CPR: Prefaces and Introduction

The Crisis of Metaphysics

Kant’s motivation is to firmly establish the status and role of metaphysics, with a view to saving it from a shameful demise. In his time metaphysics had already begun to look seriously dodgy.

Among the rational endeavours in which reason is used, or which are based at least partly on logic (so logic – the mechanics of reason itself – is taken for granted), metaphysics is singularly unsuccessful, especially when compared to mathematics and physics (and it is the recent explosion of physics that makes the inadequacy of metaphysics felt for Kant). Whenever metaphysics builds an edifice, cracks open up in it, and unanimity is always lacking among its practitioners.

Kant looked on Newtonian physics with awe, and as a body of absolute truth. Kant’s project is a result of lab envy

But all of these sciences or would-be sciences make use of a priori judgements, that is, the framework that we bring to objects and which reason consists in, i.e., logic.

If there is to be an element of reason in those sciences, something in them must be known a priori [Preface, Bix]

This is just because reason is separate from experience. Reason consists in the a priori. The objects of experience, i.e., empirical objects or their representations thereof (which are really, according to Kant, the same thing), are objects that we reason about when we do physics. Therefore we need to find the limits – the well-defined domain – for metaphysics corresponding to those that were found for mathematics and physics, otherwise everything is “random groping”. We can attempt an “experiment” in metaphysics, in imitating of the more successful sciences (though of course he has the burgeoning physics and chemistry in mind, rather than mathematics). [Bxvi]

Kant is prompted to consider the status of metaphysics by a peculiar set of circumstances. Kant mentions the “battleground” of metaphysics, against which his project is set. There were several connected battles going on, which together made themselves felt as a crisis of metaphysics.

  1. Newtonian physics versus Leibnizian metaphysics
  2. Empiricism versus Rationalism
  3. The scientific worldview versus morality and religion

In each case, metaphysics had come under attack and been shown to be wanting. This might have prompted one to wonder if metaphysics, as a science, was possible at all, and indeed such was the position of Hume. Kant sees the force of this question but rejects it, both because indifferentism is unacceptable and because scepticism is incoherent.

Indifferentism is unacceptable because metaphysics is a natural disposition. [Bxv]

Scepticism about metaphysics is incoherent because to doubt metaphysics is to doubt all reason. The reason with which we understand empirical objects is the same as that with which we think of abstract concepts. Does this argument work only because Kant assumes from the outset that empiricism is wrong in ignoring the structure of experience? Yes, he can do this because empiricism so obviously fails to account for the receptivity of our minds to ideas such as causation.

The big question that Kant does intend to address is How is metaphysics as a science possible? [Introduction, B22] That is to say, how is metaphysics possible as more than just a natural disposition. As a natural disposition it is safe, but that’s not enough for Kant.

...my principal problem is and remains this: What, and how much, can understanding and reason know independently of all experience?, and not: How is the faculty of thought itself possible? [Preface, Axvii]

To answer this, Kant is offering what he calls a critique of pure reason.

  1. By “critique” he does not mean necessarily a negative criticism.
  2. Reason is extraneous to the empirical, but it often concerns itself with the empirical. Pure reason is concerned only with non-empirical objects.

In connection with point 1, his plan is to…

...conduct a huge audit in order to establish why these sciences whose existence is taken for granted can be said to be truly valid — without making any attempt to generate them from pure thought or speculative philosophy … The effect of this process is to consolidate the validity of this entire structure [the synthetic a priori, I guess] whose truth is already assumed on the basis of the positive validity of the sciences. And this is actually what Kant means by 'critique’. [Adorno p30]

The Copernican Revolution

In the preface Kant conceives of an experiment in imitation of natural science. His experiment is to reverse the way in which we regard our relation to the objects of knowledge (which includes abstract objects such as perfect spheres as well as empirical objects of perception — DOES IT?):

Hitherto it has been supposed that all our knowledge must conform to its objects. But all attempts to establish something about them a priori by means of concepts, and thus to expand our knowledge, have on this supposition come to nothing. We should therefore attempt to tackle the tasks of metaphysics more successfully by assuming that the objects must conform to our knowledge. [Bxvi]

