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Strawson and Allison on Kant's Transcendental Idealism

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Strawson and Allison on Kant's Transcendental Idealism MATTHEW M. BRAICH [email protected] STRAWSON AND ALLISON ON KANT’S TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM MATT BRAICH LEWIS & CLARK COLLEGE PORTLAND, OREGON MAY 2008 PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT SUBMITTED in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts BRAICH 2 STRAWSON AND ALLISON ON KANT’S TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM ABSTRACT: Kant’s doctrine of transcendental idealism is no stranger to controversy. A primary source of the controversy is the question whether Kant regards the distinction between things in themselves and appearances as metaphysical or epistemological. Advocates of the metaphysical interpretation (specifically, P.F. Strawson) insist that things in themselves and appearances are distinct entities occupying different ontological realms: the phenomenal realm and the noumenal realm. By contrast, advocates of the epistemological interpretation (specifically, Henry Allison) insist that things in themselves and appearances are numerically identical entities considered from different perspectives: the empirical perspective and the transcendental perspective. While both interpretations offer plausible accounts of transcendental idealism, neither is completely compatible with the text. The question, then, is: what elements of Kant’s philosophy must we sacrifice in order to adopt either interpretation? In this paper, I answer this question and argue that, though each view fails to cohere fully with the text, the problem may not lie in the details of the interpretations. There is another possibility: transcendental idealism may not itself be a single, self-consistent doctrine. Kant’s doctrine of transcendental idealism is no stranger to controversy. As one of Kant’s earliest critics, F. H. Jacobi, famously writes: “the ‘thing in itself’ is the kind of concept without which it is impossible to enter Kant’s system, but with which it is impossible to get out of the system.”1 Jacobi’s remarks highlight an apparent tension in the first Critique: on the one hand, Kant restricts the range of things we can cognize to possible objects of experience, while, on the other hand, his system relies on uncognizable entities. For many critics, this tension tolls the death knell for transcendental idealism. In The Bounds of Sense, for example, P.F. Strawson jettisons things in themselves in an effort to absolve Kant from what he regards as inconsistencies. “The only element in transcendental idealism which has any significant part to play in those structures,” Strawson writes, “is the phenomenalistic idealism according to which the physical world is nothing apart from perceptions.” 2 If we accept this metaphysical interpretation of Kant, the dilemma is twofold: should Kant continue to talk about things in themselves, his system runs into apparent contradictions; yet, should he abandon things in themselves, as Strawson urges, his system operates exclusively at the phenomenal level. 1 F. H. Jacobi, David Hume über den Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus. Ein Gespräch, Breslau: Gottlieb Löwe, New York and London: Garland (1787). 2 P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense, London: Methuen (1966), page 246. BRAICH 3 More recently, however, this interpretative tradition has lost favor among Kantians. Since the publication of Henry Allison’s Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, commentators have increasingly regarded the distinction between things in themselves and appearances as epistemological, rather than metaphysical. 3 By contrasting things in themselves with appearances, Allison insists, Kant means only to underscore the limits of our cognitive powers; he is not, importantly, distinguishing between two ontologically distinct sets of entities—i.e., appearances and those supersensible entities that lie, as it were, outside of our cognitive field. Consequently, Jacobi’s original criticism is avoided: Kant can coherently talk about things in themselves because those entities just are appearances considered in abstraction from the conditions of our cognizing them. The question, then, is whether Kant himself regards the distinction between things in themselves and appearances as metaphysical or epistemological. Unfortunately, the text cannot answer this question. Allen Wood notes this problem: I think much of the puzzlement about transcendental idealism arises from the fact that Kant himself formulates transcendental idealism in a variety of ways, and it is not at all clear how, or whether, his statements of it can all be reconciled, or taken as statements of a single, self-consistent doctrine. I think Kant’s central formulations suggest two quite distinct and mutually incompatible doctrines.4 Compare, for example, the following two passages: We should consider that bodies are not objects in themselves that are present to us, but rather a mere appearance of who knows what unknown object; that motion is not the effect of this unknown cause, but merely the appearance of its influence on our sense.5 We can have cognition of no object as a thing in itself, but only insofar as it is an object of sensible intuition, i.e. as an appearance…we [assume] the distinction 3 Henry Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, Connecticut: Yale University Press (1983). 