In his criticism of the fourth paralogism, Kant once again visits the debate between realism and idealism and concludes that empirical idealism can't work. Mind you, the transcendental dialectic is based about errors in logic, but the error made by empirical idealism is too big. But first, let's define what Kant means by an idealist: "someone who … does not admit that [external objects are] cognized through immediate perception and infers from this that we can never be fully certain of their reality from any possible experience” (CPR p.426 A369 ). Kant goes on to illustrate the difficulty faces by empirical idealist since he believes that they are also transcendental realist (CPR p.427 A372). If this is the case, however, the issue is confused because it “must always remain doubtful whether the cause [of our perception of objects] is in us or outside of us” since the idealist would claim that the cause is in us and the realist would claim that it is outside of us (CPR 427).
The correct position according to Kant should be that of transcendental idealism where all objects (outside of ourselves) are just “mere representations” (CPR 426). Furthermore, this position is better because it makes an object’s reality “immediately perceived” that doesn’t need to “be inferred” (CPR 427). Instead of doubting the actual reality of the objects in the world (empirical idealism), we should realize the limits of our reason: this is the task that Kant has set out to accomplish in the transcendental dialectic. In the transcendental analytic he established that we can’t know anything about things in themselves and that we only interact with the appearance of things (CPR 424). Due to this fact, we can only work with the perception we have, objects “cannot be actual [read ‘real’] in any other way” and that is precisely what the transcendental idealism states (CPR 429).
But overall, empirical idealism doesn’t make sense because, as Hume thought, we can’t really believe it. We wouldn’t be able to function if we truly thought the world was a figment of our imagination. Nevertheless, this type of idealism was a precursor to what Kant is suggesting with his transcendental critique. In other words, the empirical idealist claim is true in as far as our ability to describe outside objects; just wrong in doubting that they are really there. But doesn’t it seem logical to doubt the existence of something you know you can’t say anything about? Shouldn’t the standard for existence be that we can say something positive about the object? Not if you’re Kant. He is only interested in setting out the bounds reason. Existence is based around what must be the case to have the possibility of experience, not on what we can exhaustibly describe.
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3 comments:
I like the idea that Kant puts forth about not being able to know the true nature of things in themselves (that is, that what we know is just the representations of objects), but it seems to me that there has to be some situation in which we can know the true properties of objects, knaamean? Maybe my understanding of this concept is too rudimentary (completely likely), but I just think that there must be some dang way that we can know something about some thing. Hmm.
Sorry for commenting a bit late, but I'm not sure Kant is quite as negative about our knowledge claims as transcendental idealism initially seems. His claim is that because our mind structures all of the sensible intuitions, our knowledge is necessarily structured as well. Our empirical knowledge can be trustworthy, but it's never unmediated by our mind. To me this seems more of an agnostic claim than a negative one when it comes to knowledge.
The problem is not how we would function if we thought everything was a figment of our imagination. This misconceives the issues. We have to begin with what we have: namely, consistent knowledge of things. The question is how we explain this. How do we know that the representations that seem to be of things outside of us really are outside of us?
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