Ak. 4.259)

Garve’s interpretation locates Kant’s work in the existing frameworks of a normative epistemology and a standard idealist dualism. It addresses the central skeptical problem of our knowledge of an independent reality but offers a confused and highly dubious resolution of it. It throws up immediately many of the ambiguities and contradictions for which Kant’s theory has been traditionally criticized. Kant is supposed to assume a traditional idealism but to offer a theory which rejects it. He assumes that our knowledge can be only of subjective sensory states or objects of pure reason, and yet denies that either can justify knowledge of an independent reality. Kant denies that our knowledge is purely subjective, and yet accepts our ideas or sensations as the only material basis for that knowledge. He rejects any appeal to common sense in answering Hume’s skepticism, and yet insists that a commonsense empirical realism is correct.

Kant’s own response to these apparent inconsistencies is to imply that they arise only because Garve cannot escape from a routine school metaphysics which the Critique questions. In rejecting all previous metaphysics Kant denies that he is working within that assumed traditional framework so that Garve has simply failed to appreciate the extent to which Kant’s metaphysics of experience is revolutionary. That metaphysics of experience is well-characterized in the footnotes (Ak. 4.373 and 375) where Kant speaks of his primary interest as the fruitful bathos of experience and rejects the schwärmerische, transcendent tendencies of proper idealism and its windy metaphysics.⁶ The fruitful bathos of experience which interests Kant evidently contains more than the idealist restriction to subjective sense experiences and transcendent objects.

1.Contemporary Commentators

It may be thought that Garve’s account of Kant is widely recognized as naïve, and that no commentator now ascribes these positions to Kant. Probably few commentators hold exactly the same views as Garve, but many meet the basic requirements for what I have called traditionalism. These are the underlying framework of a normative, antiskeptical, foundationalist epistemology, and an idealist insistence on the dualism of subjective ideas and transcendent objects in justifying or constructing our knowledge of an independent reality. Some commentators who regard Kant as a classical phenomenalist put more weight on the construction of an independent world out of subjective sense experiences and insist on a similarity between Kant and Berkeley. Others put more weight on Kant’s epistemological commitment to the reality of transcendent objects or things in themselves. But any commentators who emphasize these points within the traditional framework qualify as traditionalist as I shall use the term. By the same token, those who deny that underlying framework of antiskeptical normative epistemology with its associated idealist dualism, and who take seriously Kant’s aims of rejecting that tradition in order to provide a revolutionary reform of philosophy (Ak. 4.258) I shall call revolutionaries. That these disagreements still continue among commentators can be seen in the recent publication of James Van Cleve’s Problems from Kant (1999) which is determinedly traditionalist, and Arthur Collins’s Possible Experience (1999) which is avowedly revolutionary. Van Cleve’s traditionalism classifies Kant as an honest-to-goodness idealist, while Collins, as a revolutionary, denies that Kant is either an idealist or a foundationalist.

In later discussions I shall claim that influential commentators such as Guyer and Strawson⁷ also ascribe to Kant that underlying dualism of subjective ideas and transcendent objects and qualify as traditionalists. They echo Kemp Smith’s claim that Kant was the victim of those conflicting tendencies. Strawson does not endorse the view that Kant’s position is the same as Berkeley’s, but he says on several occasions that Kant is closer to Berkeley than he (Kant) acknowledges (1966a, 22, 35). Like Garve, Strawson ascribes to Kant a phenomenalistic idealism, in which outer objects are reducible to representations, and describes it as an extreme subjectivist position (1966a, 173). There are, no doubt, more sophisticated versions of idealism and phenomenalism, but this language undoubtedly pushes Kant towards the most basic view of Berkeley’s philosophy.⁸

