Kant's Prolegomena, pt. 1
In part 1 of the preamble, Kant differentiates between psychology, which investigates internal experience, and physics, which investigates external experience. He elaborates on this later with the division between synthetic (acquired) and analytic (contrived) knowledge, elaborating even further with the distinction between knowledge a priori and knowledge a posteriori. He even concedes that much of what he's offering cribs directly from Locke. However, while Locke located certainty of knowledge in experience (and Descartes located it in psychology, and Hume, according to Reid and Beattie [who got him wrong] seemed to place all of these certainties back into a realm of argument, imagination, and social construction), Kant finds certainty of knowledge in "pure understanding." Turns out, Hume didn't discover the social construction of causality--he discovered an innate principle of human cognition. In the subsequent sections on the mathematical and natural sciences, we learn the metaphysical implications of Kant's claim to have located the synthetic a priori component of human existence.
But what are the communicative (or rhetorical?) implications? Does this mean that we can have a "universal language" (one not contingent upon specific shared knowledges, cultural constructions, historical exigencies), a mathematics that can be valid without any need for correspondence to the world or for comportment with a population's accepted wisdom? A natural science that is sensible regardless of its experiments' falsifiability? If so, what would this universal communication enable us to talk about? Anything interesting? And how could we discourse?
Drawing on either the section on mathematical science or the section on natural science, try to explain the communicative implications of Kant's argument. What does he think we can talk about reasonably? What can (must) we agree about, and what kind of disputes can begin (or be resolved) based on those resolutions? Be specific with your textual citations.
Blah, Mr. Kant
I am probably taking this question a little more literally than the rest of you, but Kant drives me crazy. I’m not sure I completely understand the whole synthetic a priori thing, but here goes. The way I read Kant, whether he intends it or not, is a direct result of my reading of Hume and general trust in Hume. Though Kant dismisses his skepticism, as Connie reminds us, he forgets that all this synthetic a priori knowledge can only be talked about by having the capacity to use words, which must be learned, as well as having some conception of the predicates of analytic arguments.
Perhaps Kant was simply born way smarter than the rest of us and I simply don’t get his arguments, but the idea of a pure, intuitive mathematics simply blows my mind. I’ll begin first with my objection to pure mathematics in the hope of linking it to my objection to any meaningful communication based outside of experience in Kant, and from that insinuating that talking about metaphysics is impossible if it is based solely on a priori intuition.
Kant’s argument that the proposition “that not more than three lines can cut each other at right angles” is “a priori intuition” is crap. One must have experienced the concept of right angle in order to be able to understand the three right angle concept. In order to understand the truth of that experience, one creates either a mental image of that intersection or a proof in order to prove it. The mental image is clearly a creation of a mental “experience,” whereas the proof clearly demonstrates that such knowledge is NOT intuitive.
In order to be able to construct his argument, Kant must first construct the language that describes his argument. By not doubting the combination of res et verba, He indicates his complete grounding in words, which are necessarily based on experience in that they must be learned. When he says that “gold is a yellow metal” is an a priori judgment based solely on contradiction or non-contradiction, he forgets that one must learn the meaning of yellow and that “ yellow” does not simply mean “not red” but is actually relative to any other color in the spectrum and has very shades. Of course, this is his argument that things that are empirically observed can still be a priori judgments which either means that a priori judgments can be based on experience, which I think is contradictory, or that those judgments can still be empirically proved.
We must, of course, have experience to talk about all of these arguments, and we must conceive colors to talk about colors, and to have seen gold to talk about gold, and to know what “gold’ means in order to have any concept of it. Kant would have us believe that we can conceive and probably communicate ideas based solely on synthetic a priori experience, but without experience to tell us what right angles are and how they can only intersect three times, the limits of our communicative abilities would probably be looking at two things, pairing them together and giving each other high fives. Of course, before we could do that, we would have to learn what “congruent” means, so I think we’re screwed.
So if these “pure” sciences exists as Kant so interestingly hopes, we’ll never be able to talk about them without our language being based on experience. Because he dismisses skepticism, most of that conversation would be thoroughly boring. Not sure metaphysics is possible... at least outside of our brains.
