Disclaimer: For those of you who don’t get the reference, please listen to James Brown. It’s for your own good.
So Kant, in a pretty unexpected move, decides to talk about the immortal soul or, as he calls it, the physiology of inner sense. I figured the whole immortal soul thing kind of fell under the category of those blasted dogmatic thinkers that Kant seems to dislike so much, but I guess Kant has to face the music at some point.
Basically, he mentions the doctrine of the soul and the doctrine of bodies as opposites, with the soul concerning inner sense and bodies concerning objects of outer sense, which are basically anything that exists in space. So that leaves time as the only thing governing our souls, which doesn’t seem to make too much of any kind of sense. Unfortunately for Kant, he digs himself even deeper by saying that all of our a priori concepts can only be found in the doctrine of bodies, since the doctrine of the soul has “in it nothing abiding” (A381 pg432). With no a priori concepts to fall back on how can Kant give any account of the soul at all, since it clearly isn’t something we can observe.
All that is really left to the soul is its possession of some type of “I,” or sense of self-identity, which ties together some constant flux of the soul with no manifold to unite. So it seems that Kant believes a soul must exist somehow, although he doesn’t give it much credit. He seems to at least think that the observer needs to have this thing to tie everything together and be able to synthesize experience. I think he kind of gives up on the soul here, and just begins to focus on exploring whatever the I is, since that only turns out to be some presupposed intuition with no meaning at all.
I guess in Kant’s view, the soul doesn’t have too much of a purpose then, which would, in a way, accomplish his goal of vanquishing the dogmatics and their penchant for eternal life. However, he establishes a thinking Self, which I suppose is a piece of the soul, and the purpose of its study. He says that study of the soul helps us “remain within the limit of those questions that do not go beyond that whose content can be provided by possibly inner experience” (A382 pg433), which is a fancy way of saying that we should limit our treatment of inferences as facts. This inner sense which is so important for the soul and the thinking Self again asserts out need to synthesize experience with a priori synthetic concepts and all of that fun, transcendental idealist method.
So even though Kant doesn’t place as much importance on the soul as most other philosophers do, he takes his own view that falls in line with his usual doctrine of synthesis of experience. He still said it loud, he’s a transcendental idealist and he’s proud.
6 comments:
Is Kant saying that a priori concepts are the soul? Is the inner sense ( a priori conceptions of space, time, non-contradiction etc.) therefore synonymous with the soul? Or is Kant attempting to make a case for some sort of "soul" that is neither the inner sense, nor empirical? If the two are NOT synonymous, what is the purpose of the soul? Is it merely self-identity or is it more of our true "essence" like the real objects that we can never experience, and our bodies are merely appearances?
My understanding is that Kant argues there is no empirical intuition that suggests the soul exists. Our entire concept of soul stems from the unity of consciousness (apperception/"I think"), but we have no intuitions beyond the fact that such a unity is present. In the Analytic the apperception was really just the unity of intuitions that allowed the categories to be applied to them. I think Kant is arguing that any attempt to know more about this "I" is a faulty strategy.
I agree
...with everything.
So, Michael, is the soul comparable to an object in itself then? We can know that a soul exists but knowing anything about it is impossible as the only versions of the soul we come into contact with are merely appearances?
I'm confused, but as I understand it, we could not say that the soul is an object that we can make no claims about since it is only given to us as an appearance. I don’t think it is an object given to us in experience. If our conception of the soul stems from apperception (the inner sense of "I think") then it cannot be considered an appearance given to us in experience, but rather, is part of this sense of unity through which we synthesize experience. As such we cannot call it an object, or make any claims about it or its existence.
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