Transcendental idealism is a
doctrine founded by German
philosopher Immanuel
Kant in the eighteenth century. Kant's doctrine
maintains that human experience of things consists of how they
appear to us — implying a fundamentally
subject-based component, rather than being an activity that
directly (and therefore without any obvious causal link)
comprehends the things as they are
in and of
themselves.
Background
Despite influencing the course of subsequent
German philosophy dramatically, exactly
how to interpret this concept was a subject of some debate amongst
20th century philosophers. Kant first describes it in his
Critique of Pure
Reason, and distinguished his view from contemporary views
of
realism and
idealism, but philosophers do not agree how sharply
Kant differs from each of these positions.
Transcendental idealism is with
formalistic idealism on
the basis of passages from Kant's
Prolegomena to any Future
Metaphysics, although recent research has tended to
dispute this identification. Transcendental idealism was also
adopted as a label by
Fichte
and
Schelling
and reclaimed in the 20th century in a different manner by
Husserl.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-spacetime/#WhaTraIde
Kant
Perhaps the best way to approach transcendental idealism is by
looking at Kant's account of how we intuit (Ge: anschauen) objects,
and that task demands looking at his accounts of space and of time.
Before Kant, some thinkers, such as Leibniz, had decided that space
and time were not things, but only the relations among things.
Other thinkers, including Newton, maintained that space and time
were real things or substances. Leibniz had arrived at a radically
different understanding of the universe and the things found in it.
According to his
Monadology, all things
that humans ordinarily understand as interactions between
individuals and all things that humans ordinarily understand as
relations among individuals (such as their relative positions in
space and time) have their being in the mind of God but not in the
Universe where we perceive them to be. In the view of realists,
individual things interact by physical connection and the relations
among things are mediated by physical processes that connect them
to human brains and give humans a determinate chain of action to
them and correct knowledge of them. Kant was aware of problems with
both of these positions. He had been influenced by the physics of
Newton and understood that there is a physical chain of
interactions between things perceived and the one who perceives
them. However, an important function of mind is to structure
incoming data and to process it in ways that make it other than a
simple mapping of outside data.
The salient element here is that space and time, rather than being
real
things-in-themselves or empirically mediated
appearances (Ge: Erscheinungen), are the very forms of intuition
(Ge: Anschauung) by which we must perceive objects. They are hence
neither to be considered properties that we may attribute to
objects in perceiving them, nor substantial entities of themselves.
They are in that sense subjective, yet necessary, preconditions of
any given object insofar as this object is an appearance and not a
thing-in-itself. Humans necessarily perceive objects as
located in space and in time. This condition of experience is part
of what it means for a human to cognize an object, to perceive and
understand it as something both spatial and temporal. Kant argues
for these several claims in the section of the
Critique of Pure
Reason entitled the
Transcendental Aesthetic. That
section is devoted to the inquiry of the
a priori
conditions of human sensibility, i.e. the faculty by which humans
apprehend objects. The following section, the
Transcendental
Logic concerns itself with the manner in which objects are
dealt with in thought.
Kant's observations from a logical and philosophical point of view
are supported in modern thought by some empirical findings that go
beyond the science available to Kant in his time, are not based on
what might be called a Kantian ideology, and yet support Kant's
conclusions on the grounds of novel discoveries. Kant argues,
essentially, that incoming data must be organized into a form that
human minds can process. At the dawn of the computer age it was
assumed that robots would soon be capable of taking over for humans
in many tasks. Unexpectedly, it soon became apparent that pattern
recognition was not an easy goal to attain. The human brain seems
to be hard wired for pattern recognition. A very telling indication
of organic structures for pattern recognition came to light when
researchers discovered that the image of a moving object in
crossing the retina is processed at the first level of the human
cortex and sends an almost instantaneous message: "Movement!" to
the rest of the brain. So "movement" turns out to be an automatic
processing of raw incoming data into a special signal having
immense survival salience to the organism. Kant had to be satisfied
with examining the functions of the mind and teasing out the
functional dependencies without much if any help being derived from
observable physical mechanisms in the brain. The mind imposes
structures on incoming data. In the case of the rope perceived to
be a snake, the initial structuring must be abandoned. The snake
disappears from consciousness and is replaced by a rope. In various
ways other philosophies have maintained this useful distinction
between what humans conceive to be present and whatever may really
be there. Important schools of modern philosophy of science, a
field from which Kant drew much, speak in terms of "models" or
"convenient fictions" rather than asserting actual knowledge of
reality.