4 Allen Wood, Kant, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing (2005), pages 63-64. 5 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, New York: Cambridge University Press (1998), A387; my italics. BRAICH 4 between things as objects of experience and the very same things as things in themselves.6 Because such inconsistencies preclude the possibility of arriving at a univocal interpretation of the text, commentators, including Wood, have been forced to rely on such extra-textual considerations as charity when adjudicating between the metaphysical and epistemological views. Though this approach has benefits, it raises the question: what elements of Kant’s philosophy must we sacrifice in order to adopt either interpretation? In this paper, I address this question in three sections. In section one, I outline three central roles things in themselves play in Kant’s philosophy. In section two, I examine Strawson’s interpretation (commonly called the “two-worlds” view) and argue that he fails to account for the role things in themselves play in Kant’s moral philosophy. In section three, I examine Allison’s interpretation (commonly called the “dual-aspect” view) and argue that he fails to account for the role things in themselves play in affecting the faculty of intuition—a crucial aspect of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. I conclude by arguing that, though each view fails to meet all of these constraints, the problem may not lie in the details of the interpretations. There is another possibility: transcendental idealism may not itself be a single, self-consistent doctrine. I. THE ROLES OF THINGS IN THEMSELVES Though Kant is quite clear that we can cognize (and hence know) only appearances, and not things in themselves, he uses the notion of a thing in itself throughout his philosophy. In “Things in Themselves,” Robert Adams outlines the four roles this notion plays in Kant’s work, 6 KrV, Bxxvi-Bxxvii; my italics. BRAICH 5 but I am here only concerned with three.7 The first role (the negative role) arises in the context of Kant’s theoretical philosophy, specifically, the “Transcendental Aesthetic,” in which Kant specifies the a priori conditions under which we intuit the matter of experience. The second role (the affecting role) arises in Kant’s transcendental account of how appearances occur. Lastly, the third role (the moral role) arises in the context of Kant’s practical philosophy, specifically, in his attempt to ground the possibility of freedom, God and the soul in the noumenal realm. We shall consider these three roles in order. 1) The central thesis behind the “Transcendental Aesthetic” is that the faculty of intuition comprises two a priori forms: space and time. An object, for Kant, counts as a possible object of experience if and only if it can be given in intuition, and hence ordered in time and, if it is an outer intuition, space. Against this picture of what possible objects of experience are, Kant contrasts things in themselves. He holds that we experience objects not as they are in themselves, but only as they appear in relation to our faculty of intuition, in time and space. This use of the thing in itself to clarify what appearances are not constitutes the negative role the concept plays in Kant’s philosophy. 2) Kant bases his transcendental psychology on primarily two faculties of the mind: the intuition and the understanding. In terms of producing experience, the understanding plays an active part; it actively organizes the manifold of intuition under the rubric of a priori categories, e.g., causality. By contrast, the intuition plays a passive part; it receives the manifold through an interaction with something else, presumably beyond the range of our experience. Kant identifies 7 Robert Adams, “Things in Themselves,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 57, No. 4 (1997), pages 801-825. I have left out the regulative role because it does not directly pertain to my discussion of Allison and Strawson. BRAICH 6 things in themselves as the source of this interaction, and perhaps to avoid illicit metaphysical commitments, he characterizes that relation in terms of “affection” or “grounding.”8 3) One of Kant’s central concerns in the first Critique is reconciling Newtonian physics with morality. At the level of appearances, Kant is a Newtonian: he holds that everything in the empirical world happens in accordance with the laws of nature. This includes not only natural events, but also human action. Consequently, Kant asks: given that physical laws (as specified by Newton) determine all events in the empirical world, how are freedom and morality possible? Kant answers this question by positing the noumenal realm. He argues that so long as there could be a realm independent of the empirically determined order of our experience, there remains at least the logical possibility of God, morality and the soul.
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