International Phenomenological Society I. Kant's Doctrine of the "Things in Themselves" and Noumena Author(s): T. I. Oizerman Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Mar., 1981), pp. 333-350 Published by: International Phenomenological Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2107456 . Accessed: 23/05/2011 06:16 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ips. 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Jacoby, one of the first critics of Kant, originated the winged expression: "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 Stating the antinomy of the Kantian understanding of things in themselves, Jacoby saw in it nothing but logically inconsistent statements. He opposed to Kantianism the in- tuitivist doctrine of faith as the only conclusive way of understanding metaphysical reality; that is, he rehabilitated everything which Kant's Critique of Pure Reason refuted. The contradictoriness of the Kantian doctrine of things in themselves is indubitable. Its source is the desire to reconcile materialism and idealism. Jacoby's mistake, however, was that he ap- praised in a negative way the contradictions which he noted. These contradictions are extremely significant, and it can even be said that they testify in an indirect manner to the profound formulation of a problem. Dialectical materialism, in distinction from the meta- physical mode of thought, substantiates the necessity of positively evaluating contradictions, which are a feature of outstanding philo- sophical doctrines. Substantive contradictions, which contain at- tempts at overcoming the limited, one-sided construction of a pro- blem, are not merely defects, but in a certain sense the value of these doctrines. Recall that K. Marx saw in the contradictions of D. Ricardo's theory of value the initial premises of the correct construc- tion of a most complex economic problem. Indeed, a certain analogy (of course, only in gnoseological and methodological foreshortenings) between the Kantian doctrine of things in themselves and Ricardo's theory of value seems to us not only justified, but also fruitful. In places in both authors' works it is a question not only of mistakes, of great mistakes of genius, but also of contradictions existing in objec- tive reality. Consequently, we are very far from merely accusing Kant of in- consistency, in that he did not understand or notice something and fell into contradictions that were very evident even to his.immediate *This article originally appeared in Voprosy filosofii, 1974, no. 4, pp. 117-128. 'F. Jacoby, Werke, Bd. II, Leipzig, 1912, S. 304. 333 334 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH successors. Such a mode of analysis of an outstanding philosophical doctrine must be considered antiphilosophical. If Kant had inter- preted things in themselves merely as absolutely transcendent or, on the contrary, had viewed them only as gnoseological phenomena, he would have been, despite all the determinateness and "consistency"of this view, not a great, but a mediocre thinker. V. I. Lenin formulated in a profound way the problem of the need to overcome the vulgar-materialist mistakes in the criticism of Kant's philosophy. Scientific criticism of Kantianism does not simply reject his arguments from a threshold, but corrects them. V. I. Lenin wrote in this connection: "Marxistscriticized (at the beginning of the twentieth century) the Kantians and Humists more in the manner of Feuerbach (and BUchner), than of Hegel."2 In the light of this indica- tion, which has great methodological significance, the necessity of in- vestigating the diverse, real content of the contradictions of Kantian philosophy with the aim of their actual scientific solution becomes evident. It is well known that in the "precritical"period Kant created an essentially materialist cosmogony, which completely agreed with the laws\of mechanics, satisfactorily explained the established astronomic facts and provided an interpretation that was scientific for his time of both the "systemic arrangement" and the origin and development of our solar system. Elucidating the principles of his investigation, Kant wrote: "It seems to me that we can say here with intelligent cer- tainty and without audacity: 'Give me matter, and I will construct a world out of it!' i.e. give me matter and I will show you how a world shall arise out of it." But is it possible, wrote Kant several lines below, "to boast of the same progress even regarding the lowest plant or an insect? Are we in a position to say: 'Give me matter, and I will show you how a caterpillar can be produced? . It should not therefore cause astonishment if I presume to say that the formation of all the heavenly bodies, the cause of their movements, and, in short, the origin of the whole present constitution of the universe, will become intelligible before the production of a single herb or a caterpillar by 2 V. I. Lenin, Complete Collected Works (in Russian), volume 29, p. 161. 1. KANT'S DOCTRINE OF THE 335 "THINGS IN THEMSELVES" AND NOUMENA mechanical causes, will become distinctly and completely understood." (Kant's Cosmology, p. 17)3 The development of Kant's views in the "precritical" period led him to the conviction that the origin of life, and moreover of con- sciousness and thought, cannot be explained by the movement and development of matter. Of course, he meant mechanical movement, the mechanically interpreted process of development. But, Kant, and all of the outstanding scientists of his time, generally did not know of other natural processes, conditioned by nonmechanical regularities. For Kant, the fact that mechanical materialism did not reveal the genesis of life and consciousness was the basis for the denial of materialism in general. The mechanistic form of this doctrine was for Kant not its historically transient limitation, but rather the essence of the materialist (and natural scientific) explanation of the phenomena of nature. Although he did not reject the mechanistic methodology, and even justified and substantiated it, Kant stressed its limitation. This entailed the conclusion about the unrealizability in principle of philosophical monism: the diversity of reality cannot be understood by proceeding from one fundamental position. But following the thesis of the insufficiency of the materialist (in fact, mechanistic) point of departure, Kant argued the thesis of the unsoundness of idealist monism, i.e., the derivation of the external world from con- sciousness, from the subjective in general. Moreover, Kant had in mind not only the "dream-like" and "dogmatic" (in his words) idealism of G. Berkeley, but also the "problematical" idealism of Descartes, who derived our knowledge of the existence of the external world from the cogito, from self-consciousness. The latter was adopted by Descartes as the fundamental premise that makes all other premises superfluous. Kant maintained that the existence of self-consciousness is the proof of the existence of the external, sensual- ly perceived world, because "the consciousness of my existence is at the same time an immediate consciousness of the existence of other 3 In references to Kant's works, the following editions were used: Kant's Cosmology (Tr. W. Hastie), New York: Greenwood Publishing Corporation, 1968; Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Ed. Lewis White Beck), New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1950; Critique of Practical Reason (Tr. Lewis White Beck), New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1956; References to the Critique of Pure Reason are given in the standard way. In references to Kant's Works in Six Volumes (in Russian), Moscow: Mysl', 1963-1966, the first numeral refers to the volume, the second numeral to the part of the volume. 336 PHILOSOPHYAND PHENOMENOLOGICALRESEARCH things outside me." (B276). This position contains the recognition of the independence of consciousness from the external world, but Kant did not express this idea in a clear form.4 We quote here from the section, "The Refutation of Idealism," written by Kant for the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason as a response to those reviews of this work which not without reason saw a subjective idealist tendency in it. Emphasizing his differences with Berkeley, Kant resolutely insisted on the fact that the manifold of ideas organized by a definite image and understood as sensually perceived nature or the world of appearances, necessarily presupposes the acknowledgment of things in themselves, which form the substratum of the world of appearances and are completely indepen- dent of the knowledge of the world. The subjectivity of the sensually given is conditioned by the specified mechanism of human knowledge.