Transcript Reading: Kant Part 2

When last we met, we had started on Immanuel Kant, the last of the great philosophers, and probably the greatest of them all, in this period between 1600 and 1800, the period known in philosophy as the modern period. And I said, why don't we start out by listing some of the mistakes that Hume—I'm sorry, that Kant perpetuated and didn’t overcome—and then we'll look at some that he did. The first thing that I had mentioned was the big one. It’s the mistake of thinking that what is given in our experience, the "given," is the individual sensory properties which our minds combine into objects. So what comes into the mind for Kant, as it did for Hume, are colors, sounds, tastes, touches, and they come through different senses. So, they get combined by the mind into objects. So the "given" isn't the objects—it’s these individual sensations, sensory properties. These are what Berkeley called conjuries of sense, by which he means just what I’ve been talking about—individual colors, tastes, touches, sounds, and smells that we put together in what he calls a "conjury," a combination. And that’s what produces the objects.

But the given is something else—that’s not what we experience. What we experience are objects. There are mountains, clouds, roads, cars, people, and lakes, and if you’re inside, as I am, there are walls, a door, and a window, and that’s what we see—whole objects. So, this is just not correct as a report of the "given." It’s already a theory about the given—it’s a guess about how these objects come to appear to us, but it’s not a correct report. So, that’s the number one mistake that they all make in this time period.

And that means the second big problem, caused by the first one, is to explain how we have ideas of what appear to be other kinds of properties. And the first thing they worry about is how we can experience quantitative properties and spatial properties, and where logical principles come from. How is it we can do mathematics, and why does it look so certain? When we do a calculation correctly, we get a certain solution. Why is that? Why is it that, if we have the initial measurements of something correct and do the calculations correctly, even just arithmetic, the answer we get corresponds to the way the thing is? The ancient Pythagoreans explained that by saying it's because everything’s made of numbers. It’s not made of little individual sensory properties that we put together in bundles we call objects. The objects we experience are really made of numbers. That’s one kind of solution—a rather desperate remedy. As far as we know, when we investigate the world around us, we find things like molecules and atoms for the physical structure, not that they’re made out of numbers—abstract numbers.

So, back to this. The big problem, then, is to account for the other kinds, especially the ones we call rational, like logic and math, as opposed to sensory, which is the phenomenal—the conjuries of sense. I pointed out earlier, but I’m going to repeat it—the fateful equivocation between regarding something as known via sensation, which is how we perceive the world around us, and saying it has only one kind of property: the properties related by laws that relate them. It’s not that we just have colors, tastes, touches, smells, and sounds that come in, and we put them together into a thing that therefore only has those sensory properties. The fateful equivocation between the sensory kind of properties and law is true as we experience it of everything, and saying that something is a sensation. We know the world through sense perception, but we know more than sensory properties. The world as we experience it, as it’s given to us—before we start making theories and going into arguments like this—is made up of things, events, states of affairs, relations between them, people, whole objects, and we experience them as having many kinds of properties.

I said that before, but instead of just mentioning that, why don’t we talk about what some of them are? It seems to me that the given, the real given to us, is not just sensory properties. Let’s put down what kinds it seems to me that we do experience. One is quantitative.

Quantitative—we represent quantities by numbers, but what they represent is the "how much" of things. And we set that up. If we represent them by numbers, we find that there are quantitative laws as well. So, we know that one and one is two. Given what we mean by one and one and two, and given the law that in the natural number series, every successive number represents an increase over its predecessor by the amount of the first, it will always come out that one and one make two because of that law—not because we've seen everything in the past and everything in the future. There are quantitative properties. There also appear to be spatial properties in the things we experience pre-theoretically.

And there are spatial laws, and there's geometry that studies space. Although it didn’t exist in Kant's time, there's non-Euclidean geometry today. He worked only with the Euclidean idea of geometry, and that's what he tried to show as a certainty because it’s one of the categories of being rational. Yes, there are also kinetic properties. This has to do with rest and motion. Galileo’s law of inertia: a thing not acted on by an external force tends to remain in motion, and a thing not acted upon by an external force tends to remain at rest. If it's at rest, it will stay at rest. It will change if there is something else that changes it—the same for motion. So, it isn't that rest is the natural state of everything (that's what Aristotle thought, and you had to explain motion), and it isn't that motion is assumed by Galileo to be the natural state of everything, and you have to explain why some things go to rest and stay the same. Nope, neither one is basic to the other. We find things in motion and at rest, and it’s the change from one to the other that needs to be explained. Why? Because of the principle of sufficient reason—for everything, there must be a cause or explanation. That was Galileo's assumption, and so he comes up with kinetic properties and laws.