The “experiment” would solve the question as to how reason can gain access to the objects of experience at all, i.e., it would establish the possibility of objects (which, I think, is to solve the critical problem), because what previous (rationalist and empiricist) philosophers missed is that there is no intelligible relation between the understanding and objects in the external world if those objects are considered as things in themselves (and this includes rationalists and even idealists like Berkeley, because they all suppose a domain of real self-constituted objects [see Gardner p38]) Attempts to specify such a relation always presupposed a deeper relation or a context that had not been established. But if objects must conform to our knowledge, then the question will dissolve, because objects will be such that they must be accessible to reason, because this is just another way of stating the terms of the experiment.

Kant goes on to give this a different slant:

...we know of things a priori only that which we ourselves put into them. [Bxix]

In other words, to the extent that we can know objects at all independently of experience (and this is the question of metaphysics), we know them through what we supply from our inner faculties. So we have a priori on one side, and objects of experience on the other. But without the objects of experience we have only what we bring, which has the “somewhat startling result” that this faculty of knowing a priori can never gain any knowledge from beyond “the limits of possible experience”. [BUT what about synthetic a priori?]

Our knowledge, then, does not have access to things in themselves, the unconditioned [Bxx]. Note that Kant is not saying that we do not have access to things-in-themselves, only that they cannot be known. This is interesting to me in that this famous division comes about from a meta-philosophical consideration of the role and foundation of a priori knowledge, rather than anything traditionally metaphysical or epistemological.

The experiment goes by the name of Kant’s Copernican revolution or Copernican turn. Copernicus might have said the following to parallel what Kant said in:

Hitherto it has been supposed that we perceive the movement of the stars and the rising of the sun, while we ourselves remain motionless. But all attempts to establish something about the sun and stars on this basis have on this supposition come to nothing. We should therefore attempt to tackle the tasks of astronomy more successfully by assuming that the stars and sun remain motionless while we move through space. [after Bxvi]

It is us who revolve around the sun, not the sun around us. For both Copernicus and Kant, there is something about us that can explain our world, something that has been missed so far.

Transcendental Idealism

I had a first stab at explaining transcendental idealism here, so I’ll try not to repeat myself.

If objects are constituted only by our faculties, this seems to result in straightforward idealism of the Berkeleyan variety. Kant wants to avoid this impression — how does he do it? [see Gardner p.42]

The old distinction of appearance and reality is reconfigured by Kant’s Copernican Revolution, and transcendental idealism is the result.

Reality is no longer a reality in itself. The latter is unknowable (though thinkable). Appearance is not the result of the filtration of impressions from things-in-themselves – as empiricist realists would have it – but the result of the a priori forms that are imposed on the world so as to make it knowable.

* At the common sense (and, presumably, scientific) level, realism is true. This is empirical realism* But philosophically (when philosophy is conceived as transcendental), empirical reality is transcendentally ideal

That is to say, from the transcendental standpoint, from which we are looking at the conditions for experience in general, the empirically real depends on those conditions, i.e., it is conditioned by the structure of experience, by that which transcendental philosophy investigates.

This also means that the distinction between metaphysics and epistemology is reconfigured.

I call all knowledge transcendental which deals not so much with objects as with our manner of knowing objects insofar as this manner is to be possible a priori. [B25]

A Priori and Empirical (a posteriori)

From the beginning of the Introduction [B1]:

There can be no doubt that all knowledge begins with experience.

With respect to time … no knowledge is antecedent to experience.

But although our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

Our knowledge may arise partly from within ourselves, but only when given the objects of experience. And this nicely conveys Kant’s attitude to empiricism.

a priori: knowledge which is absolutely independent of all experience. But this does not mean independent to the extent that it never concerns objects of experience. Absolutely independent means not at all dependent on – no matter how deep you delve – on anything learned from experience. [B2] **pure a priori knowledge:” does not concern anything empirical.

NOTE: His assertion that “each alteration has its cause” is not pure [B3] is flatly contradicted on the next page. Translation issue?

