Kubilaï iksel
260550337
Garth Green
October 17, 2016
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Philosophy of Religion
Kantian epistemology, or a farewell to metaphysics
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Research project : Did Kant kill God before Nietzsche ever could ? This paper
will explore Kant’s account of the epistemic faculties of the mind in the critique of pure
reason, and attempt to address some of the implications they may have on our ability to
posses knowledge of objects which pertain to the sphere of metaphysics. The aim will be
to explore wether or not Kant successfully demonstrated the impossibility of legitimizing
the all-to-human activity of metaphysical speculation, and finally attempt to ascertain
how such an impossibility would impact our engagement with questions about the divine.
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David Hume believed that that which could be known of the basis of reason alone
were only statements whose negation would invariably yield a contradiction, all other
forms of knowledge are only attainable through the medium sense experience alone. This
radical empirical epistemology dealt a serious blow to the pursuit of metaphysics, and still
today, we argue wether or not it is possible or even relevant to concern ourselves with such
questions as the nature of the soul, or the ontology of phenomena. Immanuel Kant, in
his great magnum opus, the critique of pure reason, took these epistemic interrogations
extremely seriously and sought to formulate a revolutionary system whose project would
be to fully explore the limits of what the Human mind could do, and consequently, the
bounds of what it could hope to know. Thus, the aim of this paper shall be twofold, first
to examine the manner in which Kant’s philosophical commitments attack the legitimacy
of metaphysical speculation, and second to attempt to humbly ascertain wether or not the
critique of pure reason buried metaphysics the way neuroscience buried phrenology.
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Kant, in his exposition on the idea of transcendental philosophy, starts by stating that
experience is the “first product that our understanding brings forth”[C-A1]. It deals with
the raw materials which the senses provide. However, experience only provides us with
“what is at hand” in the very moment, and therefore cannot give us any kind of insight
about universal principles. This is what reason seeks to apprehend however, more and more
general rules which apply everywhere and with increasing universality. It is because of
this that reason finds itself more vexed by experience than anything else, and seeks to find
universal cognitions. Such cognitions must be valid independently of experience, and as such
are called a priori cognitions. Conversely, that which is born from experience, or put
differently, the product of empirical observation, Kant calls a posteriori cognitions.
Just as important as Kant’s distinction between these two concepts is the one he makes
between synthetic and analytic judgments. There are two distinct ways in which a predicate
can relate to its subject ; “Either the predicate B belongs to the subject A as something
which is contained in this concept A ; or B stands outside the concept A, though surely
connected to it”[C-A7]. In the first case the judgment is analytic, in the second it is
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synthetic, where the former clarifies, the latter amplifies. What this means is that analytic
judgments are those in which the predicates speak to the components which are contained
within the subject, and synthetic judgments are those in which the predicate ads a new
specification (X) to the subject in question.
Next, Kant poses a difficult problem ; how would synthetic a priori judgments work ? The
problem is this ; how can we show how a predicate B is connected to a concept A if our
usual means of verification (namely to check in the field of experience) is not available to
us ? (because a priori judgments are not aided by empirical analyses). In other words, how
could I verify X if I cannot make use of my senses ? This problem lies at the very core of
the epistemic challenge of metaphysics, for it speaks directly to the difficulties inherent to
our desire to enquire about that which lies outside the scope of what empiricism can
validate.
In order to address this problem’s difficulty Kant replies that it is reason which provides
the principles of cognition a priori, therefore “pure reason” is that which contains the
principles for cognizing something absolutely a priori . And so a system of pure reason
would be the sum total of all of the principles in accordance with which all pure a priori
cognitions could be acquired and brought about[C-A11]. What does all of this mean ? I
believe Kant to be saying is that he wants to elaborate an air-tight system which would
ground reason’s ability to establish a priori truths for itself without the aid of empirical
verification. In other words, he is trying to build an epistemic model which would
legitimize the judgments we make using the unadulterated faculty of pure reasoning,
unencumbered by the stringent requirements of empirical reasoning.