And then there are physical properties—stuff like mass, weight, and solidity. If you asked Descartes, he would say, it occupies space. If you asked Leibniz, he would say, it exerts some force. But things also appear to have bionic properties. Not everything’s alive, but even things that aren't alive can have passive bionic properties. I mentioned an example I think Goodwin gave, and I remind you of it: a stone that's not alive can be swallowed by a bird, go into its gizzard, and help grind its food. So it's part of the digestive process of a living thing. And though it's not living, it's part of the living thing. It's included in it, and being included in it activates this passive potential bionic function.

So, one of the things I'd add to all this is that things can possess these properties actively or passively. And that means simply what you think it means—prima facie this isn’t some tricky kind of philosophical meaning. It's not a special meaning of the terms so that it sounds simple but turns out to be fearfully obscure. Take the planet Earth. The planet Earth is numerically the third from the Sun. Now, that's a property the Earth has whether anybody knows it or not, so it possesses that actively. But the property of being counted only happens in relation to beings like us who can count things. It’s a passive property. The Earth is passive in being counted. It doesn’t count—it doesn’t sit there and go, "1, 2, 3, I’m the third planet from the Sun"—but people can count it. So it has that passive numerical property, or quantitative property.

After biotic properties, we have perceptual properties—sense perception—but things also have logical properties. Now, you might say that's pretty extreme. Why would you put that down when rocks, tables, chairs, walls, and houses don’t reason logically? That’s absolutely true, but they have passive logical properties. If they were not logically distinguishable—and that's an active property—they could not be logically distinguished—and that's a passive property. So, they have both.

But besides logical properties, there are others that we notice things have. I’ll call this one technical. It has to do with our human ability to take a natural material and make a new thing of it. So, we can take wood and make a hut, we can take wood and make a boat. We can take metals and make things from them. One of the first things humans did was to take sounds and marks and make them into a language. We regard them as symbols that stand for something else. That’s why, often, very ancient languages are highly onomatopoetic. The name of a thing can make a sound like the thing. So the Hebrew word for lion is "ari"—it’s a little roar.

Well, there are many more. Here's that list again: Things are linguistically referable, able to be formed into something new, logically conceivable, able to be perceived. And there are more—many more, I think. I’ll just name a couple more. Especially things that are technically formed by us—we charge money for. We make a product or service, and we sell it. So, there are economic properties and laws: the law of supply and demand, the law of diminishing returns, and we try to make economic calculations based on them.

There are also juridical properties to a thing according to the law. And here I mean the law of the land. Some things are allowed by law, some are forbidden by law. Boundaries are set by law. Disputes are settled in courts as to what kind of justice should prevail here. But this has to do with our intuition that some things are just, and some just aren't fair—they’re not right. So, we create an institution of society, the state, to make a public legal order and enforce it. But that also corresponds to the distinct kinds of properties that things can have. Actions can be just or unjust, and there are others as well.

Social properties have to do with standards of what counts as polite and respectful, and what would be an insult. All those things have social value to us, especially standing in the community. And one’s standing is one’s social position. So, the things that we experience are multi-property. If we press into this word "aspect," and we now give it a philosophical meaning, it’s going to mean a distinct kind of properties and laws, and that means the laws that hold among that particular kind of property. Then, we can name a lot of them that have been singled out, investigated, and written about by scholars, scientists, and philosophers.

There are kinds of properties and laws that people in everyday life, who are not scientists or philosophers and do not wish to be, nevertheless still recognize in the things of their experience. That was a stingy, tricky point. There’s also ethical, and I mentioned before, for a Christian, ethical doesn’t mean the same thing as legal. Something can be legally okay but ethically wrong because legality has to do with what’s fair and just. Ethics has to do with what’s loving and what conforms to, or violates, the norm of loving your neighbor as yourself. We’ve done some work on this, so I’m not going to repeat it all, but I am pointing out here that the world as we experience it—the objects that we encounter—we encounter as multi-aspectual. It’s not too annoying a term, is it—multi-aspectual?

But Kant makes a mistake. He follows all his predecessors in saying that what is given in our experience are just sensory properties. So, the big question is: How do we get from sensory properties to all the other kinds? How can we talk about them? How can we then do physics? How can we do mathematics? How can we do biology, sociology, linguistics, cultural studies, law, ethics? Remember, the two big things Kant is not going to tolerate the loss of are science (for him, that meant astronomy and physics) and ethics. Science is one of the great accomplishments of the human race, according to Kant, and it has taken place and burgeoned here in Western Europe. We are the beneficiaries of the work of people like Galileo, Newton, Pascal, Lavoisier, Volta, and many others. This is a great accomplishment, and it gives us insight into the nature of the world around us, which people have always been curious about.

