2641-2007 Phil Lecture 3 Notes Chapter 3: Kants development from physical to moral monadologist (continued)
3.5 Kant's Transcendental Turn in the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770. The full title of Kant's dissertation given on the occasion of his being made professor of Logic and Metaphysics at University of Knigsburg, "On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World", makes the issue at the heart of his Swedenborg critique clear. In conceiving of souls as ghostly analogues of bodies, Swedenborg was clearly confusing the "form and principles" pertaining to the sensible world (the world of bodies) with that pertaining to the "intelligible world" (the world of "souls"). But while Swedenborg's error was overt, the same confusion in other more reputable philosophers (including Leibniz and Kant's earlier self) was more subtle. In the dissertation, Kant's separation of the "form and principles" governing the sensible and intelligible world takes the form of a distinction between two kinds of mental representations ("Vorstellungen"): "concepts" and "intuitions". Manfred Kuehn, who refers to this separation as the "Discontinuity Thesis", makes it the first of the three major linked theses presented in the Inaugural Dissertation, the other two being subjectivity of space and time and the essentially rational nature of morality.
3.51 The representational duality of concepts and intuitions.
Concepts are general representations -- a concept can be applied to many separate individual things. The easiest way to think of this is to think of the concept expressed by certain types of words -- especially common names, like "chair" or "human". Thus these concept chair applies to all chairs, the concept human to all humans, and so on. This is true even when we use such concepts to pick out particular things, as when we say, for example, that this chair has a broken leg, we pick out that individual thing as a chair and so in terms of the properties it will have in common with other chairs. (It might be said that chairs are the kinds of thing that typically have legs. In contrast, this number has a broken leg has no meaning because numbers are not the kinds of things that have legs.) Kants account of concepts implies that there are no singular conceptsconcepts that in principle apply to one object alone, like the way a proper name like Julius Caesar, for example, is thought to apply to one person. Even if there were only one chair in the universe, the concept chair would apply to it as a general term which could be applied to other chairs, were they to exist. In contrast, intuitions are singular representations that is, they present to the mind single thing. Intuitions typically present single things to the mind in perception, and it is tempting to think of intuitions as something like an optical image formed, say, in a camera, as Kant thinks there is a causal connection between sensory intuitions and the individual things represented in them. Thus when I take a
photograph of a chair, I think of the photographic images as representing that individual chair. 1 These intuitions are empirical intuitions, because they have sensory content, but the space within which the chair is represented is also considered by Kant as single and hence as intuited. Intuitions of space and time are not empirical but pure. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant adds another distinction, and says that while intuitions are immediate, concepts are mediated. By this he seems to mean that concepts never apply directly to objects, but only apply to objects able to be presented in intuitions. That is, concepts working alone are incapable of representing anything, an idea expressed in the first half of his well-known claim that thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. (A51/B75). I will call this the mutual dependency thesis, the idea that taken alone neither concepts nor intuitions can function as representations. Contentful representation requires both to be operative. But in the Inaugural Dissertation Kant does not seem to have contrued his representational dualism in this way as there he seems to imply that concepts alone can represent as he thinks of properly metaphysical knowledge in just this way. From conceptual thought alone by a process he calls analysis, we can arrive at properly conceptual knowledge of noumena. There, the philosophical point of the separation of the two forms of representation is to criticize the practice of utilizing something like intuitional forms of representation in metaphysicsan error he calls the subreptive fallacy. Metaphysical knowledge should be constructed within the domain of pure conceptual thought from which anything having the form of intuition should be kept exempt. In contrast, empirical knowledge was knowledge in which intuitions and concepts both had a role. Swedenborgs error, then, from this perspective, was to have thought of souls on the model of empirically intuitable bodies rather than to have kept to conceptual thought alone.
3.52 The subjectivity of space and time:
After the transcendental turn started by the Inaugural Dissertation Kant still agrees with Leibnizs rejection of Newton's idea of the "reality" of space, but he now rejects such realism about space for different reasons. (This part of the Inaugural Dissertation is largely the same as his treatment of space and time in the Critique of Pure Reason). Kant's idea is that when we experience individual objects in the world, we do so on the basis of their causing us to have certain sensations. But perceptual experience is not just the having of sensations. When I look at a tomato, I just don't
In fact, this is not as straightforward as it seems -- photos are commonly used to represent kinds of things because and individual thing can in turn represent its kind. Thus, in an advertisement, a photo of an iPod, for example, is meant to represent the kind, iPod, not the particular one that was part of the causal process involved in the creation of the image. Nevertheless, the photograph in the first instance seems to represent the individual thing itself and are taken to so represent that individual thing. The photo of my dog on my laptop is of her -- at least from my point of view, it is not representing that kind of dog.