There are two great types of human cognition ; sensibility and understanding [C-A15]. It is
through the former that objects are given to us and through the latter that they are
thought. What this means is that there is a dual aspect to the way in which we cognize
reality, the first being purely receptive and the second being purely active. Kant will thus
in the first place conduct an investigation of the manner in which objects are given to us,
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in order to then determine what the mind does with all of the materials afforded by this
faculty of sensibility.
“Through whatever means a cognition may relates to objects, that through which it
relates immediately to them, is intuition”[C-A19]. What this seems to be saying is that
intuition is the most fundamental vehicle through which our minds connect to objects, it is
the faculty which can be said to refer to object directly in the most immediate sense.
Intuition, he goes on to say, happens only insofar as objects are given to us. Therefore this
receptive capacity we posses to acquire representations through the ways in which we are
affected by objects is none other that our faculty of sensibility at work. Thus intuition is the
immediate representation which results from the meeting of an object with our faculty of
sensibility (it is their lovechild if you will).
Objects are given to us through sensibility and “thought of ” or “worked on” by the
understanding. The result of the understanding’s activity, indeed the fruit of the labour it
performs on the materials which it receives in intuitive form are called concepts.
“ Plato abandoned the world of the senses because it posed so many hindrances for the
understanding, and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of
pure understanding”[C-A5]. The understanding operates in the dark abyss of pure
thought, where concepts are generated and perish, and where the forms which Plato
venerated as the very building blocks of reality itself, rest in their eternal abode. It is
precisely within this conceptual space that reason pushes forth boldly in an endless
promethean leap into the depths of the unknown.
And so, concepts are the products of both mind’s receptive and active faculties’s
interplay, the culmination of a direct experience of an object and the mind’s endeavor to
give that experience a form. Next he says that “sensation” is the representation which
results from the object’s affecting of us. The intuition which is related to the object through
sensation is called empirical, and the abstract, undetermined object of an empirical
intuition is called an appearance or a phenomenon. That which in the appearance corresponds
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to sensation is designated as its matter, whereas that which allows the myriad of
appearances to be ordered in certain particular relations is designated as its form.
The matter of phenomena is given to us a posteriori, meaning posterior to the sensation it
brings about. However its form lies in the mind prior to sensation and as such is known a
priori and can be considered apart from it. For Kant, every representation which can be
thought of apart from sensation is called pure. And so even if I abstract from the
operations of the understanding (and its characterization of things in terms of substance,
form, divisibility etc…) as well as the representations of sensation (in terms of
impenetrability, hardness color etc..), I am still left with two aspects of intuition, namely
extension and form. These are the pure forms of sensible intuition (or pure intuition). One
way to construe such forms is as the mind’s a priori “readiness” or “aptitude” to receive
sensations .
The science of all principles of a priori sensibility is dubbed by Kant ; “the transcendental
aesthetic”. It is the science which pertains solely to the mind’s receptive relationship to
objects, and as such, speaks to the most fundamental manner in which we intake reality.
The two pure forms of sensible intuition as principles of a priori cognition are
respectively space and time. Therefore, here space and time do not exist a part from
cognition as qualities or ontological features of objects themselves, rather they are the
pure forms of our intuition, and as such make up the most fundamental way in which we
experience said objects. If this is so, then we have to commit to the idea that objects do
not present themselves to cognizing minds as they are in themselves, but instead present
themselves (even in their most abstract form) as appearing to posses both extension (or
temporal characteristics) and form (or spacial characteristics). These pure forms of
sensible intuitions therefore confine the entirety of our reality to an inescapable spaciotemporal paradigm and encapsulate all reflexions within its matrix.