But then there’s also ethics. It doesn’t just satisfy our curiosity and give us insight into the world around us. Without it, people are going to blow themselves up. They’re going to kill each other. And if we want peace in the world, we need ethics. We need to know the rules of what’s loving and what’s not. That’s Kant, who later writes an essay called Toward Perpetual Peace, and that essay is carved on the wall of the UN building.

What we're trying to achieve is peace. We'd like to achieve harmony and goodwill too, but we'll settle for peace.

And of course, it's related to goodwill. That’s the way Kant's going to construe it too. So, see how Kant goes about this. How’s he going to do this trick? And before I show you what he did, let’s mention some things that he got right that his predecessors didn’t get right. The first is that Kant recognizes space and time. Now, these other guys, if they mention space and time at all, they just kind of blow it off. Where do I get the idea of time, for example? If there’s no impression, if there’s no sensation of time, how do I get the idea? And Hume tried to blow that off by saying, when I hear three notes played in succession on the flute—notice succession already assumes time—then I form the idea of things being successive, or of being simultaneous with, or one’s before and one’s after another. So, I get the whole idea of "before" and "after" and simultaneity just by hearing three things done successively like that. I heard three notes on the flute. I hear the clock strike three. Whatever it is—that’s a circular explanation, folks. It assumes he already knows what time is, and he’s saying that’s how we know time. But listen to his own explanation: He knows it because he infers it from three notes played in succession.

What kind of impression, what sensation is succession? What color is it? What does it taste like? What does it smell like? What does it sound like? If you hit it, what does it feel like? It’s not a sensory impression. The notes on the flute are, but succession isn’t. That things can succeed one another in time already assumes you know there’s time, and you experience time in some way. What’s that way going to be? Hume taught us all along that we don’t have any ideas except as copies of impressions. Succession isn’t a sensory impression. So, how do we have an idea of it? But Kant says we do, and he’s going to give it another source. The same for space. Some of them dealt with space in some ways, and others pretty much kind of ignored it. But Kant is going to say the same thing: Space isn’t anything you see. What color is it? What does it taste like? What does it sound like if you hit it? What does it feel like if you touch it? It’s not a purely sensory thing, and it’s not a bundle of purely sensory properties. So, where do we get the idea?

So, one of the things that Kant gets right from the beginning, that the others don’t, is by insisting that we really experience space and time. Kant rejects that we have no ideas

The ideas that are not copies of impressions, to use Hume’s terms. Here, it's Hume that Kant mainly has in mind. Sorry, I thought I’d switch that over for you. Kant's going to retain space and time, not try to explain them away, and he rejects Hume's proposition that we have ideas only of what we have first had impressions of. So Hume repeatedly recommends doing away with any term that's illegitimate, and it's illegitimate if it purports to refer to or use the meaning of something that’s not first a sensory impression. Ideas are copies of sensations, and sensations have only sensory properties. Well, if that's true, you're never going to get to the other kinds of properties.

And that’s just about what Hume concluded. Kant starts with, “Sorry, but that’s wrong.” In some sense, our experience is temporal and spatial.

Kant’s going to try to explain where that comes from—how it gets into our experience. But those are not ideas that are copies of sensations. They're not just bundles of color, sounds, touches, tastes, and smells. So, the first thing he gets right, which his predecessors didn’t, is that it’s not true that the only ideas we have are copies of sense perceptions.

We have ideas of space and time. And here’s something else he gets right: we have ideas—well, yes, we have an idea. We have an idea of necessity. Now, that means there are types of necessity. It means, fundamentally, that when one thing happens, another must happen—not does happen, but must. And that was Hume's problem. Hume couldn’t see how we could ever get an idea of necessity. Hume keeps saying that in the world around us, we may see one event followed by another event—A followed by B—and we can see that again and again and again. Will that give us the right to say B mustfollow A? And his answer is no. If you see it happen that way a billion times, in the billion-and-first instance, it may be that A occurs and B doesn't follow. And based on that, he dismisses the idea of causality. We don’t know causes either.

There’s also rational necessity. If you have one and one, you have two, right? That’s mathematical necessity. There’s also logical necessity. So, we have physical necessities, and we have logical and mathematical necessities.