On the other side of that assumed dualism, commentators such as Garve or Jacobi have represented Kant as committed to the existence of the items contrasted with sense experiences, that is, transcendent objects, things in themselves, or noumena.⁹ Things in themselves may be identified, as in Garve’s review, with independent physical objects, or may be regarded as an underlying causal factor in our creation of such an independent world. Adickes’s doctrine of the double affection outlines a traditionalist commitment to an unknowable reality of things in themselves as an essential part of Kant’s theory.¹⁰ The doctrine represents Kant as committed to parallel causal interactions between transcendent things in themselves and minds on one side, and between objects of experience and empirical minds on the other. Kant is represented as endorsing both kinds of causal relation even while admitting that only the latter is knowable. Strawson (1966, 235–38) echoes Adickes’s view in noting Kant’s causal language both for phenomena and for noumena, but in any case commits Kant to the reality of supersensible things in themselves.¹¹ He says, The doctrine is not merely that we can have no knowledge of a supersensible reality. The doctrine is that reality is supersensible and we can have no knowledge of it (1966, 38). Strawson represents Kant’s view in Garve’s way as the mind making nature (1966, 22), in which the mind which makes nature is not the ordinary empirical mind but its supposed transcendent counterpart, the mind in itself. Kant’s firm denial of such a view of reality at B195, B270, and B517,¹² coupled with his vehement rejection of Garve’s similar view, demonstrates the need for some resolution of this evident conflict of interpretation: "The possibility of experience is, then, what gives objective reality to all our a priori modes of knowledge" (B195).

Rae Langton, in Kantian Humility, accepts that Kant is committed to things in themselves as transcendent causes of our receptive senses and is consequently led to identify external spatial causes of that experience as such transcendent objects. In her discussion of the relation between appearances, or phenomena, and things in themselves she represents Kant’s terms appearance, or phenomenon, and thing in itself as extensionally equivalent or even identical (1998, 158, 159). In order to avoid, or mitigate, a resulting skepticism about our knowledge of external reality she regards phenomena as knowable properties belonging to unknowable things in themselves. This is to assimilate Kant’s position less to Berkeley than to Leibniz, for whom underlying monads are the hidden essences, revealed to reason, of the same objects we perceive through the senses in only a confused fashion. It echoes Garve’s belief that for Kant to argue for the reality of independent objects would be to justify reason’s claims about things in themselves. Kant’s persistent denial of such an aim and his devastating criticisms of Leibniz¹³ yield another apparent conflict calling for an interpretative resolution.

Throughout the examination of Kant’s text I shall argue for a revolutionary, and against a traditionalist, account of Kant. The claim will be that Kant wished not only to reject traditional philosophy and reform it, but also to reverse its approach and direction. As a consequence Kant cannot be properly represented as accepting either the framework of a normative, foundationalist epistemology, or Garve’s idealist problematic within that framework. He does not canvass an exhaustive dualism of inner mental states, ideas, and independent things in themselves, and does not take reality to be composed of unknowable things in themselves. In line with the passages at B195, B270, and B517, Kant accepts the reality of phenomena, the objects of possible experience, and does not regard them as mere properties of unknowable things in themselves. He does not envisage either a phenomenalist construction of the outer, physical world, or Garve’s doctrine of the mind making nature in which an unknowable mind in itself outside nature literally creates or constructs nature itself.

Kant is concerned, as he says, with the fruitful bathos of experience rather than windy metaphysics, but he does not appeal to common sense against traditional skepticism. He does address some skeptical issues which need to be identified and distinguished, but these are more specific than the blanket skepticism of a normative epistemology, and his method of dealing with them depends upon the reformed framework of his own philosophy. I shall argue that that reformed framework is what Paton called a metaphysics of experience, that is, a descriptive survey and classification of the central, fundamental elements constituting our experience. It provides a metaphysical classification of those elements and relates them in what Kant calls the web of human knowledge (B117). It echoes both Kant’s conception of a transcendental topic (B324), in which those elements are mapped in their rightful locations, and his central task in the Critique of providing an "inventory of all our possessions through pure reason, systematically arranged (Axx). A metaphysics of experience cannot be wholly divorced from issues in epistemology or psychology, but the claim is that Kant’s interest in epistemology is not of that traditional normative foundationalist kind. Nor, as I shall suggest, is Kant a straightforward honest-to-goodness" idealist.

2.A Cartesian Idealist Framework

I earlier identified the tradition which Kant rejected in terms of his distinction between appearances and things in themselves, and a Cartesian distinction between subjective mind and objective world. I have suggested that the familiar conflicts in Kant’s position arise primarily from certain assumed ways of assimilating the two distinctions.¹⁴ If appearances are located within the Cartesian mind and things in themselves are positioned in the Cartesian world, then Kant’s internal problems take a large step towards the intractable inconsistencies noted above. What I have called traditionalist views may emphasize different Kantian commitments within that framework, but all of them revolve around that dualism of subjective ideas in the mind and transcendent objects independent of it. Idealism, as I indicate later, is an unclear and complex doctrine, but that dualism can be expressed in a generic Cartesian idealism with the following three aspects.