Here’s Raugust’s (Phil forum) definition: > A priori knowledge is true belief that can be sufficiently justified and brought about by having enough experience to understand the proposition in question, without any need in principle for other evidence. If all it would ever take to warrantedly assent to some true sentence p is that you understand p, then p constitutes a priori knowledge for anyone who believes in it. A posteriori knowledge is any knowledge that is not a priori, i.e., that depends on some experience beyond comprehending the terms involved.

Your first definition of a priori, “requiring no experience whatsoever”, makes no sense. Knowledge is impossible without experience, as rationalists generally accept. I don’t know what your “fuzzlewuzzle” example is supposed to suggest.

From here

Characteristics of a priori propositions [B3] – Necessity — but not logical necessity – Strict universality

These are saying the same thing in different ways. [B4]

Now take the proposition, “each alteration has its cause.” The concept of cause here has the character of necessity and strict universality, because we cannot conceive of an event without a cause. Therefore causation is a priori, contra Hume. [B5]

To prove a principle’s “indispensability for the possibility of experience itself” is also to prove it is a priori.

Note that Adorno is at pains in his lecture 1 to emphasize that Kant is interested in objective validity rather than an elucidation of subjective cognition.

Kant says that his central proof, the Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts (Categories in other translations) of the Understanding, is meant to establish the…

...objective validity of its a priori concepts. It is, therefore, essential to my purposes. [Axvi]

It is the establishing of objective validity that makes it essential for him.

Analytic and Synthetic

Judgements: propositions or statements Analytic: a judgement whose predicate is “contained” in the subject, or a judgement whose negation is contradictory, or a judgement that is self-evident Synthetic: a judgement whose predicate is extraneous to the subject, or a judgement that gives us new knowledge

synthetic a priori | analytic a priori
synthetic a posteriori | none

For Hume and Leibniz there are two kinds of knowledge: analytic a priori and synthetic a posteriori. For Kant there are three. [See Gardner p52]

1. All mathematical judgements are synthetic

2. Physics contains synthetic a priori judgements as principles

3. Metaphysics is meant to contain synthetic a priori knowledge

The Synthetic a priori

The question, How is metaphysics as a science possible? hinges on the question How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible?

Note again that the question is how, not if.

Why is it an important question? Because the more general question is about how reason can gain new knowledge, therefore it concerns the a priori taken in isolation, and the synthetic, which provides new knowledge. And establishing the synthetic a priori breaks down the rationalist and empiricist bifurcation of knowledge, thus allowing, contra Hume, the possibility of contentful, i.e., not merely logical or analytic, knowledge which does not arise from experience. The whole of metaphysics depends on this.

More importantly, perhaps, is the problem of accounting for our seeming knowledge of necessary, universal truths. Given Hume’s argument that induction cannot justify the status of any propositions as necessary — which Kant accepts — how can we know that some things must be true? In the introduction to Pluhar’s translation, Patricia Kitcher gives three examples of the sorts of truths that Kant wants to give an account of:

And the answer cannot be that they are true merely by virtue of the meaning of the terms, because they are synthetic, not analytic (although I imagine that some might argue that the first is analytic). Yet the ncessary, niversal character that they surely do have isn’t based on experience: no matter how many times we measure the rate of a falling objects, we cannot derive necessity from this repeated conjunction.

The concept of cause, though often associated with the concept of a happening, is extraneous to it. If “everything that happens” is represented by A, and cause is represented by B (the formalization is inaccurate but unimportant), how can B be thought to be necessarily connected with A when it is not contained by A?

How then can I predicate of that which happens, as belonging to it, and belonging to it necessarily? What is here the unknown = X, on which the understanding relies when it believes it discovers, outside the concept A, a predicate B foreign to the concept A, which it nevertheless believes to be connected with that concept? [B14]

...synthetic a priori judgements are those that define the structure of experience. [Gardner p62]

That is, these are distinctions that are not significant logically but with regard to content.

