The Bounds of Sense

An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

Peter Strawson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429823602
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Peter Strawson (1919–2006) was one of the leading British philosophers of his generation and an influential figure in a golden age for British philosophy between 1950 and 1970. The Bounds of Sense is one of the most influential books ever written about Kant's philosophy, and is one of the key philosophical works of the late twentieth century. Whilst probably best known for its criticism of Kant's transcendental idealism, it is also famous for the highly original manner in which Strawson defended and developed some of Kant's fundamental insights into the nature of subjectivity, experience and knowledge – at a time when few philosphers were engaging with Kant's ideas.

The book had a profound effect on the interpretation of Kant's philosophy when it was first published in 1966 and continues to influence discussion of Kant, the soundness of transcendental arguments, and debates in epistemology and metaphysics generally.

This Routledge Classics edition includes a new foreword by Lucy Allais.

Part One

GENERAL REVIEW

General Review

1. Two Faces Of The Critique

It is possible to imagine kinds of world very different from the world as we know it. It is possible to describe types of experience very different from the experience we actually have. But not any purported and grammatically permissible description of a possible kind of experience would be a truly intelligible description. There are limits to what we can conceive of, or make intelligible to ourselves, as a possible general structure of experience. The investigation of these limits, the investigation of the set of ideas which forms the limiting framework of all our thought about the world and experience of the world, is, evidently, an important and interesting philosophical undertaking. No philosopher has made a more strenuous attempt on it than Kant.

A central difficulty in understanding his attempt lies in the fact that he himself thought of it in terms of a certain misleading analogy. It is a commonplace of casual, and of scientific, observation, that the character of our experience, the way things appear to us, is partly determined by our human constitution, by the nature of our sense organs and nervous system. The workings of the human perceptual mechanism, the ways in which our experience is causally dependent on those workings, are matters for empirical, or scientific, not philosophical, investigation. Kant was well aware of this; he knew very well that such an empirical inquiry was of a quite different kind from the investigation he proposed into the fundamental structure of ideas in terms of which alone we can make intelligible to ourselves the idea of experience of the world. Yet, in spite of this awareness, he conceived the latter investigation on a kind of strained analogy with the former. Wherever he found limiting or necessary general features of experience, he declared their source to lie in our own cognitive constitution; and this doctrine he considered indispensable as an explanation of the possibility of knowledge of the necessary structure of experience. Yet there is no doubt that this doctrine is incoherent in itself and masks, rather than explains, the real character of his inquiry; so that a central problem in understanding the Critique is precisely that of disentangling all that hangs on this doctrine from the analytical argument which is in fact independent of it.

The separation of these two strands in the Critique, however, is only part of a wider task of division between what remains fruitful and interesting and what no longer appears acceptable, or even promising, in its doctrines. Accordingly, I shall begin this introductory survey by setting out, in rough opposition, the elements of this division. I shall follow this with a slightly fuller but still introductory account of some of the central themes of the work.

Like many of his predecessors and successors, Kant laid stress on the fact that the results hitherto achieved in philosophy contrasted unfavourably with those achieved in mathematics and natural science. If philosophy too was to be set “on the sure path of a science”, one requisite was that it should limit its pretensions; and a major instrument of this necessary limitation was a principle repeatedly enunciated and applied by Kant throughout the Critique. This is the principle that there can be no legitimate, or even meaningful, employment of ideas or concepts which does not relate them to empirical or experiential conditions of their application. If we wish to use a concept in a certain way, but are unable to specify the kind of experience-situation to which the concept, used in that way, would apply, then we are not really envisaging any legitimate use of that concept at all.¹ In so using it, we shall not merely be saying what we do not know; we shall not really know what we are saying.

This principle, which I shall refer to as Kant’s principle of significance, is one with which empiricist philosophers have no difficulty in sympathizing. They sympathize just as readily with the consequence which Kant drew from it: viz. the complete repudiation of transcendent metaphysics. Whole regions of philosophy – regions of maximum pretension and minimum agreement – owed their existence, he maintained, to disregard of the principle of significance. Freed from the obligation to specify the empirical conditions of application of the concepts they used, philosophers might seem to be giving information about the nature of Reality as it is in itself, instead of as it appears in the limited and sense-bound experience of creatures such as ourselves; but their seeming knowledge was delusion, and the first task of a critical and scientific philosophy was to ensure that it was recognized as such. The first task of philosophy is to set its own limits.

Kant was not content merely to draw this general negative conclusion about the impossibility of transcendent metaphysics. He thought that the propensity to think in terms of ideas for which no empirical conditions of application could be specified was not merely a philosophers’ aberration, but a natural and inevitable propensity of human reason. It was even, in some ways, a beneficial propensity. Certain ideas which had in themselves no empirical application or significance nevertheless inevitably arose in the course of scientific inquiry, and might even serve a useful function in stimulating the indefinite extension of empirical knowledge.² The illusion of metaphysical knowledge arose only when it was thought that there must be realities answering to these ideas and that it was possible to obtain knowledge of these realities by pure thought, unmixed with experience. It was in this kind of thinking that the principle of significance was violated. A substantial proportion of the Critique is devoted to showing how, in particular celebrated instances, we are tempted to violate the principle and to demonstrating the empty, and sometimes conflicting, character of the metaphysical knowledge-claims which result from our doing so.