For instance, unsupported objects fall to the ground, and that means things heavier than air, when unsupported, in the gravitational sphere of the Earth, fall down. Logical necessity: if P implies Q and P is true, Q must be true. We have mathematical necessity: one plus one always makes two because it has to. It’s not just that these things happen to be the case—it must be. So, we have ideas that are not copies of impressions. That’s really important because that’s how Kant can say we have an idea of space, an idea of time, and an idea of necessity in its different senses. Some things may be biological necessities, social necessities, or economic necessities. There are physical, logical, and mathematical necessities. There’s a kind of necessity that corresponds to all the kinds of properties we experience things to have—all those aspects that were on the list I had on your whiteboard.

So, Kant gets this right, where Hume doesn’t. I mean, we’re all impressed when we read Hume about the logical acuity with which he writes and analyzes things, and also the wit that comes out. But he wasn’t always right, and just because he tries to make something a devastating criticism and makes it funny, doesn’t make it right. So Kant is rejecting the idea that there’s nothing in the mind that wasn’t first in the senses. Well, that’s the empirical stuff they all accepted and got wrong. So, he’s going to have a different start. Now, look, if we have ideas of all this stuff, and he thinks it’s undoubtedly true that we do, he doesn’t try to prove that we have ideas of space and time—of course, we do. We talk about it all the time.

Where does it come from? If it’s not from sensation, what is its origin? What is its source? How does it get into the mind? The same thing for necessity. We experience things as necessary, and that’s true in the physical world around us. Unsupported objects constantly fall to the ground. There had never been a good explanation for that. The best Aristotle came up with in the ancient world was to say that’s the natural place for things to be—on the ground. So if you try to get them off the ground and then they become unsupported, they go back to their natural place. No idea of gravitation, such as they had even at the beginning of the 20th century, let alone here in the 21st. Nobody thought about quantum gravitation waves or stuff like that.

So, where does it all come from? And this, I think, is another huge mistake, but Kant has an answer. What he’s going to say is, essentially, this:

The mind supplies all the contents of our experience that did not come from the senses. So, except for colors, sounds, tastes, touches, and smells, everything else is supplied by the mind.

There’s a strange little paragraph that occurs in the Critique of Pure Reason in which Kant says, “I can think of one alternative. The only alternative I can think of is that if you were to say God had created everything with all these properties and all these kinds and the laws that hold among them, and then we grasp them through perception and with our minds, and then God is the lawgiver to creation, you could say that, I guess,” and he drops it, and it never returns. No allusion to that thought ever returns in any of his work. And I would say that’s what’s exactly right, and not all this subjectivism. I mean, you do realize that he is giving up on knowing the real external world, if there is one. He’s a thoroughgoing subjectivist. We can’t know if there is a world outside our minds, Abigail, or if there is a—

I'm going to put it—we can’t know if there is a world outside our minds or, if there is, what it is like, what its nature is, what its characteristics are. I think both of those things I had on the board are huge mistakes. They’re very clever, and he’s going to work them out very cleverly. We’re going to see that in the sessions to come. But he maintains the mistake that the only thing that comes into the mind are colors, tastes, touches, and sounds, and smells. Then he concludes that we can’t know anything else except what the mind supplies to those sensations. And therefore, the door is closed forever on knowing the world as it exists independently of us.

But these guys weren’t crazy. They knew they had parents. They knew there had been people long before them, and some of them had children, so they knew there are going to be people after they die. And I don’t think one of them thought they’d never die.

So how do they explain that? I’m at a loss. I can’t help you. I can’t help them. That’s why it’s wacky. Complete subjectivism, which says the only thing I know is what’s inside my mind, leaves us with solipsism. Remember, I had that weird word on the board earlier—the possibility, or even the belief, that I’m the only thing in the universe, that I’m all there is, and everything is just my ideas, my sense perceptions, including the news reports on TV and pictures and TV shots of other cities, and those are just perceptions. I mean, it’s nothing outside of my head. But that is loony. I had a professor in graduate school who used to say, “Kant forgot he had parents.” Well, I’m sure he didn’t. I’m sure that on the equivalent of Mother’s Day, he’d send her flowers and a card or something. But man, his philosophy doesn’t allow for it.

So I’ve tried to point out some of the things that were mistakes that continued, and some of the things that were not mistakes—insights better than his predecessors—such as space and time, which are real parts of our existence and experience. He’s going to account for them in a weird way, but he’s going to account for them. And so is necessity, and therefore so is causality.