Historical parallels
Xenophanes of Colophon in 530 BC
anticipated Kant's epistemology in his reflections on certainty.
"And as for certain truth, no man has seen it, nor will there ever
be a man who knows about the gods and about all the things I
mention. For if he succeeds to the full in saying what is
completely true, he himself is nevertheless unaware of it; and
Opinion (seeming) is fixed by fate upon all things." (From Kathleen
Freeman's
Ancilla to the Presocratic Philosophers,
Xenophanes fragment 34.)
Certain interpretations of some of the medieval Buddhists of India,
such as
Dharmakirti, may reveal them to
be transcendental idealists, since they seemed to hold the position
of
mereological nihilism but
transcendental idealists who held that their minds were distinct
from the
atoms. Some Buddhists often attempt
to maintain that the minds are equal to the atoms of mereological
nihilist reality, but Buddhists seem to have no explanation of how
this is the case, and much of the literature on the aforementioned
Buddhists involves straightforward discussion of atoms and minds as
if they are separate. This makes their position very similar to
transcendental idealism, resembling Kant's philosophy where there
are only things-in-themselves (which are very much like
philosophical
atoms), and phenomenal
properties.
Schopenhauer
Briefly, Schopenhauer described transcendental idealism as a
"
distinction between the phenomenon and the thing in
itself, and a recognition that only the phenomenon is accessible to
us" because "
we do not know either ourselves or
things as they are in themselves, but merely as they
appear." Some of
Schopenhauer's comments on the definition of
the word "transcendental" are as follows:
Schopenhauer contrasted Kant's transcendental critical philosophy
with Leibniz's dogmatic philosophy.
P. F. Strawson
In
The Bounds of Sense,
P. F.
Strawson suggests a reading of Kant's
first
Critique that, once accepted, forces rejection of
most of the original arguments, including transcendental idealism.
Strawson contends that if Kant had followed out the implications of
all that he said he would have seen that there were many
self-contradictions implicit in the whole.
Strawson views the analytic argument of the
transcendental
deduction as the most valuable idea in the text, and regards
transcendental idealism as an unavoidable error in Kant's greatly
productive system. In Strawson's traditional reading (also favored
in the work of
Paul Guyer and
Rae Langton), the Kantian term
phenomena (literally something that can be seen
from the
Greek word
phainomenon, "observable") refers to the world of
appearances, or the world of "things" sensed. They are tagged as
"phenomena" to remind the reader that humans confuse these
derivative appearances with whatever may be the forever unavailable
"things in themselves" behind our perceptions. The necessary
preconditions of experience, the components that humans bring to
their apprehending of the world, the forms of perception such as
space and time, are what make
a
priori judgments possible, but all of this process of
comprehending what lies fundamental to human experience fails to
bring anyone beyond the inherent limits of human sensibility.
Kant's system requires the existence of
noumena to prevent a rejection of external reality
altogether, and it is this concept (senseless objects of which we
can have no real understanding) to which Strawson objects in his
book.
Henry Allison
In
Kant's Transcendental Idealism, Henry Allison proposes
a reading that opposes Strawson's interpretation. Allison argues
that Strawson and others misrepresent Kant by emphasising what has
become known as the two-worlds reading (a view developed by
Paul Guyer). This — according to Allison,
false — reading of Kant's phenomena/noumena distinction suggests
that phenomena and noumena are ontologically distinct from each
other. It concludes on that basis that we somehow fall short of
knowing the noumena due to the nature of the very means by which we
comprehend them. On such a reading, Kant would himself commit the
very fallacies he attributes to the transcendental realists. On
Allison's reading, Kant's view is better characterized as a
two-aspect theory, where noumena and phenomena refer to
complementary ways of considering an object. It is the dialectic
character of knowing, rather than
epistemological insufficiency, that Kant wanted
most to assert.
Opposing realism
Opposing Kantian transcendental idealism is the doctrine of
philosophical realism, that
is, the proposition that the world is knowable as it really is,
without any consideration of the knower's manner of knowing. This
has been propounded by philosophers such as
Bertrand Russell,
G. E.
Moore,
Ralph Barton Perry,
Henry Babcock Veatch and
Ayn Rand. Realism claims that perceived objects
exist in and of themselves independent of the mind which is
incorrect according to transcendental idealism.
See also
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