CPR: The Thing In Itself: An Introduction

Before I go on to the Analogies of Experience, here’s something I wrote. It’s an attempt to introduce the thing in itself in my own words. It first appeared here, in response to a query about a comment by Russell in his History of Western Philsophy:

They got rid of the thing-in-itself, and thus made knowledge metaphysically fundamental.

What did Russell mean, and what is the thing-in-itself anyway?

Kant’s was a game-changing philosophy, and later philosophers came to be defined by how they responded to it. This was particularly true of his division of the world into the objects of experience and objects considered as they are in themselves. For Kant, philosophers had to consider the world, or our knowledge thereof, from a transcendental perspective, meaning effectively that we must take account of both sides of the subject-object relation. We cannot make progress without taking into account the way in which we can come to know anything about the world in the first place. This amounts to saying that an object, as far as we can know it, is no more than an object of experience, and anything beyond experience we cannot say. After all, we can hardly jump outside of our experiential correlation with the world to view reality from a godlike perspectiveless view from nowhere. To know an object is to know it as we know it, and not as it is in itself.

My favourite analogy is visual perspective. What is the true perspective on a table? Straight on from the side? From above? Somewhere in between? This strikes us as a silly question. To see an object is to see it from a point of view. This is just the way that objects must be seen to be seen at all. Seeing is essentially perspectival, and there’s no getting away from it: we cannot go beyond perspective and see all the possible profiles of the table at once. Similarly, to experience an object generally is to experience it in the way we must experience objects for them to show up as objects at all. There’s no getting away from it: we cannot go beyond experience to apprehend the object, because apprehending an object is to experience it. Just as visual perspective is an optico-spatial finitude, our status as experiencing subjects is a general epistemological finitude. There can be no talk of “what it is really like” in a non-dogmatic philosophy.

(Incidentally, perspective is my favourite analogy because it suggests a way of thinking about Kant’s subjectivism that gets away from the mental).

So, in Kant’s phrasing, we can never reach beyond the boundaries of possible experience. Reality is what is in principle experienceable and cannot be considered outside of that experiential connection of subject and object. Things considered as they are in themselves, or “the thing-in-itself” or “things-in-themselves” for short, are completely unknowable.

But it might be wondered why Kant said so much about something we can in principle never know anything about. The reason Kant used the idea of things in themselves is twofold:

(1) It was Kant’s diagnosis of contemporary metaphysics that philosophers had simply assumed they could gain access to an underlying, ultimate reality—the thing-in-itself—merely with reason (these are now known as rationalists). In fact, the success of empirical observation in science and the philosophy of Locke and Hume made it increasingly clear that such speculations could never be known one way or the other, for we apprehend and learn about the world through sensory experience (with the help of a certain perceptual template that we apply to all the objects given in perception, along with innate concepts such as cause and effect, which are required to allow us to make judgements about those objects—to talk and think about them rationally, and to know them). Kant had to make a distinction between his critical philosophy and transcendental realism. The latter, in its rationalist incarnation, relegated sensory experience to an uncertain, inferior status, and favoured pure reason as a means of attaining knowledge of the ultimately Real directly. From the transcendental perspective, these philosophers could be seen not to take account of how we can know things, illegitimately assuming a subject-independence of the object (a “realism”) that could properly only be attributed from an empirical, that is, a non-transcendental perspective (and this is why Kant was a transcendental idealist, but an empirical realist). Thus he had to make a distinction between the objects of experience (and knowledge), and the imagined objects that the rationalists juggled in their metaphysical schemes. Hence, objects of experience versus things in themselves.

(2) According to Kant, even aside from the mistakes of the philosophers, we do find the idea of things in themselves irresistibly compelling. We simply cannot dispense with the thought that our experiences are of something, moreover something beyond and independent of subjectively constituted experience—that objects as we know them (phenomena or appearances) must be caused by an underlying reality.

Russell is referring to philosophers now known as German Idealists, who had a lot of trouble with Kant’s notion of the thing-in-itself. For one thing, if cause and effect is just a concept we contribute to the world in order to organize experience intelligibly, then how can something beyond experience cause our experiences? Essentially, there can in principle be no way to justify our belief in things-in-themselves, because reason’s only scope is the world of experience. But this is hardly philosophically acceptable, to throw our hands up and say “well, we can’t help believing in it so what can you do?”.

So the German Idealists rejected the notion of the thing-in-itself. And without that, what do we have left? Well, we are left with what is subjectively constituted. We just have our knowing of the world, a world that is just the thing we know, and no more. Hence, knowledge became metaphysically fundamental.

Further reading:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-metaphysics/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/
http://www.iep.utm.edu/germidea/

But…