The specifically novel element here is that objectivity itself, that is, the validity of knowledge as such, is created by passing through subjectivity — by reflecting on the mechanisms of knowledge, its possibilities and its limits. In this system the subject becomes if not the creator, then at least the guarantor of objectivity. [Adorno p33]

Appearance, Reality & The Thing in Itself

We should notice what is distinctive in Kant. “What causes perception?”, for instance, is not the question Kant was asking, and if you’re thinking in these terms then you haven’t got over the older distinction between appearance and reality. Kant reconfigured this distinction in his own special way.

“What causes perception?” might be phrased in a more general way to do away with any presuppositions (bearing in mind Hume on causality), thus to approach, but not yet to reach, Kant’s question, as “what is it that allows reality to become an object for us?” Rationalist, Empiricist, common-sense answers to this question all seem to presuppose a relation of some sort, when this is precisely what is being sought. At the same time, they presuppose a realm of self-constituted objects. One of Kant’s innovations (perhaps his main innovation) was to reconceive all of this, by considering objects not as independent things-in-themselves but as objects only insofar as they are knowable by virtue of the conditions of experience, i.e., as conditioned by the ground of experience.

So far in my reading, I see the unconditioned, or thing-in-itself (Schopenhauer, for example, makes it singular, because it is only our contribution of space that results in the experience of plurality), as like a by-product of Kant’s project, rather than a positive construction. It’s not what he’s interested in, as a domain of theoretical enquiry — though its very unknowability is something that – I’m out on a limb here – secures a space for morality and freedom.

In Kant’s view it is not a question of how our perceptions match up to real objects – which is the familiar empiricist or representational realist way of thinking. For Kant, our perception of empirical reality is direct, because empirical reality itself is conditioned by experience (or what makes experience possible). What’s interesting here is that whereas the older question of appearance and reality results in scepticism (about causality or the existence of the external world, etc), Kant protects empirical reality from scepticism by establishing the necessary, objective validity of the conditions of experience (the _transcendental) as that which makes objects objects for us in the first place. In fact, I would say, as that which makes objects objects at all in the first place, because an object is always for us. This last point might be controversial.

Consequences

Where is Kant going? We can make a distinction in metaphysics, the two opposing kinds of metaphysics having different names:

Immanent metaphysics | Transcendent metaphysics
Metaphysics of experience | Speculative Metaphysics

When he’s finished, Kant will have rejected the possibility of transcendent metaphysics — seen in the philosophy of the rationalists — but will have secured immanent metaphysics on a firm foundation. In this way, he will have done what was done for physics and mathematics: demarcated its territory, fenced it off so as to make it productive.

The Negative and Positive Aspects of the Critique

Negative (Dialectic)

Limits reason (as science) to the objects of experience

Positive (Aesthetic + Analytic)

Secures the metaphysics of experience, or immanent metaphysics, as being based on objectively valid and necessary conditions. As Adorno says (p2), Kant’s intention in the CPR is to “establish the objective nature of cognition, or to salvage it.”

Because things in themselves are thinkable, though not knowable, there is a space for us to think freedom, God, the Good, and so on, without the burden of proving them, proving that we know them, etc. (this is the space of practical reason) This means that, for example, free will can be protected forever against the assaults of a science that wishes to reduce everything to the mechanism of nature [Bxxix], while not restricting science unduly. And the same goes for God, beauty, etc.

This is a spectacular attempt to find an answer to the crisis of the Enlightenment, in which the spirit of enquiry had come to threaten morality and religion (it was not just that religious authorities were threatened – Kant was fine with that, good Enlightenment boy that he was – but that faith and the spiritual were threatened).

When Kant asks the question “how are synthetic a priori judgements possible?” he is asking “how is it possible for thought to generate something new?” Levi Bryant

I like this emphasis. The synthetic a priori is the space for freedom.