Kant Posting, mreilly
Kant's Prolegomena is certainly hostile to rhetoric, insofar as it stakes out philosophy (metaphysics) as a scientific field and not an art based in tropes and commonplaces. Kant's indebtedness to Locke's nominalist theory of objects persists because we cannot know objects as "things-in-themselves," yet Kant abandons both the nominalist impulse toward "accepted" names and the materialist reliance on sense-perception and probability as modes of understanding. Neither of these fields affords the pure understanding of the type Kant is looking for. Kant understands scientific inquiry to generate new knowledge that was already present but insufficiently understood. Because scientific inquiry does not analyze pre-existing concepts, but instead uncovers general laws for objects of possible experience, scientific inquiry is grounded in synthetic judgements whose possibility rests on more than the law of contradiction. Thought, then, requires judgment. These judgments "are at first mere judgments based on perception; they are valid simply for ourselves, as subject. Only subsequently do we give them new reference, namely, to an object, and insist that they shall always be valid for ourselves as well as everyone else" (Pro 18). The general necessity of judgment, then, pertains to objects of possible experience. How, though, are noumena and phenomena understood as having objective validity or general necessity? How comes a concept to determine the thing-looked-at? If thought is derived from immanent experience before reason attempts to reconcile thought to the concept of all things, could language or culture structure the transmission from sensation/affect to thought/feeling? If this were possible, the terms of universal reason ("the good," "the beautiful," and so on) could remain intact even if applied to very different objects. A native, for example, might see colorful face paint and understand it in relation to other concepts that pertain to "beauty," whereas the European might have a similar notion of universal beauty in relation to powder or pomatum, but a repugnance toward face-paint. Granted, Kant dismisses such examples as anthropological, yet the general laws that explain how certain objects to universal concepts remain valid.
I think Kant would have us
I think Kant would have us discussing our judgments. That's where our freedom lies for him. Appearances we don't have much control over, but judgments we do: "When an appearance is given us, we are still quite free as to how we should judge the matter. The appearance depends upon the senses, but the judgment upon the understanding; and the only question is whether in the determination of the object there is truth or not" (38). So we would have conversations about our understandings, and Kant would argue that we must come to agreements about those understandings, not about the appearances.
Also we can only discuss those things about which we have experience. We can't argue about things which are beyond our experience: "...appearance, as long as it is employed in the experience, produces truth; but the moment it transgresses the bounds of experience, and consequently becomes transcendent, produces nothing but illusion" (40). So I guess this means we can't argue about things in themselves, but we can argue about our judgments of appearances.
So, I think we can only talk about our judgments and what's going on with our judgments that might cause us to interpret appearances differently. We must agree on everyone's unity of apperception and the limits of our experience, but I don't really know what kinds of "disputes can begin (or be resolved)."
I Kant take this anymore.
(I didn't want Ty to have the only pun).
Kant is quite self-consciously in the midst of a discussion or discourse about metaphysics, which has clear communicative implications. Kant clearly feels that he is making an important intervention in an even more important conversation that has gone slightly awry. Kant’s important intervention into this conversation was prompted by the dual manifestation of what he terms Hume’s Great Mistake (assuming that math was purely analytical) and everybody else completely missing what Hume was right about. With wry wit he writes, “All metaphysicians are therefore solemnly and legally suspended from their occupations until they shall have satisfactorily answered the question: How are synthetic cognitions a priori possible?” (20)
What is this conversation? Who is he talking to and what are they talking about? The conversation is about metaphysics and according to Kant the aim of metaphysics is “knowledge of the highest being and of a future existence proved by pure reason” (16). He is talking to Locke (2, 15, 30) Leibniz (2), Hume (2-8, 15, etc.) Reid, Oswald, Beattie and Priestley (4), Moses Mendelssohn (7), Wolff (15), Baumgarten (15), Descartes (34), Berkeley (34) among others including himself. This work is a follow up to several other works and he states that it is a warm up exercise to the more dry and sophisticated conversation of his other work.