(1)A commitment to the priority of our subjective experiences in justifying an objective experience based on them.

(2)The identification of a privileged subjective experience which provides a foundational content for knowledge and a distinctive method of psychological enquiry.

(3)A consequent debate about the antiskeptical success, or the skeptical failure, of the theories produced in response to (1) and (2).

Traditionalist commentators typically hold that Kant is committed to all three features. His acceptance of the terminology of ideas (Vorstellung) is taken to support (1) and is linked with the belief, noted above, that outer objects are reducible to ideas. His appeal to the transcendental unity of apperception expressed in terms of the Cartesian cogito is held to provide the requisite foundation for knowledge in (2). His transcendental arguments are thought to provide a new, but dubiously successful, method of answering the consequent skepticism in (3).¹⁵ Such a position, as I have indicated, tends also to imply a commitment to an independent reality which goes beyond any possible experience, that is, commitment to the existence and reality of transcendent things in themselves. Such a traditionalism often includes other important claims which I have not so far stressed. Kant’s arguments may be thought objectionable in confusing appeals to psychology, logic, semantics, and epistemology, and his classifications, say between sense and understanding or duty and inclination, may be criticized for being too rigid and inflexible.¹⁶ His distinctive conception of philosophy as transcendental is sometimes thought too obscure to be of help in understanding his claims or arguments.¹⁷

Revolutionary opposition to any account which locates Kant in that Cartesian tradition may, however, appeal to other aspects of the Critical position. The Refutation of Idealism canvasses a priority of outer experience over inner in evident and conscious opposition to (1). The differences between Kant and Descartes in their appeals to the cogito converge on the Paralogisms section which severely criticizes (2). Kant’s generally dismissive attitude towards philosophical skepticism casts doubt on the role of transcendental arguments outlined in (3), and his persistent, robust denial of transcendent knowledge importantly qualifies any commitment he may have to things in themselves. The collateral claims may be rejected by regarding Kant’s distinctions as not rigid or inflexible, or by insisting, as Kant patently does at B80–81, on the higher-order, transcendental nature of philosophy. What is distinctive, and new, in Kant’s transcendental project may be understood without confusing psychology, epistemology, logic, and semantics, and without commitment to traditional idealism.

If we think of (1)–(3) as a traditional package, then there is clear evidence that Kant did not wish to take it for granted, and did not intend his own work to be an unqualified contribution to it. There is indeed clear evidence in his repeated claim to provide a revolutionary new direction for philosophy, in its detailed specification of the Copernican experiment at Bxvi, and in his vehement response to Garve that Kant quite consciously wished not merely to change previous philosophy but to reverse it, to turn it completely round. The Copernican revolution is a radical revision of earlier philosophy and a reversal of its previous direction; it rejects the assumption that all our knowledge must conform to objects in order to test the supposition that objects must conform to our knowledge. Earlier I suggested that the question was not whether Kant advocated a revolution in philosophy but how radical his revolution was. These points indicate that we cannot exclude the possibility that the revolution aimed to reject the traditional package (1)–(3), to reform philosophy and lead it into more fruitful forms of enquiry. An acceptance of these qualifications to the traditional package defines a revolutionary approach to Kant’s philosophy.

In recent times revolutionary interpretations of Kant have had greater prominence and articulation. Works by Allison, Prauss, Paton, Weldon, Walsh, Pippin, Gordon Nagel, Collins, and Abela, as well as my own Kant’s Theory of Knowledge, have contributed to the development of such an alternative account.¹⁸ These representatives, like the opposed traditionalist commentators, do not agree about every aspect of Kant, but they share a firm recognition of the transparent absurdities of the traditionalist position and an unwillingness to ascribe it to Kant. They have generally recognized the provisos with which Kant distances his own view from the tradition. Among these are the formal account of the contrast between appearances and things in themselves, the special character of transcendental enquiry, and the attack on, and reversal of, the tradition noted above in the Copernican experiment, the Refutation of Idealism, and the Paralogisms. But the disagreements between traditionalist and revolutionary commentators remain unresolved. The former will say of the latter that they provide only anodyne,¹⁹ or overcharitable, accounts of Kant, deviant interpretations which may seem momentarily attractive . . . but cannot for long be held to represent Kant’s views (Strawson 1966, 235–36). Kant insists that appearances are mere ideas, that we impose laws on nature, and that the a priori principles which govern experience are in the mind, or in us. All these expressions are to traditionalists so clear a commitment to noted aspects of Garve’s account that it would be merely perverse to deny it.