Transcendent metaphysics, then, is declared in general, and demonstrated in detail, to be impossible as a form of knowledge, or, as Kant would say, as a science. But this does not mean that no form of scientific metaphysics is possible at all. On the contrary, there is a large positive task for a genuinely scientific metaphysics, a task which, according to Kant, can be discharged once for all, and which is at least partially carried out by him in the most original, interesting, and difficult part of the Critique. This is the task I have already referred to: the investigation of that limiting framework of ideas and principles the use and application of which are essential to empirical knowledge, and which are implicit in any coherent conception of experience which we can form. It is of course possible to feel and express scepticism, not only about the details of Kant’s execution of this programme, but about the programme itself; it may be thought unlikely that such an inquiry could yield any but the slenderest results. But if these doubts are unjustified, and a fruitful inquiry of this kind is possible, then it will fully deserve the title of metaphysics. It will be, as metaphysics was always said to be, the most general and fundamental of studies; and its method will be non-empirical, or a priori, not because, like transcendent metaphysics, it claims to be concerned with a realm of objects inaccessible to experience, but because it is concerned with the conceptual structure which is presupposed in all empirical inquiries. This kind of investigation Kant sometimes calls “transcendental”, as distinct from “transcendent”, though he is by no means consistent in his use of this expression.

In his espousal of the principle of significance and in his con-sequential repudiation of transcendent metaphysics, Kant is close to the tradition of classical empiricism, the tradition of Berkeley and Hume, which has probably, at least in England, received its clearest modern expression in the writings of A. J. Ayer. But in the elaboration of his positive metaphysics of experience, Kant departs sharply from that tradition. The central problem of classical empiricism was set by the assumption that experience really offers us nothing but separate and fleeting sense-impressions, images and feelings; and the problem was to show how, on this exiguous basis, we could supply a rational justification of our ordinary picture of the world as containing continuously and independently existing and interacting material things and persons. Hume, it is true, rejected the problem in this form, holding that such a justification was impossible, but also unnecessary, since the gaps found, and left, by reason were filled by the helpful fictions of the imagination. Between the views of Hume, the most sophisticated of the classical empiricists, and those of Kant, there is a subtle and interesting parallelism. But there is also a great gap. For Kant rejected the basic empiricist dogma which Hume never questioned. He did not reject it in the spirit of naïve, or refined, common sense which has sometimes, in England, seemed to be the twentieth-century alternative to classical empiricism. His rejection took the form, rather, of a proof that the minimal empiricist conception of experience was incoherent in isolation, that it made sense only within a larger framework which necessarily included the use and application in experience of concepts of an objective world. Thus the execution of Kant’s programme for a positive metaphysics is held to entail the rejection of what he calls “problematic” idealism, even if such idealism is only the methodological starting-point, rather than the terminus, of philosophical reflection. Any philosopher who invites, or challenges, us to justify our belief in the objective world by working outwards, as it were, from the private data of individual consciousness thereby demonstrates his failure to have grasped the conditions of the possibility of experience in general. Philosophers as unlike in other respects as Descartes and Hume are held to be alike in this respect, to be alike guilty of this failure.

These themes of the Critique which I have so far referred to have an evident harmony. Together they form, one might be tempted to claim, the framework of a truly empiricist philosophy, freed, on the one hand, from the delusions of transcendent metaphysics, on the other, from the classical empiricist obsession with the private contents of consciousness. Together they present the blander, the more acceptable face of the Critique. But it would be a very one-sided account of the work which referred to these themes alone. Their exposition and development is throughout interwoven with more questionable doctrines, one of the sources of which I have already indicated. It is true that Kant thought of himself as investigating the general structure of ideas and principles which is presupposed in all our empirical knowledge; but he thought of this investigation as possible only because he conceived of it also, and primarily, as an investigation into the structure and workings of the cognitive capacities of beings such as ourselves. The idiom of the work is throughout a psychological idiom. Whatever necessities Kant found in our conception of experience he ascribed to the nature of our faculties.

He prepares the ground for this ascription by the manner in which he presents a certain fundamental duality, inescapable in any philosophical thinking about experience or empirical knowledge. This is the duality of general concepts, on the one hand, and particular instances of general concepts, encountered in experience, on the other. If any item is even to enter our conscious experience we must be able to classify it in some way, to recognize it as possessing some general characteristics. To say that we must have general concepts in order for empirical knowledge to be possible is just to say that we must have such recognitional abilities as these. No less evidently, if these abilities are ever to be exercised, we must have material on which to exercise them; particular instances of general concepts must be encountered in experience. The importance of this fundamental duality is fully recognized by Kant. His word for awareness in experience of particular instances of general concepts is “intuition”; and the point epitomized in his famous dictum, that “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind”,³ is one which he repeatedly emphasizes.