In spite of Kant’s obvious respect for Hume, he is very upset with skepticism, which he sees as a sort of suicide or self-violence by reason (16). Therefore, he presents to the reader what he sees as a refutation of not only the arguments of Hume’s detractors but simultaneously the correction of Hume’s Big Mistake. To sum up his argument in his own words, “Thus they [experiences, potential experiences] are referred to objectively and universally valid synthetic propositions, in which we distinguish judgments of experience from those of perception. This takes place because appearances, as mere intuitions occupying a part of space and time, come under the concept of quantity, which synthetically unites their multiplicity a priori according to rules” (48). Kant distinguishes and “corrects” the idea that things only exist because we sense and represent them as existing. He claims that things exist independent of our perception and we can only understand and represent them as far as our limited sensual cognition will allow. We can not understand them as they exist to themselves.
Clearly, the communicative implications of this work are crucial to Kant. He is concerned not only with the discourse but also its form but with the evolution of vocabulary to match the evolution of ideas (18, footnote 6). He acknowledges that there are two ways to talk about these matters, the first in a commonsensical fashion with a ‘chisel’ or in a more precise fashion as with an ‘etcher’s needle’ (5). Regarding common sense he values it but cautions against its fetishization by saying, “It is indeed a great gift of heaven to possess right or (as they now call it) plain common sense. But this common sense must be shown in deeds by well-considered and reasonable thoughts and words…” (4).” He also expresses frustration with philosophers who “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 concepts, and thereby deform and distort them (33). Finally, although Kant presents the idea of sensual cognition, representation and synthetic judgments as absolutely essential to the communication of philosophers and metaphysicians who need make claim to special universal knowledge, he does not necessarily thing that everyone should be in this class of thinkers and that there are plenty of other realms of science and basic common sense that are suitable for communication, which might better merit study and time. Rhetoric, for example.
Here we go...
I feel that I have very little to say on this topic that would be of any use to the discussion. But here's my best effort...
Kant divides knowledge into that which can be known empirically (through experience) and that which is subjective and contingent, "pure concepts of the understanding." It would seem that the place for a rhetoric would be among those subjective concepts, since bringing such concepts into the world and into public discourse must inevitably involve argumentation among various subjectivities. For example, Kant seems to point to a space for causal argument when he insists that "the concept of cause is a pure concept of the understanding, which is totally disparate from all possible perception and only serves to determine the representation contained under it with regard to judging in general, and so to make a universally valid judgment possible" (40-1). How do we get to "a universally valid judgment" about an inherently subjective thing like causality without some form of communication/rhetoric?
Kant's very language, to me, seems so abstract that culture and the interventions of language feel at a more distant remove than they do in Locke or Hume. It almost seems as if he is attempting to distill knowledge to the point that we can achieve universal judgments independent of language and culture once, for example "the expansion of air" is understood "as belonging to it necessarily" rather than as an object of perception through the incredibly dense method that Todd speaks of (41).
What role do Kant's categories of knowledge have in all of this? He suggests that in order to reach universally valid judgments, we much "represent what belongs to judgments in general" and commences with a table of categories that I found nearly indecipherable. All I can tell is that this sort of taxonomy is supposed to help us prove that stuff we can't observe is real. Is Kant attempting to replace rhetoric with a kind of rubric or systematic approach to knowledge?
Citation is from the Hackett edition.
Witherspoon's _Lectures on Moral Philosophy_
The first of John Witherspoon’s Lectures on Moral Philosophy are concerned with “personal duties,” politics, “the administration of justice.”In these lectures, he makes reference to the mind’s faculties: the will, the understanding, and the affections. However, it is not always that useful to divide the faculties up in this way, he explains, since “It is the soul or mind that understands, wills, or is affected with pleasure and pain” (71). In the Supreme being, these faculties exist in a perfect balance, the same cannot be said for inferior beings, but humans have a duty to strive towards balance.
