Perception and Reality in Kant, Husserl, and McDowell

Corijn van Mazijk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000046700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

How does perception give us access to external reality? This book critically engages with John McDowell's conceptualist answer to this question, by offering a new exploration of his views on perception and reality in relation to those of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl.

In six chapters, the book examines these thinkers' respective theories of perception, lucidly describing how they fit within their larger philosophical views on mind and reality. It thereby not only reveals the continuity of a tradition that underlies today's fragmented scholarly landscape, but also yields a new critique of McDowell's conceptualist theory. In doing so, the book contributes to the ongoing bridging of traditions, by combining analytic philosophy, Kantian philosophy, and phenomenology.

Perception and Reality in Kant, Husserl, and McDowell will appeal to scholars and students working in the history of philosophy, phenomenology, Kantian philosophy, and in particular the philosophy of perception.

1 Kant

Sensibility, Perception, Reality

On Sensibility

Chapter Overview

In this chapter and the next, I consider how Kant understands the relation between perception and reality, and the role concepts play in this. The main thesis I defend is that for Kant reality is accessible only by spatiotemporally orienting agents with a shared capacity to determine conceptually whatever is sensibly presented to them in intuitions, and that intuitions are always already in accordance with the rules for such determination, but that they are not exhaustive of sensible representation as such. This first chapter primarily deals with the first part of this thesis, namely that accessing reality presupposes spatiotemporally orienting beings. To this end, I consider Kant’s early views on space as well as those in the first Critique. This further reveals that sensibility for Kant must be considered as making an extra-conceptual contribution to experience. In the second part, I turn to Kant’s reading of Descartes and the threat of idealism. I argue that Kant rejects idealism, that he defends our immediate perceptual access to reality, and that he does not make forms of sensibility contingent upon natural fact, as McDowell (in Having the World in View) has suggested. Moreover, I show that Kant’s account of our perceptual access to reality involves the idea of a ‘dualism’ (A370) within experience, which is very similar to McDowell’s disjunctive theory. The exact role the understanding has in determining the contents of intuition in order to provide this kind of access to reality – thus the remainder of my main thesis – is discussed in the next chapter.

Introduction

Especially since McDowell’s Mind and World, Kant is often viewed as the first proponent of conceptualism – the thesis that perceptual experience has conceptual content. According to McDowell, conceptualism takes away a certain worry concerning ‘the very possibility of thought’s being directed at the external world’ (ETW 243). It is supposed to answer to a problem regarding how to ‘ensure [ourselves] that we are not beset by a difficulty about the capacity of our mental activity to be about reality at all’ (ETW 243). Conceptualism, then, deals with the conditions of us accessing reality. Indeed, by focusing on conditions of possibility, McDowell puts himself ‘close to a Kantian way’ of transcendental questioning, one that asks not for any particular ‘possession of knowledge’, but for a ‘prior condition’ (ETW 243).

McDowell’s views are of no immediate concern yet. What matters is that Kant’s critical efforts can at least be understood in this light: as an attempt to make understandable the necessary conditions for reality to be accessible in an immediate way, rather than through inference based on some mental representation. Understood this way, Kant’s transcendental philosophy becomes the analysis of the prior conditions required for reality to be manifest to the mind at all. As such, it yields a picture of the bare essentials, so to say, of the mind-world relation.

The thesis I defend over the course of the first two chapters is that for Kant, reality is embraceable in thought only by spatiotemporally orienting agents with a shared capacity to determine conceptually whatever is sensibly presented to them in intuitions, and that intuitions are always already in accordance with the rules for such determination, but that they are not exhaustive of sensible representation as such. The first part of this chapter focuses on the condition of being spatiotemporally orienting, which is the topic of the Transcendental Aesthetic as well as of some pre-critical works, in which Kant aims to show that sensibility is a faculty distinct from thought. Interesting about Kant’s argument is that it suggests that a specifically non-conceptual element – something irreducible to the faculty of understanding – is necessary for disclosing an external world. Perceiving the world here means to take a point of view, to orient oneself spatiotemporally in a sensibly given world. Kant’s picture, therefore, or so I argue, necessarily involves the idea of a non-conceptual faculty – even though this does not imply (or point to) non-conceptual content.

