Apperception, Knowledge, and Experience

CHAPTER 2. The Closure of Kant's Problematic: Idealism

CHAPTER 2 The Closure of Kant's Problematic: Idealism Kant's central thesis is that the mind structures the sensible manifold, which is given to us under the a priori forms of space and time, into a public world of objects by synthesizing that manifold according to certain a priori rules. This thesis is supposed to defeat scepticism by providing a body of a priori laws that govern the structure of experience. These laws provide the conceptual framework within which all empirical cognition takes place. But they hold only of the phenomenal world and not of things as they may be in themselves and apart from the manner in which their appearances are ordered by the mind. To attempt to go beyond the empirical world and cognize reality as it is in itself leads to the illusions of metaphysics, which we touched on briefly in our discussion of the ideas of pure reason. Kant's most powerful argument for this thesis is that the ascription of different representations to the same subject is a necessary condition of any experience whatever, and that this ascription entails in turn the objective unification of those representations with one another. But his account of how this objective unification takes place appears to be defective on at least two counts. First, although Kant maintains that the categories can be derived entirely a priori, his final account of howtime is generated conflicts with this view. For in the "Analogies" Kant describes the constitutionof the objective time-order as a constructionof temporal relations between particular spatial configurations.Thus the categories appear to arise out of the interaction between transcendental apperception and the sensible manifold. The second defect concerns Kant's account of how the a priori structure of the mind and the empirical data that it orders are brought together. Because of their heterogeneity , the pure concepts of the understanding and the sensible intuitions of the empirical manifold require a third thing, the schema, to mediate between them. But the doctrine of the schematism is never fully 68 APPERCEPTION, KNOWLEDGE, ANDEXPERIENCE developed, and it is difficult to see how the schema can do its job without compromising the radical oppositions between sensible and pure, and singular and general, which it is supposed to negotiate. Finally there is the problem of the thing-in-itself, whose existence allegedly saves Kant from falling prey to subjective idealism. The existence of the thing-initself follows from two premises: (1) that the mind contributes something to the form or structure of experience; and (2) that the matter of experience , the sensible manifold, originates independently of the mind. The first premise has been established as the central conclusion of the transcendental deduction. But the second premise has never been clearly established by Kant. In his moral philosophy, however, Kant does provide some insight into one aspect of non-empirical reality, the self in its function as a moral agent. Kant and Idealism According to Fichte, at least in the initial stages of his thought,the problems of the critical philosophy all point back to the need for a deeper understanding of transcendental apperception for their solution. And, despite his own denials,1 Kant himself seems tacitly to sanction such an approach. In the footnote on B158 he observes that I can have no intuition and therefore no theoretical knowledgeof transcendental apperception , for it is always the determining not the determinable in me. Nevertheless I exist as a spontaneity and it is "owing to this spontaneity that I entitle myself an intelligence." Thus although their connection is not made clear, the first Critique clearly seems to link spontaneity with transcendental apperception and reason. The second Critique, however, states that freedom is central to "the whole architecture of the system of pure reason and even of speculative reason" (Akad 5: 4; 3). 1. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant argues that freedom need not conflict with natural causality, provided that we think of freedom as noumenal . He warns us only against falling prey to the illusions of speculative reason that confuse the possibility of noumenal freedom with a genuine cognition of noumena themselves. Such cognition is impossible, for in thinkingof a causality through freedom, speculative reason seeks the absolutely unconditioned. But since objects are given to us only through the mediation of sensible intuition, and all sensible objects are subject to natural causality, the unconditioned can never be found. Yet the thought of an unconditionedfirst cause is not a mere delusion of reason...