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Dear murugappan,

KANT AND TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM :

Kant’s Critique of Metaphysics

In one of history’s best-known philosophical compliments, Kant credited the work of David Hume (1711–1776) with disrupting his “dogmatic slumbers” and setting his thinking on an entirely new path. To better understand the results of this new line of thought, we should briefly consider the “dogma” in question, and Hume’s attack on it. The prevailing philosophical orthodoxy in Kant’s time was a rationalism set out by Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), and systematized by Christian Wolff (1679–1750). According to such rationalists, empirical knowledge based on experience is suspect because it is necessarily tied to the subjective perspectives of individuals. Because the human senses are inherently fallible, empirical investigations can never reveal how the world really is, untainted by perspective: objective knowledge of the world can be achieved only through the use of reason. Leibniz, for example, provided an account of the world derived by reason from only two basic principles, which he believed were self-evidently true.

David Hume was an exponent of empiricism, a doctrine opposed to rationalism. For empiricists, all knowledge is derived from sense experience, and, therefore, the subjective perspectives of observers can never be entirely overcome. According to this position, rationalist efforts to circumvent the senses by relying on reason alone are bound to fail. Reason can contribute to knowledge, but only by relating ideas to one another, and ideas are ultimately based on sense impressions. An independent “realm of ideas,” or access to knowledge of reality untainted by the human senses, is therefore impossible. Hume was especially effective in drawing out the skeptical implications of the empiricist position. He argued that neither personal identity nor causality could legitimately be inferred from experience. Although we might notice that some events regularly follow others, we cannot infer that one caused the other. Kant found Hume’s attack on causality particularly worrisome, because it threatened the basis of modern natural science.

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant lays out his response to this philosophical dispute. Kant sees the force of the skeptical objections to rationalism and therefore aims to re-establish some of the claims of reason on firmer ground. Kant agrees with the empiricists that there is no “intelligible realm” accessible only by reason, and he denies that we can gain knowledge of how the world is, independent of all experience. However, he does not conclude that all human knowledge is ultimately reducible to particular experiences. For Kant, it is possible to draw general conclusions about the sensible world by giving an account of how human understanding structures all experience. As he puts it in the Preface to the second edition of the Critique:

Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge.

Kant compares his metaphysical studies to those of Copernicus, who revolutionized the study of astronomy by accounting for the position of the observer of the celestial bodies. Analogously, Kant aims to revolutionize metaphysics by accounting for the structure of the understanding that apprehends nature. According to Kant, the sensible world has certain features that can be known a priori, not because these are features of the objects in themselves, but, rather, because they are features of human understanding. We can know a priori that all objects will exist in space and time because these are the forms of our intuition; we could not even conceive an object that exists without these forms. Similarly, all experience is structured by the categories of the understanding, such as substance and causality. On the Kantian view, human understanding becomes the legislator of nature because the “laws of nature” that we perceive in the world are put there by our understanding.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant aims to show the limits of what can be known by theoretical reason, and his strategy depends on a distinction between phenomena (objects as we experience them) and noumena (objects as they exist in themselves). In one sense, Kant chastens the ambitions of reason. Because all knowledge is structured by the categories of the understanding, we must forego knowledge of things-in-themselves. However, knowledge of these categories also allows us to draw a priori generalizations about the phenomenal world. For example, we know that the natural world is governed by the principle of causality because causality is a form of knowledge. By confining his conclusions to the world of experience, Kant is able to meet the threat of Humean skepticism and put natural science on a firm foundation

Self in Kantian terms:

The idea of a self plays a central role in Western philosophy as well as in the Indian and other major traditions. Three main types of views of the self can be discerned. One moves from Kant’s conception of rationally autonomous self, another from the so-called homo-economicus theory, of Aristotelian descent. Both those types of views theorize the independence of the first person from its biological and social environment. Against those, a perspective that sees the self as organically developing within a certain environment has been proposed.

The Place of the Self

The idea of the self covers a central role in most philosophical branches. For instance, in metaphysics, the self has been seen as the starting point of inquiry (both in the empiricist and rationalist traditions) or as the entity whose investigation is most deserving and challenging (Socratic philosophy). In ethics and political philosophy, the self is the key concept to explain freedom of the will as well as individual responsibility.

The Self in Modern Philosophy

It is in the seventeenth century, with Descartes, that the idea of the self takes a central place in the Western tradition. Descartes stressed the autonomy of the first person: I can realize that I am existing regardless of what the world I live in is like. In other words, for Descartes the cognitive foundation of my own thinking is independent of its ecological relationships; factors such as gender, race, social status, upbringing are all irrelevant to capture the idea of the self. This perspective on the topic will have crucial consequences for the centuries to come.

Kantian Perspectives

The author that developed the Cartesian perspective in the most radical and appealing way is Kant. According to Kant, each person is an autonomous being capable of envisaging courses of action that transcend any ecological relationship (customs, upbringing, gender, race, social status, emotional situation …) Such a conception of the autonomy of the self will then play a central role in the formulation of human rights: each and every human being is entitled to such rights precisely because of the respect that each human self merits in as much as it is an autonomous agent. Kantian perspectives have been declined in several different version over the past two centuries; they constitute one of the strongest and most interesting theoretical core attributing a central role to the self.

Homo Economicus and the Self

The so-called homo-economicus view sees each human as an individual agent whose primary (or, in some extreme versions, sole) role for action is self-interest. Under this perspective, then, humans’ autonomy is best expressed in the quest to fulfill one’s own desires. While in this case, an analysis of the origin of desires may encourage the consideration of ecological factors, the focus of theories of the self based on homo-economicus see each agent as an isolated system of preferences, rather than one integrated with its environment.

The Ecological Self

Finally, the third perspective on the self sees it as a process of development that takes place within a specific ecological space. Factors such as gender, sex, race, social status, upbringing, formal education, emotional history all play a role in shaping up a self. Furthermore, most authors in this area agree that the self is dynamic, an entity that is constantly in the making: selfing is a more proper term to express such an entity.

Affectionately,

Gandhiram.