I had to suspend knowledge in order to make room for belief. [Bxxx]

Consequences for Empiricism and Rationalism

Empiricism (Hume) is false under this view because it never stops to consider what allows us to be receptive to sense impressions in the first place. To answer in the scientific manner is not good enough, e.g., “the light-sensitive retina allows us to see”, etc., because such answers presume what it is for the two to be related, and they presume causation, and it is that especially which we’re interested in. Empiricism doesn’t stop to consider what it is about us that could make the “habit of mind” that we call causation possible, which, after all, has the character of necessity and universality. And if there is such a state of affairs making it possible, as there must be, then empiricism is false anyway, because it means that we are not merely passive recipients of sensation.

If objects are necessarily perceived as taking up space and as causing events owing to that which we bring to it independently of experience, i.e., the a priori, then, just like the laws of logic, these perceptions will be valid and necessary. Causation will be an objective fact about the empirical world – the empirical world being conditioned by our knowledge – rather than a habit acquired on repeated exposure.

If there is such a thing as synthetic a priori knowledge it means that empiricists (Hume) are wrong in thinking that no necessity can result from constant conjunction.

As for rationalism, it turns out that one cannot use reason to derive knowledge about objects beyond experience and which do not arise in experience, because “we know of things a priori only that which we ourselves put into them” (recall that rationalism is pure a priori).

If there is such a thing as synthetic a priori knowledge it means that rationalists (Leibniz) are wrong in thinking that necessity requires analyticity.

From a general point of view, Kant puts it nicely with regard to rationalism:

The light dove cleaving in free flight the thin air, whose resistance it feels, might imagine that her movements would be far more free and rapid in airless space. Just in the same way did Plato, abandoning the world of sense because of the narrow limits it sets to the understanding, venture upon the wings of ideas beyond it, into the void space of pure intellect. He did not reflect that he made no real progress by all his efforts; for he met with no resistance which might serve him for a support, as it were, whereon to rest, and on which he might apply his powers, in order to let the intellect acquire momentum for its progress. [B9 (this is from the online Meiklejohn translation, not my Weigelt translation)]

But this should not be seen as a rejection of metaphysics, but as part of his modernizing project.

Problems

I am not clear where the a priori, and especially the synthetic a priori, stands in relation to experience. On one level the problem is my own, but on another it is Kant’s, and not just owing to his clumsy exposition. Here’s Adorno:

I have already pointed to an ambiguity that lies in the concept of synthetic a priori judgements. The ambiguity is whether synthetic a priori judgements are valid independently of experience, which is how Kant generally formulates it, or whether it means that they are valid for every experience.

Not a Radical, But a Modernizing Rationalist

Though remarkably original, Kant can be placed in the mainstream for two reasons:

  1. The search for mathematical certainty
  2. The denigration of worldly experience

These are tied together, and go back to Plato. Adorno [~p24] associates (2) with the relative status of intellectual and manual labour.

Adorno seems to imply a mainly rationalist tradition by his use of “mainstream”, but I think we can place the empiricists partly in the mainstream as well, because they are still fixated on certainty or the lack of it. [But I must read Hume!]

Kant is of the rationalist tradition. Like Tony Blair or Nick Griffin, his project is one of modernization, in the light of rationalism’s embarrassing public image and the damaging attacks of the empiricists, as well as the encroachment of science. His admiration for Newtonian physics is an admiration for the eternal certainty that it seemed to have established, not for the primacy of experiment, though he has a respect for that. Viewing Kant as a modernizing rationalist allows us to see the importance of his claim to have established objective certainty, through an investigation of the subject.

...the synthetic a priori, in short, the incontrovertibly true and valid modes of knowledge that far surpass mere logic, may be described as the roast, the Leibnizian or Cartesian roast, while Hume and English scepticism provide the dialectical salt. [Adorno, p30]

Essay Questions

  1. What are the consequences of Kant’s Transcendentalism for Metaphysics and Epistemology?
  2. What are Kant’s assumptions? Keep this question in mind throughout the book
  3. How does synthetic apriority hold up to criticism? [see Gardner p58]
  4. How does Kant’s project relate to the tension between different versions of the Enlightenment (clue: he epitomizes or embodies it — see Adorno)
  5. How does the synthetic a priori relate to experience?

Other Questions

  1. Is 7 + 5 = 12 really synthetic?
  2. Is it really true that metaphysics is a natural disposition?