How is Nature Possible?

Kant's Project in the First Critique

Daniel N. Robinson

• Editorial: Continuum
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441178015
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Filosofia
• Categoría: Filosofia moderna

How is Nature Possible?: Kant's Project in the First Critique presents a clear and systematic appraisal of what is perhaps the most difficult treatise in the philosophical canon. Daniel N. Robinson situates Kant's undertaking in the First Critique within the context of the history of philosophy and as a response to the challenges of scepticism. Kant's central task in the First Critique is totie his metaphysical analysis to the very possibility of nature itself. Where others assumed the validity or the weakness of perception and reason, Kant presents a critical appraisal of both, thereby establishing the very limits of sense and reason as instruments of discovery.Ideal for students at all levels, this fascinating introduction clarifies the aims and significance of Kant's project, locates its place within the history of philosophy and identifies the strengths and weaknesses reasonably attributed to this most significant contribution to the history of philosophical reflection.

CHAPTER 1

PRELIMINARIES

A little more than forty years ago, writing in The Philosophical Review , Jonathan Bennett passed what some took to be a final judgment:

Most of the Critique of Pure Reason is prima facie dead, because prima facie dependent on wholly indefensible theories. The commentator’s dominant problem is to display the life below the surface. ¹

Clearly, reports of this death were premature. In the years since the autopsy report was filed, it has been obvious to many scholars that the body in question was a case of misidentification. Whole clusters of indefensible theories then proved to be either surprisingly defensible, or not Kant’s to begin with. Still other commentators, though agreeing that certain gaps and flaws were, indeed, fatal, nonetheless believed that they possessed a previously unsuspected nostrum with which to restore life and give the patient yet another opportunity to have his merits properly assessed.

A small group—perhaps the smallest—concluded that it was allegiance to the strictures of “analytical philosophy” that had deadened the capacities needed to comprehend Kant’s arguments and to engage them on unprejudiced terms. A recent representative of this minority is Kenneth Westphal who states the matter cogently when he discourages attempts to absorb Kant into a contemporary methodology. He recommends that scholars,

instead of incorporating Kant’s transcendental proofs into present-day philosophical attitudes . . . reconsider some of our current philosophical attitudes in order to understand and benefit from Kant’s transcendental proofs. ²

In whatever camp one finds greatest compatibility, it must be agreed that the Critique of Pure Reason is among the most difficult works in the philosophical canon, and ever more so owing to the author’s often defensive tone, convoluted arguments, and distracting repetitions. The two editions of the work, separated by a half-dozen years, reveal Kant’s pained awareness of the difficulties faced by both hostile and sympathetic readers. There will be further agreement that these difficulties have not been overcome by the immense secondary literature spawned by the Critique any more than they were by the extensive correspondence between Kant and his contemporaries. Indeed, those who have bravely (and also those who have somewhat rashly) entered into Kant’s thought for the purpose of rendering it accessible to students and nonspecialists have often given the work an even greater mystique and remoteness. As for those who have entered more ambitiously to challenge or enrich the specialist’s reading of the Critique , the risk here is a greater attachment to how Kant should be read than to what Kant actually wrote. If this is to be avoided, the place to begin may not be with recent decades of Kant scholarship, essential though that is. A more promising approach calls for something of an intellectual biography with close attention to the progress Kant made toward identifying what he took to be the most fundamental questions and how he understood the failure of others to answer them.

Yet even to speak of progress is to overlook the several and diverging paths Kant pursued over a course of years. The evolution of the Critique includes a mixed collection of abortive early attempts and more successful but then abandoned productions during his “pre-Critical” years. The earlier efforts were engagements with well-developed perspectives in the academic world of Germany, an academic world marked by strong political and religious attachments, ever alert to departures from orthodoxy. If one is to understand the aims and the very tone of the Critique , this part of the overall story becomes important. One should be attentive to the problems and possibilities bequeathed to Kant as well as the special pressures emanating from the political quarters of the German universities. The magnitude of these pressures is conveyed by Kant when he refers peevishly to

incompetent judges, who, while they would have an old name for every deviation from their perverse though common opinion, and never judge of the spirit of philosophic nomenclature, but cling to the letter only, are ready to put their own conceits in the place of well-defined notions, and thereby deform and distort them. ( Prolegomena , 293) ³