1
have "sensations" of redness and "roundness" -- I see a tomato as an object in space and time (what is sometimes called a "spatio-temporal continuant"). Part of my representation of the tomato is, then, as a material thing which exists in this medium, but Kant thinks that there is no-way that I could have learnt about the nature of space and time themselves from experience. Experience is of things as in space and time must then presuppose the representation of space and time as give a priori. I must already have the capacity to represent space and time "in me" as a condition of any perceptual experience at all. 2 Kants idea that space is represented by non-conceptual intuition provided him with a way of restoring something of Newtons idea of the independence of the empty space filled by objects from the objects filling them by the claim that our representation of the space filled by an object was of a different nature to the type of representation employed about the object filling that space. Crudely, Kants basic point might be put this way. Think of a brick and think of the space filled by the brick. Bricks are the sorts of things about which we can be say things in sentences with a subjectpredicate form. I might say, for example, that this brick is red. But, because of the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, I can neither pick out the space occupied by the brick in its own terms (in isolation from talk of the things filling the spaces, I cant differentiate the space occupied by this brick from the space occupied by that one), nor can I say anything about the space (space itself is devoid of properties like colour, and so on). But this only goes to show that a sentence type representation is the wrong type of representation to use when trying to represent the space. Not all representations are sentences, after all. A painting or a photograph of a brick can be said to be a representation of it, and it is not clear that these are to be thought of in terms of the subjectpredicate structure of sentences. Might not there be some other forms of representation that are relevant here? Kant thought that his idea of the non-conceptual nature of spatial representation maintained something Leibnizs idea of the ideality of space without the adverse consequences of Leibnizs conceptual formulation of this point. But if space and time are "ideal", and if the things that appear in space and time are thus only things as they appear to us, rather than things as they are "in themselves", what can we say about the "in themselves"? That is, what can we say about the traditional objects of
It is important here to understand what Kant is not saying. He is not saying that we cannot know anything outside our individual minds, and that we can only know our own subjective ideas or representations. Kant is not a skeptic about the "outside world", although he is often taken to be such a skeptic. That we have sensations testifies to our interacting with substances outside ourselves. But we cannot on the basis of these interactions assume that things are as they appear to us, and that they "really" have the properties that they seem to have. Those properties, spatio-temporal properties in particular, actually reflect the way that we represent to ourselves those things with which we interact. In that sense, space and time are "in us" not in the "things themselves".
2
metaphysics? In both the Inaugural Dissertation and the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant answers that we must not employ intuition in this reasoning. But while in the Inaugural Dissertation he still believed that we can come to know things in themselves (by reasoning from pure concepts alone), in the Critique of Pure Reason he believes that reasoning from concepts alone can result in no substantial knowledge at all. It is in this sense that it is a "critique" of "pure reason" (reasoning from concepts alone). Nevertheless, in both versions of his transcendental idealism, the thesis of the ideality of space provided a means of attributing to the subject considered as a moral being the type of independence and self-sufficiency that was the attraction of Aristotles notion of substance and its modern Leibnizian analogue of the monad.