In the second part of this chapter, I turn to Kant’s critique of Descartes and the threat of idealism, his understanding of the noumenon, and the non-disjunctivism he appears to uphold, particularly in Prolegomena. I argue that Kant fuses realism and transcendental idealism in a way that, contrary to what McDowell’s reading of Kant (among others) suggests, does not involve a boundary beyond which ‘there is something we cannot know’ (HWV 79), and which further does not make access to reality contingent upon some ‘brute fact about us’ (HWV 76). Moreover, I argue that Kant’s account of the perceptual availability of a real world involves the idea of a ‘dualism’ (A370) within experience, which is similar to McDowell’s own disjunctive theory. The exact role the understanding has in determining sensible intuition in a way adequate to yielding this directedness at the real world – and therewith the remainder of my main thesis – is saved for the next chapter.

The Distinction between Sensibility and Understanding

One of the principal contributions Kant makes to modern philosophy is captured by his idea that knowledge must consist of the combination of intuitions and concepts. Intuitions, on this picture, are the product of the faculty of sensibility. This faculty is a receptive faculty; it allows the mind to receive representations without having to actively think about anything. Concepts, on the other hand, originate in the faculty of understanding. This faculty is said to be spontaneous; it involves the free production of concepts by exercise of thought. These capacities of producing intuitions and concepts, Kant notes, cannot be exchanged between the two faculties, for ‘the understanding is not capable of intuiting anything and the senses are not capable of thinking anything’ (A51/B75).

The meaning of this phrase is sometimes misunderstood. Taken precisely, Kant admits only to saying that the understanding cannot intuit, and that sensibility cannot think. He does not say that the understanding does not play any role in constituting intuitions; that intuitions would be the product exclusively of sensibility. Kant’s aim here is not to drive a wedge between intuitions and concepts, but to indicate that our two faculties are mutually dependent when it comes to experiences of knowledge. The central point is that, were it not for our sensibility, no object would be given to the mind to think about, whereas without a faculty of understanding, there would be no thoughts about anything.

Kant further makes at least a fourfold distinction as to what sensibility can contain, namely sensations, appearances, perceptions, and intuitions. It is pertinent to appreciate the differences between these terms. We can start with the last one. Intuitions, for Kant, can be taken as acts of sensible representation – that through which things are sensibly presented to one.¹ If, for instance, I were to see a squirrel outside my window, I could be said to have an intuition of that squirrel. This does not require me actively determining what I intuit through an act of understanding. I might also simply gaze at the squirrel while thinking about something else, and thus have what we can call a sheer intuition. The articulation of things as being such-and-such does not therefore belong to intuition (or to any other capacity of sensibility alone).

Second, sensibility provides us with appearances. An appearance is not synonymous with an intuition. Although distinctively passive (not requiring thinking), an intuition is something I do; it is, in phenomenological parlor, an intentional act. By intuiting something, an object in turn can appear to me. This object as it is given, as long as it remains ‘undetermined’ (by explicit thought exercises), is called appearance (A20/B34). Thus the term ‘appearance’ is one way of addressing things outside us – namely as (i) receptively given (not merely thought) and as (ii) undetermined by an effort of understanding (intuited, not judged about). If an act of understanding is in place, an appearance can be put under rules of understanding and thereby cognized – but this is an additional activity which transforms the initially subjective appearance into an object of cognition.

Third, the term perception is closely linked to intuition (for instance Prol. 4: 283). Just as intuition, perception involves the representation of receptively given objects (‘apprehension of the ideas of sense’, Anth 7: 127). For that reason, it also involves sensation. Again like intuition, perception cannot of itself make knowledge of objects available, that is to say: perceiving isn’t judging. The former lacks the active participation of the understanding which characterizes the latter. Yet Kant does consistently differentiate perception from intuition, by noting that only the former must come with conscious awareness (for instance A120). It is thus reasonable to suppose that perception for Kant is different at least from what can be called sheer intuition, which does not involve any conscious attention going out to the object perceived. This distinction will become important in Chapter 2, especially in discussing the transcendental deduction, where the role of concepts in perception and intuition respectively is discussed.

