Notes on Immanuel Kant Part 3

 

 

         Kant attempted to synthesize the rationalist and empiricist tradition since he said that Hume had awakened him from his “dogmatic slumber”. Rationalists like Descartes and Ibn Sina believed that there is knowledge that is a priori or independent from experience while empiricists like Hume and Locke believed the opposite. Hume was critical of the traditional notion of causation, arguing that the belief in cause and effect is not grounded in reason but rather in custom and habit. He argued that there is nothing in the cause that necessitates the occurrence of the effect. In other words, one may observe one event regularly following another, but there is no inherent connection or power in the cause that compels the effect to happen. A rationalist, on the other hand, would contend that knowledge of cause and effect is, at least in part, a priori—that is, independent of experience. Kant argued that while experience is necessary to shape our understanding of cause and effect, the mind contributes its own a priori concepts or categories of the mind, such as causation, to organize and make sense of that experience.

         Kant asks whether our concepts revolve around objects or is it the opposite that objects revolve around our concepts. Does the mind conform to the world or does the world conform to the mind? Kant’s Copernican Revolution is to say it is the reverse.

 

“It has hitherto been assumed that our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to ascertain anything about these objects a priori, by means of conceptions, and thus to extend the range of our knowledge, have been rendered abortive by this assumption. Let us then make the experiment whether we may not be more successful in metaphysics, if we assume that the objects must conform to our cognition.” (Critique of Pure Reason (Preface to the Second Edition))

 

Objects must conform to our cognitive faculties. Our knowledge is not a passive reflection of an independently existing reality but is shaped by the inherent structures of our mind. Our minds are constituted in a way such that they can only process the information we get from experience and this process forces the world to conform to our mind. If the world is a projector then if one has knowledge of the projector then they have a prior knowledge of what it is going to project. If the world is seen as a mirror then one cannot know until the object is reflected and therefore knowledge would not be a priori.

           

“Before objects, are given to me, that is, a priori, I must presuppose in myself laws of the understanding which are expressed in conceptions a priori. To these conceptions, then, all the objects of experience must necessarily conform.” Critique of Pure Reason (Preface to the Second Edition))

 

Kant is asserting that before we encounter specific objects in experience, our minds must already possess innate, a priori categories. These concepts are not derived from experience but are preconditions for our understanding of the world. The objects we encounter must conform to these inherent categories, and it is through the application of these categories that we can make sense of and organize our experiences. Kant proposed 12 categories: unity, plurality, and totality for concept of quantity; reality, negation, and limitation, for the concept of quality; inherence and subsistence, cause and effect, and community for the concept of relation; and possibility-impossibility, existence-nonexistence, and necessity and contingency for the concept of modality. However, these 12 categories only apply within the realm of experience. Therefore, metaphysical concepts beyond experience such as the nature of God or infinity or the soul cannot be known and this is his Transcendental Illusion. We cannot know anything about things in themselves but only about their appearances from experience which is the phenomena. The object in itself is the noumena. Aristotle would say that the phenomena and noumena are identical. The idealists would say that there is no noumena since we cannot know about it while Kant says there is a noumena but we cannot know about it.

We can, however, speak about morality. Kant argued that moral principles are derived from practical reason, which is concerned with guiding human action. Unlike theoretical reason, which is concerned with understanding the world and explaining phenomena, practical reason is focused on the principles that should govern our actions. Kant’s moral philosophy revolves around the idea of the “categorical imperative”. It is a synthetic a priori principle that states,

 

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should

become a universal law.”

 

This means that before taking any action, an individual should consider whether the principle guiding their action could be consistently applied as a universal rule without contradiction. Kant argued that human beings possess rationality and the capacity for autonomous moral reasoning. He believed that morality arises from the ability of individuals to legislate moral principles for themselves through reason. The categorical imperative reflects the idea that individuals, as rational agents, can determine the moral law for themselves. For example, lying is wrong because if everyone lied, i.e., if it was made into a universal law, then society would fall. He was a moral realist. When he says stealing is wrong, that is applied to the empirical observation of stealing and based on the synthetic a priori judgment that stealing is immoral. He argued that there is only one thing that is purely good, a good will, or one’s intention based on a sense of duty rather than inclination. He also makes a distinction between a hypothetical imperative and a categorical imperative. The hypothetical imperative is a command that applies only if one desires a particular end. For example, if one wants to pass their exam then they must study. Hypothetical imperatives guide actions based on a particular end. Categorical imperatives are not based on desire but on duty, deontology. The purpose or end toward which the categorical imperative aims must be an ultimate end, not something that is a means to another end. Kant envisioned a “kingdom of ends” in which individuals, guided by this law, treat each other as ends in themselves rather than as means to an end. Kant believes that humans possess intrinsic value and should not be treated merely as instruments to achieve someone else’s goals. The categorical imperative also requires that one must act out of their own good will rather than being forced to act morally.