3.53 The rational nature of morality
Metaphysics is (purported) knowledge about the intelligible, not the sensible, world. In the Inaugural Dissertation Kant holds that one should reason about and come to know purely intelligible entities (such as the soul) with concepts alone sensory intuitions should play no part in this reasoning. To employ sensory intuitions here, to try to picture the soul as a type of thing in space and time, is what had led Swedenborg to picture souls as ghostly types of bodies. Swedenborgs errors were obvious, but they were only obvious forms of the same type of mistake that Kant had thought of himself as making in his early work in which he had fallen prey to this diremptive fallacy. But there is another way in which we commonly make this mistake. When we think of our moral actions, we can picture them as physical events unfolding in the spatio-temporal realm of physical interaction, and from this perspective it becomes mysterious as to how those actions can be thought of free actions originating in our own wills. But this is to commit yet another version of Swedenborg's mistake. The soul is an intelligible, not a sensible entity, and we must think of its operations and effects in terms of pure concepts alone. That is, morality is grounded in rational, not sensible, processes. In terms of this moral perspective, then, Kant retains much of Leibnizs monadological perspective from which the monad is thought of as containing within itself the grounds of its own actions and its independence from local causal influence. Within the framework of the Inaugural Dissertation, this truth about the essentially rational nature of morality was still understood within a framework of metaphysics as a theoretical endeavour. In Kants fully developed version of Transcendental Idealism found in his critical philosophy of the 1780s and 90s, however, the idea of such metaphysical knowledge as a branch of theoretical philosophy was dropped. What remained intact from Transcendental Idealisms first version, however, was the thesis of the essentially rational nature of morality. Effectively, what Kant was to do was to displace metaphysics from its traditional ground of theoretical philosophy to its new ground of moral philosophy. What Kant had done, I suggest, was to have fully
abandoned his original project of a Newtonian version of Leibnizs monadology and replaced it with a moral monadology.3
Chapter 4: Kants Copernican Self-Image for Philosophy (5.5k)
In the Preface to the Second Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant makes what first seems an odd claim about the method of metaphysics. 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.4 On first reading this we might object: surely Kant has got the relation of mind to world back-to-front. In the project of coming to know the world, we are surely meant to bring our beliefs into conformity with the world. To talk of the world ("objects") as conforming to our knowledge seems to suggest that it is the fact of our knowing something to be so that simply makes it so. This must be wrong! However, note here that Kant is here not talking of knowledge the objects of the empirical world, but the "objects" investigated by metaphysicsthat is, objects purportedly known independently of experience and by pure reason alone. So, he is not saying that in relation to my knowledge that, say, today is sunny, we should think of the weather as somehow necessarily conforming to my state of mind (that, surely, would be attribute crazy powers to ourselves). Next, it is the case that we do think of the mind-world relation in the way suggested (objects conforming to our intentional states rather than the other way round) in practical reasoning. Thus, in intending to act in a certain way, I think of the intended outcome as a state of the world which ideally conforms to my intention. If I intend to open the door and act on the intention, then in the normal course of things, the door will, in becoming open, come to conform to my intention. We must now remember that Kant stresses the mind's activity in bringing about knowledge. It may be, then, that we are to understand something about that which is known as conforming to the mind in virtue of the fact that the active mind has brought about that aspect. In particular, as Kant conceives of the mind as actively contributing form
Kants return towards Leibniz in the late 1760s on reading New Essays. See Beck on Lambert and Hume (?) in Essays on Kant and Hume.
4
3
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B *, emphasis added.
to the knowledge, we might think of the form of the object as known as that element that corresponds to the mind. Of course in ordinary knowing, the mind doesn't contribute everything to the object as known on Kant's account. The world contributes something too: it contributes the matter which is so "formed". In empirical knowledgemy knowledge that the tomato is red, for examplethe world (the tomato) contributes the "matter" of sensation that is involved in my knowing it to be red rather than, say, green. (In this sense, for Kant the world is mind independent.) But even with respect to such simple examples of empirical knowledge, this knowledge has a logical formif I know that the tomato is red, and that the tomato is a fruit, then I know that there is a fruit that is red. It is the relations between the concepts involved here, the relations between the concepts tomato and fruit, that allow us to make such inferences. Such logical structure contributing to the form of our knowledge is, like the forms of intuition of space and time on Kants account, contributed by the knower, rather than the known. We only have to remember that the father of metaphysics, Plato, thought of knowledge as being ultimately directed at what he called forms to see something of what is behind Kants idea that we should think of that which is known in metaphysics as conforming to the mind rather than vice-versa. We might get assistance in following Kant's line of thought by examining the analogy he draws between his own "change in perspective" in metaphysics, and the change in perspective found in Copernican cosmology in the early period of modern natural science.