Fourth, the faculty of sensibility involves sensation. If, for instance, I see a squirrel, my faculty of sensibility receives (among others) certain color sensations. If I hear a song being played, the same faculty receives sound sensations. In both examples, the sensations received are not to be understood as appearances. I may see a black squirrel in the garden or hear Agustín Barrios play Le Cathédrale on guitar. But the black fur of the squirrel is an appearance I consider, and so is the melody of Le Cathédrale. These appearances are what we would now call intentional objects, and therefore are not themselves the sensations.

One may expect a fifth concept to be discussed in talking about sensibility, namely experience. In today’s common usage, experience often connotes something like perceiving or more broadly living-through. For Kant, however, the term refers to knowledge. To experience simply means to know; to have ‘knowledge of objects of sense’ (Anth 7: 128). In the Kantian framework the term therefore does not belong to sensibility, nor to the understanding, but exclusively to their cooperation.

Both appearances – the things given to me sensibly – and concepts are referred to by Kant as representations. It is good to note that the German term Vorstellung does not have the same connotations as the English word representation. A Vorstellung need not be a re-presentation; it more adequately translates into ‘presentation’. Kant, then, is not guilty of a representational theory of perception just for saying that perceptual appearances are representations. I continue to use the more common term ‘representation’ here, which should be harmless if we are aware of its original meaning.

By calling appearances and concepts representations, Kant does not intend to conflate the two sorts of representations. Appearances are characterized as representations ‘given to us immediately’ (A109), which is to say that they represent objects without the mediation of thought or judgment.² Sensible representations are all, as Kant claims his Transcendental Aesthetic to have shown, made possible by space and time as forms of our sensibility. Whether or not they are still representations of something else, of something perhaps altogether unavailable to our cognition, is discussed later. A concept, on the other hand, is a general and mediate representation; a ‘one over many’. A concept of or a proposition about an object is therefore always a representation of a representation – whether of appearances (singular representations) or of other concepts or propositions (general representations).

Thus construed, we have two fundamental types of representation – appearance and concept – allocated to two heterogeneous sources of the mind, the combination of which alone gives us knowledge (or experience in Kant’s terminology). The distinction between intuition and perception, as two ways of intending a sensible object (appearance), will become important again in Chapter 2, where the question of the contents of intuition and perception is considered in more detail.

A Distinct Faculty of Sensibility

But things soon turn out to be more complicated than this. It is nowadays not uncommon to read Kant as assigning to concepts a double role.³ First, they would have an analytic function for us. We make use of this analytic function when we form judgments about things – for instance in judging that ‘all swans are white’ or that ‘every event must have a cause’. In the analytic function, concepts are representations. Second, and considerably more originally, Kant would claim that concepts have a synthetic function. This means that they function as rules for the synthesis of representations – not just our conceptual representations, but also for the representations of sensibility. It is the extent and precise nature of this synthetic rule of concepts of understanding that the Kantian conceptualism debate tends to focus on.

So far, in the Transcendental Aesthetic, appearances were said to be the exclusive concern of our sensibility. After all, ‘the understanding is not capable of intuiting anything and the senses are not capable of thinking anything’ (A51/B75). I already made clear that this phrase does not exclude the option that the understanding plays a role in the production of intuitions. The central claim of (strong) conceptualists is, indeed, that the conclusion that it doesn’t ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Sources and Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Kant: Sensibility, Perception, Reality
• 2 Kant: Concepts, Deduction, Debates
• 3 Husserl: Intentionality, Consciousness, Nature
• 4 Husserl: Perception, Judgment, Habit
• 5 McDowell: Concepts, Perceptions, Debates
• 6 McDowell: Reasons, Nature, Reality
• Index