Revolutionaries on the other side may point to the provisos Kant makes about each of these expressions. Outer appearances, items in space, are plainly not mere ideas and not merely in us in any ordinary sense. Kant evidently believes that such characterizations are compatible with an empirical realism which endorses legitimate knowledge of outer, spatial objects. To note these points is to recognize the need to ask in what sense Kant insists that all appearances are mere ideas and not things in themselves, and how exactly such a claim is compatible with empirical realism. Even traditionalist philosophers have sometimes recognized that Kant uses idea (Vorstellung) in different ways, but they have not usually identified the differences correctly.²⁰ Similarly, it is also necessary to ask what is meant by saying that we impose laws on nature, or that our a priori knowledge is in some way mind-dependent. If the traditionalist regards revolutionary accounts as perversely anodyne, the revolutionary can complain that the former has not bothered to ask, or seriously to answer, those further questions. What to revolutionaries is a potential conflict in Kant’s text which calls for such interpretative enquiry is to a traditionalist no more than a terminal incoherence.

3.Aims and Methods

The aim here is twofold; first to survey the whole text of the Critique, and second to show how such an interpretative enquiry supports a revolutionary rather than traditionalist account. The first aim is designed to guide students in their reading of Kant, and also to be explicit in showing what is taken as significant in Kant’s text and what is left out. It will make clear to critics whether important items have been overlooked or disregarded. The second aim recommends an interpretative style which takes seriously the attempt to explain the familiar apparent conflicts in Kant’s text. Unlike the method of fighting Kant tooth and nail, this interpretative style is intended to learn something from the apparent tensions in Kant’s text rather than simply to add them to the list of Kant’s inconsistencies (Bennett 1966, viii). There are occasions when an apparent conflict is so striking that we should be forced to think seriously about its significance, and this is often the case with Kant. Such apparent conflicts may usefully be regarded not as decisive objections but as indications of the need for further consideration of the issue; not as a terminus to enquiry but as its starting point.

An interpretative effort of this kind seems especially appropriate for historical philosophers, and yet in Kant’s case it has often taken second place to the identification of his supposed mistakes. This may be because analytic philosophers have been typically more interested in evaluating the logic of an argument for some view than in establishing exactly what that view is. Here, by contrast, the primary interpretative effort is directed towards establishing what Kant’s position is rather than either criticizing or defending him. It seems evident that one cannot criticize, defend, or evaluate some view until it is clear what that view is, and traditionalist and revolutionary accounts of Kant are disagreements about precisely that. The primary goal here is to identify and understand Kant’s position, and only then to offer an evaluation of it.

I have suggested that Kant’s revolution in philosophy must be radical if we take his own goal seriously. He says at the start of the Prolegomena (Ak. 4.255): My aim is to convince all who concern themselves with metaphysics that it is indispensably necessary to set aside your previous work, and to disregard everything that has happened before in order to face the preliminary question: Is metaphysics possible at all? Kant demonstrates in this way a powerful opposition to the tradition he inherited, and throws some light on one of his contentious claims. In the first-edition preface Kant notoriously made the following optimistic assertion: there is not a single metaphysical problem which has not been solved, or for the solution of which the key at least has not been supplied (Axiii). That comment has generally been taken to represent little more than arrogance on Kant’s part, and on the traditionalist account that conclusion is inevitable. But I shall suggest that if we insert the term traditional between the words single and metaphysical the claim expresses fairly, and more modestly, Kant’s intended break with the past. That, after all, is how philosophy appeared to Kant in the 1770s during the period after the Dissertation when he began to recognize the need for his revolution in and reform of the subject. To accept the truth behind that optimistic claim is not to accept everything Kant says or to free him completely from his historical position. It is only to begin to recognize adequately the extent of the revolutionary new direction which he advocated for the reform and future progress of philosophy.