Perhaps the first sign of a more settled position on the task he would undertake is in a letter to a former student. Writing to Marcus Herz a decade before the publication of the first edition, Kant refers to his current efforts on what he has provisionally titled The Bounds of Sensibility and Reason . There is an urgency expressed in the letter. He reports that such a project calls for one to be “driven by a mania for systematizing” and that his goal is nothing less than working out “in some detail the foundational principles and laws that determine the sensible world. . . .” ⁴

At this time (1771) Kant must make choices between two powerful but radically different modes of inquiry, different modes of understanding; one so productively applied by Newton and another that had established Leibniz as the greatest metaphysician of his age. Just how far can knowledge proceed by way of observation and measurement? Just how far can reason in its theoretical projections enter into and grasp the actual nature of things?

Both sense and reason are limited. Thus, Kant must identify the proper mission and domain of each as well as the manner in which their separate functions come to be integrated in what is finally the intersubjectively settled knowledge of science. The task he faces requires an acknowledgment of the empirical character of science and also a sustained defense of it against skeptical challenges grounded in notions of subjectivity and relativism. Similarly, the grand rational systems so common in traditional metaphysics must be put on notice, but not at the expense of the central place of reason in rendering the world, if incompletely knowable, nonetheless intelligible.

Between the two editions of the Critique Kant wrote an exegesis designed to clarify points judged to be obscure in the first edition. This was his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), intended to assist teachers who might wish to adopt the Critique but would need a supporting and clarifying summary of the principal arguments. He begins section 14 with the statement, “ Nature is the existence of things, so far as it is determined according to universal laws.” A universe of disjointed and random fluctuations cannot qualify as “nature.” Rather, nature is possible only insofar as there are in actuality universal laws of nature that confer order, predictability, and coherence. Accordingly, there can be “nature” only insofar as there is a pure science of nature , and this leads Kant to the question, “How is it possible?” ( Prolegomena , 295).

If the overall objective of the Critique can be collapsed into a single sentence, it is this interrogative: How is nature possible? How does the flotsam of mindless physicality become organized into the world as known and knowable?

There is room for confusion on this point, amply illustrated by otherwise authoritative works. On one common construal, Kant’s attempt to determine how nature is possible takes a form summarized this way (and criticized) by Graham Bird:

For Kant nature, empirical reality, is one self-contained realm which requires to be “constituted by” some agency outside that realm, namely a transcendental mind. That non-empirical item is causally affected by things-in-themselves and is causally active in literally constructing nature out of the subjective mental effects of those things-in-themselves. The mind, conceived in this way, will itself belong to that alternative, non-natural, realm of things-in-themselves. ⁵

Bird’s own position is quite different. His reading leads him to conclude that

for Kant what is “left out” of a scientific, explanatory, account of reality is now a reference to another causal, or explanatory, account operating in the unknowable realm of things-in-themselves. If a scientific account needs philosophical supplementation it is needed simply as a higher order examination of reality and our knowledge.⁶

As will be shown later, Kant was not oblivious to such attempts to naturalize the mind, citing Locke’s attempt to sensualize the process by which the resulting lawfulness of nature is achieved (A271/ B327). ⁷ Kant would surely resist any interpretation that would have nature constructed “out of the subjective mental effects of those things-in-themselves” if, by “constructed out of,” one has in mind some determinate relation. On this account, noumena —those things as in themselves they really are—are ruled out completely, for the term refers to what is intelligible but not sensible. As will be discussed in later chapters, the sensible realm is that of phenomena. Just what that ultimate physical constitution of things might be falls beyond the powers of sense. A noumenal realm may be inferred from the very fact of phenomena but cannot be known.

Actually, Kant is utterly uncertain as to whether, once thought has liberated itself from all sensible intuition and thereby engages the concept of noumena , “any object whatsoever is left” (A253). He acknowledges and cautions against that tendency by which one is misled into thinking

the entirely indeterminate concept of an intelligible entity . . . as being a determinate concept of an entity that allows of being known. (A250/B307)

In all, then, it is doubtful that reality could be constructed out of no more than sensible intuitions and the conceptual elements crafted according to some higher-order examination of empirical knowledge.