There are many idioms in which this inescapable duality can be expressed. Kant’s idiom is psychological, the idiom of departments or faculties of the mind. He distinguishes between the receptive faculty of sensibility, through which we have intuitions, and the active faculty of understanding, which is the source of concepts; and thereby prepares the way for ascribing to these faculties, as their source, those limiting features which he finds in the notion of experience in general. Thus it seems that there is no conceivable way in which concepts could be instantiated in our experience except by our being aware of instances of them in space and time – or, at least, in time. Space and time themselves are accordingly declared to be “in us”, to be simply the forms of our sensibility, nothing but our ways of being aware of particular things capable of being brought under concepts. Again, it is argued that unless the concepts we employed in application to our experience implicitly involved the application of certain very general notions (the categories), it would be impossible that there should be any such thing as self-conscious awareness of the succession of experience in time. The applicability of these notions is, then, a further necessary condition of the possibility of anything which deserves the name of experience or empirical knowledge. But this necessity once more is presented as a consequence of our cognitive constitution; only it is assigned, this time, to our faculty of understanding, which is described as acting on our sensibility to bring about the satisfaction of its own requirements.

These allocations contain already the seeds of that disastrous model which, as we shall see, Kant had such powerful motives for prizing. The natural world as we know it, the whole content of our experience, is thoroughly conditioned by the features just referred to: our experience is essentially experience of a spatiotemporal world of law-governed objects conceived of as distinct from our temporally successive experiences of them. But all these limiting features alike simply represent ways in which things must appear in the experience of beings constituted as we are, with such a sensibility and such an understanding as ours. Of things as they are in themselves as opposed to these appearances of them, we have, and can have, no knowledge whatever; for knowledge is possible only of what can be experienced, and nothing can be experienced except as subjected to the forms imposed by our sensibility and our understanding.

This “transcendental idealism”, according to which the whole world of Nature is merely appearance, is sharply distinguished by Kant from other forms of idealism. The typical “empirical” idealist, as Kant calls him, takes as certainly real the temporally successive states of consciousness and questions or denies the real existence, or our knowledge of the existence, of bodies in space. The transcendental idealist, on the other hand, is, Kant says, an empirical realist, according no superiority of status, as regards reality or certainty of existence, to states of consciousness over physical objects. When we see how Kant supports this claim, however, we must view it with scepticism. It is true that he grants us as immediate a knowledge of the physical objects of “outer sense”, whose form is space, as he does of the psychological states, the objects of “inner sense”, whose form is time. It is true, too, that he says that our inner-directed experience no more yields us knowledge of ourselves as we are in ourselves than our outer-directed experience yields us knowledge of other things as they are in themselves. But these parities do not really amount to according equal reality to bodies in space (“outer objects”) and states of consciousness (“inner determinations”). The doctrine that the material and the mental constituents of the natural world are alike only appearances turns out, in the end, to bear with unequal weight on bodies and states of consciousness. Kant, as transcendental idealist, is closer to Berkeley than he acknowledges.

The doctrines of transcendental idealism, and the associated picture of the receiving and ordering apparatus of the mind producing Nature as we know it out of the unknowable reality of things as they are in themselves, are undoubtedly the chief obstacles to a sympathetic understanding of the Critique. We may be tempted by weakened interpretations of these doctrines, representing them as expository devices perhaps not wholly understood by their user. Thus the doctrine that we can have knowledge only of things as objects of possible experience, and not of things as they are in themselves, has a certain ambiguity; and we may be tempted, at times, by its subtler or ironical sense, which Kant himself seems, at times, almost to endorse. Again, we may be tempted to interpret the whole model of mind-made Nature as simply a device for presenting an analytical or conceptual inquiry in a form readily grasped by the picture-loving imagination. All such interpretations would, however, involve reading into much of the Critique a tone of at least half-conscious irony quite foreign to its character; and there are other, more decisive reasons for thinking that they would altogether fail to answer to Kant’s intentions.

One of them is made clear enough in the Preface. As Kant there says, he is concerned not only to curb the pretensions of dogmatic metaphysics to give us supersensible knowledge; he is concerned also to curb the pretensions of sensibility to be coextensive with the real. The proof of our necessary ignorance of the supersensible safeguards the interests of morality and religion by securing the supersensible realm from our scepticism as well as from our knowledge. There are other indications of a different kind, more important still in the present context, as being more immediately related to the main concerns of this Critique. Thus the principle of significance itself, as applied to the categories, is derived by Kant as a consequence of the nature of the part played by the faculty of understanding in ordering experience; and the very possibility of knowledge of necessary features of experience is seen by him as dependent upon his transcendental subjectivism, the theory of the mind making Nature. This indeed is the essence of the “Copernican Revolution” which he proudly announced as the key to a reformed and scientific metaphysics. It is only because objects of experience must conform to the constitution of our minds that we can have the sort of a priori knowledge of the nature of experience which is demonstrated, in outline, in the Critique itself. Finally, Kant’s claim to find in the solution of the first Antinomy decisive confirmatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part One: General Review
• Part Two: The Metaphysics of Experience
• Part Three: Transcendent Metaphysics
• Part Four: The Metaphysics of Transcendental Idealism
• Part Five: Kant’s Theory of Geometry
• Index