4.1 The Copernican reversal of perspective and its consequences for metaphysics In the Preface to the second (or B) edition to the Critique of Pure Reason Kant links Copernicus to this reversal of the mind-world relation: Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved round the spectator, [Copernicus] tried whether he might not have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest. A similar experiment can be tried in metaphysics, as regards the intuition of objects. If intuition must conform to the constitution of the objects, I do not see how we could know anything of the latter a priori; but if the object (as object of the senses) must conform to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, I have no difficulty in conceiving such a possibility. In the pre-copernican cosmos, there was a feature of the world as it was purportedly known (the movement of the sun and the stars) that was in fact, as we have come to understand after Copernicus, a movement that properly belonged to ourselves in that we had been observing these from the earth. Copernicuss thought experiment had been to imagine the cosmos from some point other than that of his actual place on
earth, and from this point of view to imagine the earth as just another planet spinning on its own axis and orbiting a sun that was now taken to be at the focus of its orbit. From such an imaginative position one is able then to reflect on how things would look to observers located on such a hypothetically rotating earth and this leads to the realization that things would look just as they actually do look. Kant now projects this way of thinking from considerations of objects spatiotemporal properties to considerations of their possession of spatio-temporal form. The very possession of such form is now regarded as an the effect of the observers own movementthat is, as an effect of the observers own representing activityand not a function of how such objects actually are. 5 Next, in line with his representational dualism, Kant now conceives of the mind as contributing an independent level of form to its objectsconceptual form. The argument to the subjectivity of conceptual form is parallel to that concerning the objects intuitive form. Since I cannot rest in these intuitions if they are to become known, but must relate them as representations to something as their object, and determine this latter through them, either I must assume that the concepts, by means of which I obtain this determination, conform to the object, or else I assume that the objects, or what is the same thing, that the experience in which alone, as given objects, they can be known, conform to the concepts. In the former case, I am again in the same perplexity as to how I can know anything a priori in regard to the objects. In the latter case the outlook is more hopeful. For experience is itself a species of knowledge which involves understanding; and understanding has rules which I must presuppose as being in me prior to objects being given to me, and therefore as being a priori. They find expression in a priori concepts to which all objects of experience necessarily conform, and with which they must agree. The idea of an objects intuited spatio-temporal form is relatively straightforward. We think of physical objects as filling three-dimensional space and as thus having a shape, as having aspects which can be seen from different directions, and so on. The spatial form of an object then will just involve the characteristics of space that such shape and size are particular determinations ofits three dimensionality, for example. Kants account of the spatio-temporal features of objects may be in counter-intuitive, but what is being accounted for seems relatively unproblematic. But what does Kant have in mind with the idea of the conceptual form of an object? I suggest here that we are meant to think not of the form of an object as something perceived (and so as spatial and temporal), but rather as something judged, as, say, the constituent of some fact or state of affairs. This is an idea more familiar to modern philosophy from the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein who claimed that The possibility of its occurring, in a state of affairs is the form of an object, 6 a claim that I
5
This is explored in the Transcendental Aesthetic.
TLP 2.0141. A generally Kantian reading of Wittgensteins Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus was put forward by Erik Stenius (1960), but for an account of the parallel more like the one suggested here see Burri 2004.
6
am going to take as illuminating what Kant could possibly mean by the idea of an objects conceptual form. Early in the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein famously declared the world to be a totality of facts or states of affairs [Tatsachen], not a totality of objects [Dinge]. 7 A little reflection shows that facts are not simply equatable with what we typically think of as objects. Tomatoes are eaten, but facts about tomatoes are known or not known rather than eaten or not eaten. Tomatoes exist in space but facts about tomatoes exist in logical space. That is, while a tomato in a bowl of tomatoes has spatial relations to the tomatoes around it, facts about tomatoes, say the fact that tomatoes are fruit, stand in logical relationsthat is, relations to other facts. Thus from the fact that tomatoes are fruit I can deduce that tomatoes are parts of plants. If we think of the world as made up of what we know to be the case factsthen it is tempting to think of the world as what Wittgenstein described as the facts in logical space. 8 In order to pursue the consequences of thinking of the world in this way let us consider a contrast that has been invoked between the world and an environs. We think of cats and dogs as aware of objects in their vicinity and of events unfolding around themthat is, as aware of objects and events in their environs. 9 But it is difficult to think of non-human animals as having any kind of notion of what might go on in parts of the world outside that environs. The world of the non-human conscious agents, we might say, just is its environs, that is, that ego-centric space and time radiating out from them to some limiting horizon. It would seem to be the capacity for language that is crucial here. 10 Only beings with the capacity for language, it might be said, could have the concept of objects and events beyond the horizon of perceptual awareness because it is only by reasoning to such conceptions that we could extend the range of thought in this way and only language, it might be thought, could provide an agent with the means for such inferential reasoning. Thus, for example, humans can make inferences about parts of the world of which have no experience as when they infer what things might like at a sub-atomic level, or in some distant part of the universe on the basis of evidence to which they do have
7
1 The world is everything that is the case. 1.1 The world is the totality of facts [Tatsachen], not of things [Dinge]. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden,
8
The facts in logical space are the world . Ibid., 1.13. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 443-5. Ibid.