Witherspoon is emphatic about his belief in a material world that exists outside of our senses. Humans possess two ways to come to knowledge about this world: through sensation and reflection. The empirical knowledge that a person gains through the capacities of the external senses is reinforced by an “internal sensation” (73). Of course, he says, because of “accidental irregularity” the senses are not always reliable, but “there are so many plain and obvious ways of discovering and correcting it” (73). Furthermore, people who do not believe in the “reality of the material system . . . do not deserved to be reasoned with” (73).
Lectures three through five focus on virtue. In defining virtue, he argues that humans have an “internal sense” that provides them the ability to determine right from wrong and, furthermore, to take great please from doing the right thing: “as an internal sense, that of morality, a sense and perception of moral excellence and our obligation to conform ourselves to it in our conduct” (78). Pleasure comes from that which is pleasing to the senses, that which is “evidently more excellent, and which we must necessarily pronounce more noble,” and “Superior to both of these, is a sense of moral excellence, and a pleasure arising from doing what is dictated by moral sense” (79).
He argues that God “implanted in uncorrupted nature as principle” (87) the ability to determine the difference between virtue and vice. Virtue promotes the general good and we know the difference between virtue and vice because of how we are made to “feel toward them” (87). We are duty bound to pursue virtue and we perceive this through “conscience enlightened by reason, experience, and every way by which we can learn the will of our Maker” (87), not only because virtue is excellent, but also because we hope for a future happiness in the afterlife.
The various facets of virtue are the subjects of chapters six through nine. As he argued in the previous chapter belief in God and the afterlife are essential to leading a virtuous life. Thus, lecture six is concerned with a prior and a posteriori proofs of God’s existence. In this chapter, he labels Hume an infidel because he is one of those people who “endeavored to shake the certainty of our belief upon cause and effect, upon personal identity, and confound the understanding on such subjects” (96). (Railing against Hume is a motif in his Lectures.)
Lecture seven details the moral perfections of God and human’s duties to God as they are related to those perfections. In chapter eight, Witherspoon moves to our duties to our fellow humans: love of others “ought to have for its object their greatest and best interest, and therefore implies wishing and doing them good in soul and body” (109). And, finally, lecture nine concerns our duties to ourselves, which are self-government (which he defines as moderating our thoughts and desires) and self-interest (which he defines as guarding “against any thing that may be hurtful to our moral character, or religious hopes” (115)).
Witherspoon’s participation in Revolutionary politics seems to be at work in lectures ten through thirteen. The civic sphere, for Witherspoon, is a “union of a number of families in one state for mutual benefit” of all citizens (140). Monarchy, however, “is but another name for tyranny, where the arbitrary will of one capricious man disposes of the lives of properties of all ranks” (143-44). And, aristocracy “always makes vassals of the inferior ranks” (144).
Although he does outline a natural, God-given relationship between Masters and Servants in lecture nine, by lecture twelve, he proposes democracy as the superior system. His attitude toward servitude, though, is moderate, since he says that masters “have no right either to take away life, or to make it insupportable by excessive labor. The servant therefore retains all his other natural rights” (137). Thus, we can see in Witherspoon something resembling an anti-slavery argument.
His attitude towards rhetoric is clearly positive at this point –free speech and persuasion are integral to healthy functioning democracy. Democracy “is the nurse of eloquence, because when the multitude have the power, persuasion is the only way to govern them” (146). But again, we might question the extent of our freedom, humans must be fully persuaded that his definitions of virtue and duty to the Supreme being are natural and thus, they must believe these ideas prior to taking up democratic governance.
Lectures fourteen through sixteen take up Witherspoon’s third subject area, Jurisprudence. Just as persuasive discourse is imperative for healthy democracy, so is a properly functioning judicial system. He returns to virtue here, as the object of jurisprudence is to determine “what can be done by law to make the people of any state virtuous” (159). He is unflinching in his belief that legal contracts must be made by a “capable person,” they must be mutual, possible, formal, and lawful, and they must be completely truthful.
Witherspoon takes issue with any philosopher who said that any deviation from truth was excusable if it was in pursuit of an admirable goal--“a good end cannot justify it” (173). This is not only because in lying, we breach our duty to ourselves and others, but Witherspoon says, most important because an “oath is an appeal before God . . .for an appeal is always supposed to be made to God, against the breach of public faith” (176).