Now what gets a little weird is that he flip-flops on this issue as to whether there’s an external world. Sometimes he seems to write as though there is; other times he talks about it in a different way. This is how he speaks of the external world: he speaks of the external world as things in themselves.

So there they are—things or objects or events or states of affairs as they are, apart from us knowing them, as they are in themselves. Well, that’s the whole issue. You can’t account for anything being this way, since there’s no sense impression and no idea of it, because the things in themselves, we can’t say, are in space or time. We can’t say there’s causality among them. We can’t attribute to any of them the properties of biotic living things. Nothing that’s true of our experience, which our minds impose on our sensations, is true of the things in themselves.

But then at other times, he actually talks as though the things in themselves cause what Hume called impressions. That’s as flat-out inconsistent as you can be. He said that we know necessity, and therefore causality, only because our minds impose that on the sensory data that we get from outside. But the sensory data comes to us as total chaos, and it doesn’t represent anything about what’s outside. But no, he says in a couple of places, the data is caused by the things in themselves. But causality is one of the ways our mind organizes our experience. We can’t say it’s outside in the world in itself, any more than we can say there are real automobiles that drive us through real space from one spot to another. We don’t know that. All we know is that our sensations are ordered spatially by us, by our minds.

It might be helpful, instead of continuing with pointing out what Kant got right and wrong, to give you a little chart that I think has been very helpful in explaining Kant to undergraduates. It will give you his layout. He says that’s how he’s thinking of it too, that what needs to be analyzed first is the operations of the mind. I already said his policy is that whatever is not purely sensory—whatever is not a color, taste, touch, sound, or smell, or a bundle of them—is supplied to our experience by our minds. That’s his big move, his big ploy. So what he needs to do is investigate the mind and how it works, and he faults Hume for not doing so. Even Hume didn’t do this, Kant says. So let’s get to the architecture of the mind—his term. How does it work? And then we’ll see what we can know and what we can’t know.

So the first thing is that what comes to the mind is chaotic sense data. I’m going to call them givens, chaotic sense data, and this is the mind. And here are the slots through which chaotic sense data enter the mind. I think it’s legitimate to represent Kant this way since he called what he was going to present the architectonic of the mind. He’s thinking of a ground plan for a house, a blueprint. So what comes is chaotic but purely sensory—sights, tastes, touches, sounds, and smells. And the first thing the mind does is process through the forms he calls "sensory intuition."

Forms of sensory intuition are space and time. Kant says that space organizes things to appear outside of our bodies—these are the external sensations of our bodies. Time, on the other hand, is internal. What happens here is that this chaotic sensory input gets space and time imposed on it. To use a simple example, think of a vase with flowers. What we call sensations occur at this point in Kant's framework. There's a lot happening unconsciously, but what we're conscious of is a sensory object—an object that occupies space and has qualities like color, taste, touch, sound, and smell. This object is arranged spatially and temporally, occurring at a specific time in our experience and at a specific place.

Kant suggests that this input must be chaotic because if space and time need to be imposed on it, then what we start with must be disorganized. Without concepts like logic and mathematics, all we would have is sensory input without temporal or spatial structure. It would be chaos, a mishmash of sensations. This is where Kant's idea of chaos comes in: if you subtract all that the mind imposes, you’re left with disorder. But once this sensory input is organized by space and time, it is further structured by what Kant calls the Categories of the Understanding.

These categories include logic and mathematics, which are also ways of organizing sensory input. The chaotic sensations are put together into a whole that is spatially and temporally ordered. For example, certain colors appear at a specific time or over a specific duration, and disparate sensations—colors, tastes, touches—are integrated. There's a spatial and temporal organization, and at the same time, concepts are imposed on these sensations, putting everything together into a cohesive experience.

Kant provides a list of categories for organizing sensations: quantity, quality, relation, and modality. These categories correspond to specific concepts that structure our experience.

Let me read something from Kant that sheds more light on this: Geometry is a science that determines the properties of space synthetically, meaning its statements are synthetic a priori. This means that geometrical propositions aren't derived from mere concepts but are known intuitively, and once known, they are recognized as necessarily true. For example, we know space has only three dimensions, not because of perception, but because of the a priori principles that organize our understanding of space.

Kant’s explanation suggests that the objects we experience daily are, in fact, products of the way sensations are structured by space, time, and the categories of quantity, quality, relation, and modality. The finished product that we experience consciously is largely a result of our unconscious mental construction. Thus, our conscious experience can only perceive what our mind has already structured. This is quite a radical idea, and we’ll delve into it more in our next discussion.