But the question persists: How is nature possible ? The point of the question warrants further consideration of Kant’s aims. There is a long history of scholarly controversy on the question of just how Kant’s overall project is to be understood, the question of just what it was that he hoped to achieve. An especially clear and economical summary of alternative accounts has been provided by Karl Ameriks. ⁸ He discusses three major options when attempting to identify Kant’s principal objective. One option would have Kant developing a systematic metaphysics serving as a refutation of skepticism , as such skepticism emerges from both empiricistic (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) and rationalistic (Descartes) sources. Surely the Critique can be viewed in this light, especially granting the importance Kant attaches to the Refutation of Idealism he adds to the second edition. On yet another account, a developed metaphysical system such as Kant’s might provide philosophical foundations for a species of scientism that takes the scientific image of reality as a corrective against the claims of mere common sense, a corrective lest the “manifest image” of reality at the level of ordinary perception be taken as ultimate and authoritative. Finally, there is the enduring problem of ontology within metaphysics and the demand or the hope that the right sort of systematic treatment will clarify if not settle questions as to just what there is in reality—and whether human capacities are able to make contact with it.

Ameriks himself argues that Kant was keenly aware of all three of these issues but finally settled on a modest fourth option, the transcendental option that would unearth and critically assess the presuppositions and conditions necessary if both the scientific and the manifest images of reality are to be coherent or even possible. There is much to recommend in such a reading of the Critique , even if one is repeatedly reminded by Kant that progress in ontology must first overcome skeptical challenges, and that the limits of sense and reason impose constraints that can be identified but not fully overcome.

The orientation adopted throughout these pages is comfortable with Ameriks’ interpretation even if less inclined to put any fixed and sharp boundary between “the manifest image” and the scientific image of reality. At the macroscopic level, the boundary is not at all obvious and this, finally, is the level at which “nature” presents itself as something calling for explanation. At what is now understood to be the subatomic level—the level one is tempted to regard as closer to things “as in themselves they really are”—there are not even those appearances that stand as the starting point of every epistemic claim.

This will be made clearer in later pages, but at this point it is important to state how Kant’s aims are understood in these pages. First, it matters that Kant was a scientist as well as a philosopher, with a lifelong interest in cosmology and physics, and with an abiding concern that the claims of science would never rest securely on what he took to be the available anchoring foundations of philosophy. Haunted by skepticism, the scientific world might seek sanctuary behind the porous screen of appearances, unmindful of the observer’s contribution to the pictured world.

Fully aware of the limits and even the distortions imposed by brute empiricism, the scientific world also had a fatal attraction to elaborate rationally constructed models of a reality making little contact with the facts of the world as given. Against this historical background, there was the Age of Newton, the achievements in astronomy, mechanics, physiology—the extraordinary discovery of lawful relationships in every corner of the natural world. How is this to be understood? What makes it even possible?

The question is ever timely. Consider the world as presented to sensitive creatures. The olfactory epithelial cells of canines respond to the dissipation of one molecule of fatty acid. The inner ear is responsive to acoustic energy at the level of Brownian motion. The pigment chemistry of retinal receptors functions at the level of quanta. The ordinary percipient lives in a sea of disconnected physical impingements—incessant, innumerable, and dynamic. Out of all this, and in the manner of discovery rather than invention, a knowable world emerges. Kant’s Critique sets out to establish how this is so, the implications arising from the very nature of the process and, thus, both the achievements and the limits of sense and reason.

Returning to the ontological question, consider again Kant’s division of reality into those phenomena that are accessible to perceptual modes of knowing and that other and forever-elusive realm of noumena falling utterly beyond the perceptual resources of human cognition. Less clear is just how Kant reaches this conclusion against the small army of once-celebrated metaphysicians who had argued otherwise. Is it really the case, even in this age of super-string theory and journeys to the moon, that Physics cannot reveal what things are in themselves ? Is Kant’s distinction to be understood as an epistemological claim regarding limits on one’s access to the intricacies of reality, or is it a worrisome ontological claim yielding a double reality, a two-worlds theory? The reading encouraged in these pages takes Kant to be proposing the double-aspect character of reality, the ( phenomenal) aspect accessible...