In this assertion, he responds directly to Hutchinson, who, Witherspoon argues, is of the opinion that manipulation of the truth is excusable in certain cases. Indeed, Witherspoon’s extensive bibliography shows that he is responding to great many people (Hutchinson, Hume, Smith, Locke, Montesquieu, among others) who write on the foundations of virtue and on government and politics. Throughout the text, it is clear that he takes issue with what he sees as a moral ambiguity in people like Hume, and the “very illiberal sentiments in politics” of the likes of Hobbes.
Kant beat Pro-Legomania!
Okay, I’ve gotten the sickening Kant pun out of the way, and now it’s down to business. For Kant, a priori synthetic judgments must be universally agreed upon (or at least potentially agreed upon) because they are independent of experience, and, as Todd notes, they form the basis for experience. While a considerable debate might arise about how a priori synthetic judgments operate, Kant’s system at least posits the possibility that all humans are in possession of the same faculties and intuitions for understanding, and thus a discussion of the world “as it appears” is possible. If we could all agree about the characteristics of the a priori synthetic judgments, then we would at least ideally be able to accumulate “universal” knowledge and/or put some limit to the range of different opinion. However, the characteristics of these faculties might (and have been) open to debate, just as Kant’s own arguments have been subject to a range of interpretations.
In the section on mathematics, Kant argues that “pure intuition” is essential for all mathematical reasoning to occur and is “inseparably joined” with concepts “before all experience or particular perception” (23). This a priori intuition contains “nothing but the form of sensibility,” which precedes all the actual impressions through which the subject is affected (24). For example, Kant demonstrates that mathematical concepts/cognitions/judgments are all founded upon space and time; and just as geometry would be impossible without space, arithmetic would be impossible without time. In fact, since time and space could be said to exist without empirical data, they would necessarily have to precede any empirical mathematical pursuits (25) Synthetic a priori judgments are thus not only in accordance with the world as it appears--such judgments also structure the means by which the world can “appear” to us at all (“thought space renders possible the physical space” (29)). [would it be correct to say that the intuitions of time and space “territorialize” the realm of possible experience and empirical investigation?].
Kant’s transcendental idealism, however, cannot make claims about things in the world as they “really” are, as all objects in space are merely “representations of our sensuous intuition” (ibid.). Although a priori synthetic judgments form the basis for all experience and mathematical concepts (for everyone), they have very little to say about what cannot be experienced or at least comprehended through the senses, such as the essence of “things in themselves” or knowledge of God itself (in the words of Thomas Pynchon’s Proverbs for Paranoids “you may never get to touch the master, but you can tickle his creatures”). In a passage that applies both to mathematics and the natural sciences, for example, Kant states that synthetic principles a priori “can never be referred to things in themselves, but only to appearances as objects of experience” (52)--and for that reason, pure mathematics and pure natural science cannot be referred to anything more than what can be comprehended by sense experience. Kant is very particular, however, with not being associated with an “idealism” that denies that there may be an essence to “things in themselves,” but rather argues that the knowledge of such essences is not open to our understanding.
Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge
The Archaeology of Knowledge is often seen as Foucault’s response to critics of his previous book The Order of Things, who accused him of being a “bad historian.” It is similar to his other works in that it is an analysis of the ways that discourses of knowledge function and are validated in both the academy and in culture at large. Accordingly, this book’s purpose is to present not a theory of history, but a theory of the theory of history, or a theory of methodology. Broadly, the primary argument of The Archaeology of Knowledge is that the theories of history that have served historians and scholars of other “historical disciplines” are misleading. Foucault theorizes that history is made up of a series of ruptures and discontinuities which historians structure as a sequence of related events.