To recognize Kant’s intended radical break with his past is an antidote to the historical interest which locates him in that past and fails to recognize the novelty of his approach. There are dangers in treating Kant as if he were merely a product of his historical background, but there are also dangers of reading into his work contemporary ideas which are anachronistic. To recognize Kant’s innovations is not to license a general ascription to him of current doctrines. There are places where Kant genuinely anticipated recent views, such as his claim in the Metaphysical Deduction that judgments have a priority over their constituent concepts. His firmly anthropocentric attitude throughout the Critique indicates some form of what we recognize as relativism. I shall argue that Kant’s metaphysics of experience and transcendental topic have close affinities with what has been called a descriptive rather than normative metaphysics, and that his distinction between the empirical and the transcendental has some connections with Carnap’s later views. I will claim that Kant’s synthetic a priori classification of judgments, often thought indefensible, can draw some support from Kripke’s complex classifications. And I will argue that Kant’s major critical attempt to diagnose and correct errors in the philosophical tradition shares that therapeutic aim with Wittgenstein.

There are other places where such anticipation may seem plausible but cannot be sustained. Kant deploys the Fregean terminology of Sinn and Bedeutung in talking generally of meaning, and yet his terminology has none of the articulation or depth of Frege’s. The same point can be made more generally for recent attempts to fit Kant into contemporary views of meaning. In the 1960s commentators ascribed both semantic verificationism and an associated phenomenalism to Kant, but these attributions are now widely understood to be misconceived.²¹ More recently, semantic debates about externalism or between truth-conditional and assertion-conditional accounts of meaning have been associated with Kant. The latter issues may seem particularly close to Kant if they are linked respectively to realist or antirealist accounts of meaning and truth. If antirealism is characterized as a form of idealism, the connection with Kant may seem inevitable and illuminating. But just as Kant’s terms Sinn and Bedeutung have nothing of Frege’s background articulation, so his form of idealism has none of the articulation of contemporary antirealist doctrine.²² Kant has no formal conception of effective decidability, or of nonclassical logics with distinctive attitudes to bivalence and the law of excluded middle. At best these semantic doctrines are developments of Kantian hints, and at worst they are ascribed to him only anachronistically.

Since this is a commentary, it follows the course of Kant’s own text rather than that of its central themes. The hope is that the summary exegesis of each section will support, and encourage readers to pursue, the more philosophical development of a revolutionary interpretation, and I now summarize some of the distinctive aspects and locations of that interpretation.

(1)I represent Kant’s revolution as a rejection of a normative, justificatory epistemology in favor of a descriptive metaphysics of experience. The aim is to map in their rightful places and relations the Grundbegriffe, including a priori intuitions, of our experience. The aim follows Kant’s own accounts of the inventory in the preface (chapter 2) and of the transcendental topic in the Amphiboly (chapter 22). That initial account of the preface can be usefully read in conjunction with the concluding account of the Doctrine of Method in chapter 29. Kant’s project, understood in this way, has implications for both empiricism and skepticism.

(2)Kant regards dogmatic rationalism as the childhood of a metaphysics which matures under empiricist scrutiny into the Critical philosophy (B789). He regards empiricism as an unstable intermediate phase which cannot answer skepticism because it fails to recognize the existence of a priori elements in experience and their synthetic a priori judgments. Kant’s analytic apparatus in the introduction (chapters 3, 4) is designed to prepare for that correction to empiricism, and for the later arguments on the a priori status of the fundamental intuitions, concepts, and principles governing our experience.

(3)Kant’s inventorial, descriptive project also has implications for skepticism. Its descriptive stance neither endorses nor refutes skepticism but the resulting map of experience provides grounds for correcting those skeptical assumptions, in idealism and empiricism, which Kant specifically targets. Since he evidently thinks that skepticism derives from empiricist assumptions, the correction of empiricist assumptions in (2) is bound to question at least that form of skepticism. In chapter 11, I consider Kant’s approaches to different forms of skepticism and note his unargued dismissal of a general, idle skepticism and his approval of what he calls skeptical method. One of his characteristic reversals of the tradition is an acceptance of scientific knowledge coupled with a skeptical doubt about philosophy’s authority to question science.

