Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, Part 1
One foot in this world, another in the heavens.
We create order in the universe.
In a nutshell, this is the importance of Immanuel Kant’s doctrine of Transcendental Idealism.
The form this theory would take, as laid out in the Critique of Pure Reason, was said to lead to a Copernican revolution in philosophy. No longer would the question be: how does our thought conform to objects or reality? The question would change perspective and ask: how does the universe conform to our thought processes?
Phenomenal and Noumenal
The core tenet of Transcendental Idealism is that the empirical world we experience (the “phenomenal” world of appearances) is to be distinguished from the world of things as they are in themselves (the “noumenal”). Not only is our knowledge is limited to phenomena we can experience, our knowledge is confined to appearances:
Human beings experience only appearances, not things in themselves.
And in relation to the things we can grasp through experience, we experience them through the a priori conditions of space and time. While the empirical or phenomenal world exists for us in space and time, we have no way of knowing whether things in themselves are either spatial or temporal.
Space and Time
For Kant, space and time are forms of human intuition that are the human conditions of possible experience. Space and time are constructs of the mind that enable us to order and understand the appearances which are presented to us via the senses.
Objects conform to the ideal conditions of space and time, our mind’s system for ordering knowledge. Insofar as we can only understand appearances via space and time, which are unique to thought itself, we can never know how the universe actually is or might be.
Space and time are ideal and transcendental, the a priori possible conditions of experience: not of experience itself, but instead ordering experience.
The reality of the universe is not ideal: Kant was not an ontological idealist, he was an empirical realist. Things in themselves do exist, but we cannot know them as such; we can only know them via the human mechanics of thought.
This led to an intense academic debate on whether appearances, phenomena, and things in themselves, noumena, are of two worlds or are two aspects of one world; a debate beyond the scope of this article.
The Synthesis of Thought
What I would like to focus on here is the manner in which the mechanic of thought is characterized by Kant. It is Kant’s views on the synthesis of thought, and the implications this will have for human consciousness and subjectivity, that are of central importance.
For Kant, understanding appearances requires more than the knowledge of their sensible form (space and time); it also requires that we be able to apply certain concepts (for example, the concept of causation) to appearances.
Kant identifies the most basic concepts that we can use to think about all phenomena as the “pure concepts of understanding,” or the “categories.” The categories are: Quality (reality, negation, limitation), Quantity (unity, plurality, totality), Modality (possibility, actuality, necessity) and Relation (substance, causality, community). Kant argues that the categories are applied in a certain way such as to produce objects of experience, in accordance with what he calls the Transcendental Deduction.
The Unified Self
The Transcendental Deduction turns on a conception of self-consciousness that forms the conditions for the possibility of experiencing the world as an objective, unified whole. In short, our experience of the world is capable of being objective and unified because it can be ascribed to a unified self.
The unity of self-consciousness enables us to discern the difference between subjective and objective experiences; between those that are only our opinion and those which we share with others. The unified self is able to distinguish between the subjective and the objective via representation: unified experience depends on objective representation; which in turn is a function of rules which ultimately form the categories.
An objective representation is a unified experience understood via the categories. And the appearance of an object is re-presented in the mind via the ordering imposed by the categories of thought.
The forms of sensibility (space and time) originate in the mind and are imposed on the world, and the forms of understanding (the categories) also originate in the mind and are imposed on the world. Self-consciousness arises from combining or synthesizing representations with one another notwithstanding the ongoing change in the content of those representations.
The Ideality of Reason
Self-consciousness is derived from the invariable form and structure of experience via representation, and consciousness of one’s identity through all of one’s changing experiences. And this formal structure of experience, its unity and law-governed regularity, is an ideal aspect of the mind rather than a property of reality.
The order and regularity in the universe is constructed in the mind.
Our experience has a constant form because the mind constructs experience in a law-governed way. Self-consciousness consists in awareness of the mind’s law-governed activity of synthesizing or combining sensible data to construct a unified experience; the process of representation.
The notion of “I think must be able to accompany any of my representations” in order for me to be conscious that they are mine. This “I think” is not of this world. It is transcendent, a priori, to experience. That is, the self-conscious subject that forms unified representations of experience is a priori to our experience itself. Our subjectivity, and hence the source of reason, is ideal, transcendent of this world.
The Ideal Self
To be self-conscious, I cannot be wholly absorbed in the contents of my perceptions, but must distinguish myself from the rest of the world. Experience of an objective world is constructed by an a priori ability to judge objective representations of that world that are distinguishable from me. And it is this ideal subject that is the source of the laws of nature:
… we ourselves bring into the appearances that order and regularity that we call nature, and moreover we would not be able to find it there if we, or the nature of our mind, had not originally put it there… The understanding is thus not merely a faculty for making rules through the comparison of the appearances: it is itself the legislation for nature, i.e., without understanding there would not be any nature at all.
The Transcendent Creator of Order
Kant’s project of reconciling rationalism and empiricism is completed in the unified, transcendent subject that creates order in the world, completes the world, through an objective process of representation and judgement of appearances or experiences that follows the laws of reason.
The subject and source of reason itself stands apart from that world, transcends that world, and in so doing constructs that world in accordance with objective representation and judgement.
Clearly, Deleuze will have something to say about Kant’s transcendent subject, as I will discuss in the next article.
I hope you enjoyed this article. Thanks for reading!
Tomas
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Excerpt from my forthcoming book, Becoming: A Life of Pure Difference (Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of the New) Copyright © 2021 by Tomas Byrne. Learn more here.