History is generally thought of as continuous, progressive and teleological; that is, each historical event is caused by and leads to another historical event; and each event marks a progression to some endpoint. This is what Foucault calls a “total” theory of history. However, the problem with totalizing theories of history is that they require the interpretive act of narration in order to work—an act that is always contingent on the way the historian negotiates current discourses. Foucault proposes that instead of uncovering deep structures, we examine how our experience of the present works to shape our perceptions of the past. The writing of history, then, should always be a self-reflexive act (his analysis of the “repressive hypothesis” from The History of Sexuality Vol. I would be an example of the way in which presentism dominates our conceptions of the past).
This turn should prompt different kinds of questions from the historian: “By what criteria is one to isolate the unities with which one is dealing; what is a science? What is an oeuvre? What is a theory? What is a concept? What is a text?”(5). These questions interrogate our own theories rather than trying to get at what “really” happened at any particular historical juncture—a pursuit that Foucault would find highly doubtful at best.
As such historical artifacts are treated differently. Foucault says, “the document was always treated as the language of a voice since reduced to silence, its fragile, but possibly decipherable trace. Now, through a mutation that is not of very recent origin, but which has still not come to an end, history has altered its position in relation to the document; it has taken as its primary task, not the interpretation of the document, nor the attempt to decide whether it is telling the truth or what is its expressive value, but to work on it from within and to develop it”(6). In short, instead of reading artifacts for their content, this new type of history focuses on the formal aspects of the historical document, describing it and reading it symptomatically in order to place it within a epistemological structure. Instead of asking, “what do we know,” we ask “how we know.”
This new form of history has several consequences: first, instead of distinguishing cause and effect relationships, history (not the historian) must investigate “series,” instead of cause-effect relationships. Second, discontinuity must be ceded a place in historical exegeses. Whereas traditionally the task of the historian was to erase discontinuity by integrating it into a historical narrative, emphasizing discontinuity forces the historian to question his or her own assumptions such as periodicity, etc; in this way, discontinuity is a “positive element” which encourages the historian to see interpretations of history as dynamic instead of static. Third, this new history indicates a move from “total history” to “general history;” where a total history seeks to find continuities within a particular place or time period, general history “would deploy the space of a dispersion” (10). Last, this new history would encourage a more local perspective, by focusing more on the minute concatenations that make up total history.
This new historical method is important because it introduces new conceptualizations of the subject. Foucault aligns total history to the development of the stable consciousness/subject position in intellectual history, which is in itself rather ahistorical: “in various forms, this theme has played a constant role since the nineteenth century: to preserve, against all decenterings, the sovereignty of the subject, and the twin figures of anthropology and humanism” (12).
In keeping with this idea, in Chapter 1, “The Unities of Discourse,” Foucault begins by focusing on the notion of the oeuvre, which is for him indicative of the way in which “tradition enables us to isolate the new against a background of permanence, and to transfer its merit to originality, to genius, to the decisions proper to individuals”(21). The oeuvre is an example of the way in which a proper name is used to signify continuity, effectively simplifying the complicated matter of authorship and agency in general. Foucault would like for us to investigate this assumed idea to discover what kinds of statements it makes possible.
Summary of Prolegomena
10 Fun Facts about Kant
Summary
The central question of Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics is “Is Metaphysics at all possible?” (Kant 20). He was prompted to ask this question by Hume who took empiricism to the extreme and finally came to the conclusion that all of our sensory experience is constructed. Based on this Hume concluded that all we have is common sense and we can’t know more than that. In order to answer his question and prove the validity of Metaphysics, Kant takes the middle ground between Hume’s extreme empiricism and Locke and Descartes, who said that we can rationalize our way to knowledge and truth. Kant disagreed with both the empiricists and the rationalists and claimed that knowledge isn’t made by reason or experience alone, but of both (Scruton 27). What Kant does in Prolegomena is take Hume’s thought one step further. Kant doesn’t stop at the constructedness of our sensory experiences, but says that this constructedness is the subject of Metaphysics. Metaphysics is about knowledge that is at the limit of possible knowledge; it studies the boundary between what we can and can’t know. Essentially, for Kant, we cannot know the world without basic, a priori concepts. But, without sensory experience of the world, there is nothing to apply these a priori concept to. One cannot exist without the other. There is an objective reality, but we can only know it through a perspective that is mediated by a priori concepts (Kant 29).