(4)Among Kant’s central, but inadequately understood, distinctions is that between the empirical and the transcendental. To describe his philosophy as transcendental, and to note the persistent references to transcendental as opposed to empirical accounts of some element in experience, is not meaningless or vacuous. In chapter 5, I outline Kant’s threefold contrast between the empirical, the transcendental, and the transcendent, as an antidote to commentators who regard the terminology as hopelessly obscure and unhelpful. I argue that a failure to appreciate this distinction, along with the failure to recognize the nature of Kant’s project under (1) and his correction of idealism in (5), are among the chief reasons for ascribing traditionalist views to him.

(5)At the heart of Kant’s enquiry are refutations of traditional, empirical idealism and its replacement with his own transcendental, formal idealism. Just as Kant seeks to identify what is right and what is misguided in empiricism, so he attempts to locate what is right and what is wrong in idealism. The discussion addresses the consequent treatment of the doctrine in the Aesthetic (chapter 8, 9), Analytic (chapter 13, 15, 16) and Dialectic (chapter 26, 27). It is generally understood that Kant’s own corrected idealism regards experience as mind-dependent, but it is rarely explained what mind-dependence means. In those chapters I clarify Kant’s conception of mind-dependence, and note its different aspects in the Aesthetic, Analytic, and Dialectic. I reject the naïve account of the mind making nature.

(6)Traditionalist accounts of Kant claim that he is essentially committed, as an integral part of his metaphysics, to the existence of transcendent objects, things in themselves or noumena. In chapters 10 and 23, I argue, against that view in general and Adickes’s detailed support for it, that Kant is not committed to the existence of things in themselves but only to their conceivability. The transcendental contrast between appearances and things in themselves is widely discussed in terms of so-called two aspects and two worlds accounts. I argue that these labels are misleading and should be dropped. Kant’s discussion of transcendental Ideas (Ideen) in the Dialectic makes that conclusion clear and points in the Third Antinomy (chapter 27) to the importance of the practical, moral dimension in experience. To reject Kant’s commitments to traditional empirical idealism and to the actual existence of things in themselves is the basis for a revolutionary and more accurate picture of what is distinctive in transcendental idealism.

(7)The claims in (1)–(6) correctly represent Kant’s primary interest in the fruitful bathos of experience, rather than in the tradition’s windy metaphysics, and the Dialectic continues and reinforces that interest. It is difficult to understand how commentators can ascribe to Kant traditionalist commitments to the existence of things in themselves in the face of his uncompromising criticism of those pretensions of pure reason in the Dialectic. In Garve’s case the attribution rested on clear misunderstandings of Kant’s project and apparatus in (4), but there is less excuse for contemporary commentators who have shared in the twentieth-century criticisms of metaphysics associated with Russell, Moore, the logical positivists, Wittgenstein, and Austin. Like Wittgenstein Kant provides a diagnosis and therapeutic treatment for philosophical, dialectical illusions. He also provides, more clearly than Wittgenstein, a more positive account of the role of transcendent, especially practical, Ideas as part of his inventory (chapters 25, 27, 28).

PART I

The Preliminary Apparatus: Prefaces and Introduction

Introduction to the Preliminary Apparatus: Prefaces and Introduction

The two prefaces and the introduction outline Kant’s primary aims and construct an analytic apparatus to clarify them. Both aims and apparatus have been extensively debated and criticized, and I give here a summary indication of the way they can be explained. The prefaces can usefully be read in conjunction with the concluding part of the Critique, the Doctrine of Method (B735–884), and I note some points where that reference is helpful. In chapter 2, I outline and comment on the two prefaces, and in chapter 3, I summarize the principal claims in the Introduction. Chapter 4 offers an account of Kant’s hybrid synthetic a priori classification, and in chapter 5, I consider the less obvious, but equally important, distinction between the empirical and the transcendental.

1.The Prefaces

Kant’s aims are often seen as a contribution to a traditional normative epistemology in which certain foundations are claimed to provide a justification for our conventional knowledge. His belief that we have a priori knowledge may be seen as a way of identifying those foundations, and his transcendental idealism may be seen as a way of locating those foundations within the mind. Traditionally Kant’s position has been described as that of the mind making nature, where the assumption is that we can be certain of nature’s characteristics simply because we construct them. In more or less sophisticated ways that background has been represented as Kant’s answer to a traditional skepticism about knowledge.