         Something is a priori if it is known prior to experiencing it without our senses, for example, a triangle has three sides and its angles add up to 180 degrees, it is by the definition of the triangle that we know these things and therefore it is analytic. If I were to say that the triangle is red, I would need a posteriori knowledge of it or experience it. It is also a synthetic judgment to say the triangle is red as it is not in the definition of a triangle to be red. However, it is the case that we can understand a triangle having three straight lines only because we have experience of space and geometry and therefore would be a posteriori as well. Furthermore, physics uses a priori claims about cause and effect to explain how objects will necessarily behave. If we experience thunder we know there must be lightning causing it. Nevertheless, it does not pertain to the definition of thunder that it be caused by something. A clap of thunder would still be thunder if nothing caused it but we do not admit anything occurring without a cause therefore causality is a property we apply to events a priori. How do we know and where did we get this idea of causality being a priori? This is what Kant attempts to answer in his Critique of Pure Reason, how does one derive synthetic a priori reason. What if the ideas of causality, time, and all of the 12 categories mentioned above come from our mind? Kant’s transcendental idealism answers how space, time, and causality are a priori as they originate from us and apply necessarily to all objects we experience for that reason. These 12 are not optional or arbitrary but are essential for any coherent human experience. If one experiences a flash of lightning, they represent in their mind the lightning but also themselves to whom the lighting appeared which leads to self-recognition. What we sense such as sight, sounds, and textures must conform to us as a unity as it is our mind that recognizes them as our mind is also a unity as we can recognize ourselves. This applies to concepts as well such as causality as we understand ourselves conceptually not sensibly. Concepts are mechanisms for instituting unity within our senses. For example, one may experience a cat with its fluffiness and its whiskers and tail but our concepts put it all together as a cat along with all other cats as a universal. Objects that we experience come by their universals by conforming to the concepts in our mind and act of self-consciousness. When we understand an object through our experiences, we are looping our representation of ourselves through our senses and lining that up with the concepts in our mind that make it a unity. We recognize ourselves through concepts and therefore all experiences conform to concepts. This is where he now derives his concept of the 12 categories: senses conform to concepts, and concepts are functions of judgements, and judgements are constructed in accordance to logical forms which are hypothetical sentences through which we make sense of the world, and these logical forms that deal with senses are called categories and they are mentioned above. All of this is Kant's Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. Abstract concepts such as causality can be deduced since they reflect the basic rules of the hypothetical sentence formation of the logical forms through which all judgements are made.

In other words, Kant divided the consciousness into understanding which produces concepts and sensibility which receives the 5 senses. The understanding structures thoughts into the hypothetical sentences in order to make them intelligible. These hypothetical sentences are based on the Table of Judgements. The understanding receives input from sensibility and it applies concepts such as causality to it. Furthermore, for consciousness to make sense it must be unified. Therefore, when the sensibility sends information to the understanding, it unifies prior to the understanding and applies the table of judgements. This is also done by the understanding subconsciously by our mind’s a priori table of 12 categories. It is our understanding that prescribes the laws of causality, space, and time. However, because of this we cannot know anything prior to the mind receiving information about the noumenal world.          An analogy for this is a projector. The mind is the projector and the information that comes into the projector, perhaps a file, is the noumena. It gives information about what is it to be projected. It projects it onto the screen of experience. One can know something a priori about the thing that is projected by knowing something about the projector. For example, if we know that the projector is only black and white then we know a priori that the projection will be black and white. Knowing the information about the projector and the things on the screen, what can one say about the file itself? There is no guarantee that the file obeys the laws of the projector. For example, if the projector is black and white as mentioned, it does not mean that the file is also black and white or have any color at all, it could be all zeros and ones but. There is no guarantee that what is being projected is similar to the actual file.