Kant uses the term “a priori” to describe metaphysical knowledge. A priori knowledge is true “independently of experience, and remain[s] true however experience varies” (Scruton 28). Posteriori knowledge, the opposite of a priori knowledge, is based upon experience. Kant argued that there are two kinds of a priori knowledge: analytic and synthetic. He says that “analytical judgments express nothing in the predicate but what has been already actually thought in the concept of the subject, though not so distinctly or with the same (full) consciousness” (14). For example: “All bachelors are unmarried” (Scuton 28). Unmarried is part of the definition of the term bachelor, so the subject and the predicate essentially express the same idea. Synthetic knowledge “contains in its predicate something not actually thought in the [subject]; it amplifies [] knowledge by adding something to [the]concept” (Kant 14). For example: “All bachelors are unfulfilled” (Scruton 28). This says something new about bachelors and doesn’t simply repeat its definition; also, this sort of statement only comes through intuiting, or observing something from the world around you. Up until Kant everyone agreed that all a priori knowledge was analytic and all posteriori knowledge was synthetic, but Kant argued that it is possible to have synthetic a priori knowledge (Scruton 28).
Kant believes that synthetic a priori knowledge is a fusion of the rational and empirical. He doesn’t use those terms though. Instead of rational, he describes a priori “concepts” or “Ideas.” Kant says that, “Concepts indeed are such that we can easily form some of them a priori, namely such as contain nothing but the thought of an object in general; and we need not find ourselves in an immediate relation to the object” (29). Basically, not all of our knowledge is based on empirical observation of objects, and we have thoughts that are not dependent on the presence of an object. We just know some things, and these concepts make up the “a priori” part of the synthetic a priori. The most basic a priori concepts are space and time—we can’t even have thoughts without an understanding of space and time, and almost all thoughts make reference to these two concepts. Other a priori concepts include substance, cause, quantity, and community. Chair is an example of an object that cannot be understood without first having the concept of substance. Cause works the same way; you cannot understand specific cause and effect relationships without understanding cause as a general concept (Scruton 37). We combine these a priori concepts with sensory experiences from the real world—this is the “synthetic” part of synthetic a priori. You need experiences to “synthesize.”
The synthetic a priori is the go between for appearances and things in themselves. Appearances are basically physical objects, or what appears to us in the world. Things in themselves are essentially unknowable to us, and stand in for an unrealizable ideal of perspectiveless knowledge. I understand things in themselves to be perfectly objective observation of the world—this is something that we are incapable of, and so we don’t really know anything about things in themselves except that they’re there. Kant also describes this relationship with the terms phenomena and noumena. Basically, appearances=phenomena and things in themselves=noumena (Kant 36-37). Using our senses, we can never get to things in themselves or noumena. We can only understand object as appearances or phenomena—so we take in intuitions or sensory information, which is mediated by the concepts, and turned into appearances or phenomena (Kant 48-49). This interaction between a priori concepts, appearances, and things in themselves also shows how we can establish “universal validity for empirical judgments” (Kant 48). Kant says, “The given intuition must be subsumed under a concept which determines the form of judging in general relatively to the intuition, connects empirical consciousness of intuition in consciousness in general, and thereby procures universal validity for empirical judgments” (48). What I think this means is that we take in sensory experience but they only become empirically valid when one of these universal, a priori concepts are applied to it. Sometimes Kant uses the terminology “pure concept of understanding” to describe what is added to our sensory experiences in order to from empirical judgments. These concepts are “pure” and universal in that they are common to all of us, and based their mediation of our sensory experiences we can agree on certain empirical truths.