That picture, however, is at odds with Kant’s background view of skepticism and with the prefaces. Kant makes plain that he embarks on his project not in order to justify knowledge in the sciences but in order to rehabilitate philosophy itself by modeling it on science. The suggestion is that skepticism is properly directed not by philosophy against other disciplines but against philosophy and its supposed authority. A central part of Kant’s project is the Copernican experiment in which we are to consider the implications of supposing that we contribute to knowledge of objects rather than that objects impose their features on us. That experiment is plainly designed to support and elucidate Kant’s belief that we have a priori knowledge, but the success of the experiment, as Kant outlines it (Bxix), is not the restitution of ordinary or scientific knowledge, but the resolution of contradictions in traditional philosophy. The experiment succeeds, according to Kant, not by justifying our conventional knowledge against a skeptical challenge but by rehabilitating philosophy and directing it onto a new, reformed path.

These indicators cast doubt on the claims that Kant accepts the framework of normative epistemology and is a straightforward contributor to it. Those claims may even conceal Kant’s stated revolutionary goal, which is to establish through an inventory the a priori structure of our experience. In place of normative justification and the search for indubitable foundations Kant offers a descriptive survey of the fundamental elements in our experience. Kant rejects virtually all traditional theories in normative epistemology such as dogmatism and skepticism, empiricism, rationalism, and idealism, which suggests that the rejection depends on their assuming that ambitious normative framework. The aim of Kant’s metaphysics of experience is first to identify the a priori elements—the intuitions, concepts, and principles—which form the structure of our experience, and then to use the results to evaluate those traditional doctrines. The outcome may in the end support a dogmatic rationalism or a skeptical empiricism, or it may show that both are mistaken and should be replaced. Understood in these terms, Kant’s Critical alternative to those theories is not another rival version of that traditional epistemology but a rejection of its general framework coupled with a new direction for philosophy.

2.The Analytic Apparatus in the Introduction

Kant’s analytic apparatus for identifying a priori elements in experience has two initial resources. First, the appeal to an abstraction or isolation procedure, and, second, the construction of a new judgment classification, the synthetic a priori.

In the former Kant proposes to take our unreflective experience and to isolate and distinguish the diverse elements it contains. That attempt distinguishes particularly those elements which belong to sensibility or to understanding, those that are a posteriori or a priori, and those that are analytic or synthetic. These divisions are not comparable in every respect. The analytic/synthetic distinction applies only to judgments, but the a posteriori/a priori distinction is applied to judgments, to concepts, and to intuitions. The division between sensibility and understanding is applied to particular ideas or concepts rather than to judgments, but in the Dialectic Kant also distinguishes principles belonging variously to understanding and to reason.

To support the new judgment classification Kant offers separate criteria for the analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori distinctions from which the hybrid synthetic a priori is constructed. The underlying motive is to make room for a classification which marks Kant’s opposition to previous philosophers, especially empiricists, who allow only one classification and conflate the a priori/a posteriori and analytic/synthetic distinctions. In admitting synthetic a priori judgments Kant gives a sense to a priori which empiricists characteristically reject. Although the apparatus has this underlying philosophical motive it is, and should be, introduced in a formal and neutral way.

That formal introduction has been heavily criticized. The criteria offered to distinguish the complex subsidiary classifications are extensive and conflicting, but it is important to focus on the primary criteria rather than merely to criticize the peripheral and informal accounts. The claim is that the a posteriori/a priori contrast depends on the different types of warrant used to ground those judgments, and that the analytic/synthetic contrast turns on two related criteria to do with meaning and contradiction. These criteria have also been criticized from two opposite directions. One group accepts the empiricist claim that there is only one classification, generally the analytic/synthetic, and regards Kant’s synthetic a priori novelty as inconsistent. Another rejects both subsidiary distinctions and consequently also dismisses Kant’s hybrid. A third group, including Kripke, allows room for classifications which go beyond the one-dimensional contrast between analytic and synthetic. Kripke’s classifications provide hybrid forms similar to Kant’s synthetic a priori judgments, and are compared with Kant’s position to see how far they validate it. The claim is that synthetic a priori judgments do not hold in all possible worlds but that their truth can be determined a priori, that is, without empirical evidence.

3.The Empirical/Immanent/Transcendent/Transcendental Distinctions

Kant has another important distinction