It becomes important then at this stage to mark a clear distinction between phenomena
and noumena, the former denoting the objects of our empirical intuition which together
make up the manifold objects we experience, and the latter denoting the object abstracted
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from even our most basic mode of participation in it (in terms of space and time). If we
ascribe an objective reality to our intuitions of space and time, and consider them apart
from cognizing minds, then we fall under the illusion that we experience the object as it
exists in itself, because we fail to recognize that extension and form are features which
belong to intuition as opposed to features which belong to the object as it exists in itself.
Therefore if we deny that space and time are objective components of reality, then we
make them into subjective features of our experience of it, thereby acknowledging that
the spacio-temporal frame in which we exist speaks more to a phenomenological fact
about the nature of a priori cognition than it does to a metaphysical fact about an
ontological reality.
Kant’s characterization of time and space in terms of “the pure forms of sensible
intuition” as well as his limiting of all of the concepts of the understanding as merely
relating to appearances already carry within them potent ways of denying the possibility
of knowing the nature of noumena. In the first place, his denial that space and time are
objective features of objects in themselves deals a devastating blow to our ability to know
reality since we know quite intimately from experience that all of our cognitions have
spacial and temporal features and that therefore none of them could ever relate to the
objects themselves (as Kant conceives them). Furthermore, the distinction he makes
between the faculties of sensibility and understanding and the importance he places on
their co-dependency makes it very difficult to see how reason alone, with its concepts
abstracted from intuition could ever yield any knowledge of objects in themselves since
even a perfect unity of the two can only offer us a better appreciation of appearances.
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In the section “on pure reason as the seat of transcendental illusion”, Kant makes a series
of illuminating points concerning the root of our desire for metaphysical knowledge. As
he points out, reason seeks the universal condition of its judgments, in other words, it
advances by way of syllogism, a process whereby “a judgment is mediated by the
subsumption of its conditions under a universal rule”[C-A307]. Thus, reason is that
which seeks the conditions for every condition in an attempt to arrive at a satisfying
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conclusion, wherein it would finally touch upon the “unconditioned” and be able at last to
rest in the blissful repose that follows the attainment of that which is needed to account
for every phenomena in a perfect closed system.
What this seems to imply is that reason’s ultimate goal is to find an ontological rock
bottom, an unconditioned fundament which would finally allow us to stop looking for
underlying causes for phenomena and enable us to unify the whole universe under the
hegemony of a perfect all-applying principle ; reason desperately wants this unity. It is
precisely this epistemic drive which lies at the root of Man’s perpetual inquiry into
metaphysics. However, Kant is quite adamant in his affirmation that however much we
desire it to be the case, the ideas which reason produces and the concepts it relies on
could never touch upon the reality of noumena, but can at best, give a semblance of
conceptual intelligibility to the ways in which it presents itself to our subjective cognitive
apparatus (as intuition).
And so what may we conclude from Kant’s exposition of Mind and the epistemic range
of its faculties ? What I believe we can take away from this is that although we may never
rapturously experience Noumena, we must nevertheless be careful not to consider it to be
a metaphysical Shangri-La forever out of reach an forever taunting us with the higher
ontological status it enjoys. We must remember that since it lies outside the scope of what
we may know, we must treat its existence with due consideration, as a conceptual tool
which first and foremost serves a theoretical function ; that of accounting for the source
from which the sense-data (which presents itself to our sensibility) springs.
Furthermore, we ought to be careful to take this noumenal realm with a pinch of salt,
because there are logical difficulties involved in its very concept ; namely, if we accept the
premise that the thing-in-itself supplies us with the sense data which is necessary for the
construction of appearances, it would seem that we have accepted a causal relationship
between the two, for it is difficult to imagine causation outside of space-time, and it seems
further difficult to explain what the causal link between the thing-in-itself and the
appearance would be. However where I commend Kant is for having so elegantly
contained our relationship the divine to the pure domain of faith thereby once and for all
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dispensing with the kinds of presumptuous rationalist proofs which were so rampant
before his arrival.
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Bibliography :
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[C] - The Critique of Pure Reason - Immanuel Kant
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