Kant also uses antinomies, or conflicting statements that are equally true, to prove the existence of his concepts. The classic antinomy is that of freedom versus necessity. Kant posits the existence of the unity of apperception, which is similar to Descartes cogito. The unity of apperception is your own acknowledgment and understanding of your perspective. It is the idea that I see and know things, they are my perceptions, and I have control over them. This is the basis for the freedom side of the antinomy. Because of the unity of apperception, we are free and we have control over our thoughts and perceptions of the world around us. However, the necessity side of the antinomy says that there are necessary causes, substances, space and time, which all have control over our interactions with the world. We do not have control over these necessities, and therefore we are not free. Or as Kant puts it, “I may say without contradiction that all the actions of rational beings, so far as they are appearances (met with in any experience), are subject to the necessity of nature, but the very same actions, as regards merely the rational subject and its faculty of acting according to mere reason, are free” (93). This antinomy basically boils down to rationalism versus empiricism, and Kant says both are true and that it is pointless to argue over which one is correct. However, antinomies are evidence of the existence of a science of metaphysics—we cannot solve the antinomies but we can think about them (Kant 93).
Overall, Kant has a very optimistic outlook on the world. There are some things that we can’t know (noumena), but we are free and we have control over our perspective (unity of apperception). As for rhetoric, if Hume put everything into the realm of rhetoric because he found that all of our perceptions are a construction of our culture and society, then Kant takes some things out of the realm of rhetoric. Kant agrees with Hume that much of our understanding of the world around us is constructed. However, we also have a priori concepts that form a basic understanding that is common to all human beings; through them we can establish universal empirical judgments. So in this sense, for Kant rhetoric is only part of the picture. Because of our a priori concepts, there must be the possibility for a universal or transcendental basis for conversation, argument, and agreement (Scruton 85).
Works Cited
Kant, Immanuel. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1950.
Scruton, Roger. Kant: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Conversation in Kant
I think Kant offers more a universal method than a language. This method is universal in that depends on universal structures of cognition and not on contextual structures of culture and history. Hypothetically Kant's science of metaphysics offers us the ability to think about (which is different than to talk about) any and all matters concerning human life. He argues that the tendency to seek out and understand our "disposition to transcendent concepts in our reason" aims to "free our concepts from the fetters of experience," and in so doing improve both our knowledge of the transcendent concepts and refine our "practical principles" so as to bring them in line with a universal morality (362-3). We do not arrive at an understanding of these transcendent concepts through deliberation and argument. They are revealed to us through pure reason. We can tell other people what the concepts are, how pure cognition works, as Kant attempts to do, but this is not dialogic discourse (i.e. rhetors engaged in a back-and-forth). Rather, in telling others 'the way it [metaphysically] is,' you can tell them how their practical reason or dogmatic metaphysics has led them astray. In theory this method could serve as a "universal language," but there may be some practical limitations as to whether such a language would be taken up by many people, which I'll mention at the end of the post.
In the section on natural science, Kant attempts to clear the interference of experience and sensation away from pure, underlying a priori cognition. With natural science, Kant cannot cast experience aside entirely, as we can only understand in terms of possible experience. The dependence on experience is where Hume goes wrong, according to Kant. The laws of understanding "are not derived from experience, but experience is derived from them" (313). Experience then serves as a distraction from the "universal laws of nature" that "can be cognized a priori" (319). Indeed, to think that natural laws "are drawn from nature by means of experience" is a contradiction, because "the universal laws of nature can and must be cognized a priori (that is, independent of all experience) and be the foundation of all empirical understanding..." (319). Just because understanding is limited by experience, however, doesn't mean that understanding is the only tool we have. Reason, unbound by experience, allows us to investigate the foundations beneath understanding and reveal the operations of pure understanding based on universal principles (as Kant describes in part three). In conversation (if we can call it conversation), we would have to agree to those universal principles.
As for the limitations of this conversation, Kant argues vigorously that his metaphysics as a properly conducted science has implications for everyday matters, but he also admits that it's fine for people not interested in such a science to pursue "wholesome persuasion" based in common sense "for practical use only," so long as they don't claim to be metaphysicians with universal knowledge (278). Kant admits his method is difficult (329), and, given the number of us eager to sign up for his works at the beginning of the semester, I suspect that (practically speaking), if people limited their deliberation to Kantian method there'd be little to be said.
(Page numbers cited as they appear in Akademie edition)