Yes, this is an obvious implication of Kant. But it is such an important step--progression (maybe!?), deviation,(!?), relegation(?), perhaps merely a change-- in the history of philosophy that I thought it worth discussing. Plus, a break from the labyrinth of Kant is nice.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Kant'sequences
I am not here concerned with giving a proper explanation of Kants argument for synthetic apriori judgments. I would instead like to focus on the consequences of Kant. Kant has introduced (although of course he wasn't the first, but perhaps one of the strongest) to us the modern epistemological problematic. Post-Kant, if we accept him, we are no longer able to think about the really real. The only thing we have access to is an appeareance, and exactly how it represents the thing in itself is beyond us. This infinitely separates us from reality: As humans, we can't come into contact with it. All metaphysical conclusions resting on the assumption that we come into contact with the real world are null. We are left with a world of appearance and a capacity incapable of penetrating them.
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This is just a thought, and not yet fully developed at that.
ReplyDeleteLately I've been wondering if Kant has pushed the appearance/reality divide so far back that to render it useless. Truth and falsity now have meaning only within the world of appearance--so why not just dispense with the appearance/reality divide altogether and call this world, the apparent world, the one we deal with in experience, "reality" and philosophize about that? This would mean that the world is, for all intents and purposes, the way that it appears. And that allows us to return to some of the dogmatic philosophizing that Kant tried to avoid.
If we simply called the apparent world reality, we would also have to say that although this apparent world is reality, there is another potential thing-in-itself reality which we are cut off from because of our epistemological limits. Our dogmatic claims about this new apparent reality world are much different than those made before the appearance/reality distinction (as Kant meant it).
ReplyDeleteIn short, to do this would be to do what Kant is doing, only to switch the word apparent to reality and ignore the thing we are cut off from as something unknowable. Still, though, our dogmatic claims post-Kant, if we agree with Kant anyway, are much more limited than those of the dogmatic philosophers that I think you have in mind.
This is an interesting question. It is helpful, I think, to enumerate the things that can no longer be said to be true or even inquired into by a Kantian. Of course there are several sorts of Kantians. Kant is clear that viewing the world as appearance does not hinder us from saying the world is empirically real. So reality as experienced should undergo no change at all. Reality insofar as it is thought or insofar as it can ONLY be thought, does undergo significant change.
ReplyDeleteKant does not really restrict what we can experience (if a scientist can experience something he didn't account for then he must change his model to accomodate it - he does of course seem to reject mystical or meditative or other kinds of altered consciousness expereince as experience and one wonders if this is possible) .
Kant does restrict what can be thought as true without experience. This is highly significant because it means Kant, for all his subtleties, squarely supports the empiricist's agenda.
Strangely, one can show that Kant limits the power of thought by overestimating its spontaneity and radical independence from sense experience rather than by showing its utter dependence on the latter (as hume does with ideas and impressions.)