9
10
perceptual access. But the capacity for this type of reasoning does not simply extend knowledge from knowledge of the environs outward, since, as Copernicuss example shows, it can also lead us to reinterpret what we otherwise perceive of objects in the environs, in that it can introduce a distinction between an appearance (for example, the appearance that the sun moves) and an underlying reality (the reality that it is the earth that moves). It is when we conceive of what is known in such a way that supports this type of inference making, I suggest, that we conceive the world as a world of factsa fact-worldrather than a world of things. 11 My suggestion is that the Copernican turn thus seems to construe the world as a fact-world in contrast to which the Aristotelian cosmos appears to have features more like an environs than a world as such. In the cosmos, the knower by nature resides at the centre, the earth, from which the rest of the cosmos radiates out towards an absolute horizon, the outer zone of the stars. The Copernican reversal de-centres radically this environs, and so displaces the knower from his or her natural home as there no longer is a centre to the cosmos, nor an outer edge. There is now no longer a natural place from which things are to be viewed and experienced, and knowledge will now be conceived in ways in which the knower is understood as located nowhere in particular.12 This involves a reinterpretation of
From the relation of language to world follows its unique factualness (Sachlichkeit). It is matters of fact (Sachverhalte) that in various ways permits one to recognize it independent otherness, which presupposes a real distance between the speaker and the thing. Ibid. 445. In the Tractatus Logic-Philosophicus Wittgenstein had attempted to capture something of this point in the following way. 5.632 5.633 The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world. Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be noted?
12
11
You say that this case is altogether like that of the eye and the field of sight. But you do not really see the eye. And from nothing in the field of sight can be concluded that it is seen from an eye. However Wittgensteins parallel with the eye and the visual field is misleading in that it effectively conceives of the world as an environs [Umwelt] rather than a world [Welt]. Thomas Nagel captures the sense of alienation from the worldly self that is part of the quest for objectivity. I being by considering the world as a whole, as if from nowhere, and in those oceans of space and time TN is just one person among countless others. Taking up that impersonal standpoint produces in me a sense of complete detachment from TN, who is reduced to a momentary blip on the cosmic TV screen. The View from Nowhere, 61. As we
the type of transcendence that had in ancient philosophy been associated with knowledge. In Platos imagery, knowledge had been pictured as involving the flight of the soul from the earth into the heavens. It was knowledge that enabled one to escape from the precinct of finitude to the realm of the infinite and divine. The Copernican turn, however, abolishes this distinction between the earth and the heavens as a real distinction, by making the earth just another part of the heavens. From Kants Copernican point of view, we can understand ourselves as capable of this type of transcendence that is free from Platos imagined mental relocation, 13 and this has crucial consequences for the project of metaphysics. Traditionally, metaphysics has been concerned with the attempt to know something about objects independently of empirical experience. Thus Plato thought of the mind as being able to be raised to a type of intuition of a supersensible entity the idea or form of x (a bed, say)of which certain empirical objects (any actual empirical bed) were copies. In a variation of this, Aristotle thought of the things form as inseparable from the matter that it informed, and not as the occupant of some supersensible transcendent realm. (The only exception to this inseparability of the form was that it could come to exist in the mind of the knower of the thing.) But in both, the possibility of the apprehension of such a form gave a meaning to the idea of metaphysical knowledge. Such knowledge was fundamentally the apprehension of form. Kants Copernican account of conceptual form is directed against both of these way of conceiving of such a knowledge of forms: both the idea of a world of transcendent forms, and that of cognitively extractable forms from empirical objects, are for him consequences of the subreptive fallacy. We shouldnt think of forms as quasi-objects available to a type of non-sensory equivalent to sensory perception, the type of idea made obvious in Swedenborgs account of conversing with the dead. When we talk of a things form, we are talking about something that we have projected onto the object, just as, say, we project onto the sun, our own movement, when we pre-reflectively refer to the sun as rising or setting. Metaphysics is the a priori knowledge of objects and we can know a priori of things only what we ourselves put into them. Our interpretation so far goes largely along the lines in which Kants Copernican analogy is commonly taken. But I suggest that we are able to unpack the analogy in a way that separates Kants critical reflections on Aristotle
will later see, Nagels choice for the cover of his booka landscape by the German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich was most apt. Thus Gadamer points out: Animals can leave their environment and move over the whole earth without severing their environmental dependence. For man, however, rising above the environment means rising to world itself, to true environment. This does not mean that he leaves his habitat but that he has another posture toward ita free, distanced orientationthat is always realized in language. Ibid., 4445.
13
and Plato such that two distinct dimensions of Kants critical philosophy come into focus. The distinction will hang on two different ways in which concepts will be related to experience. 4.2 Kants Copernican reversal of Aristotles categories
Kants idea that we project a conceptual form onto perceivable objects, rather than divine any form that exists in them, fits with his reinterpretation in the text of the Critique of Pure Reason of Aristotles theory of the categories. In the work Categories, Aristotle attempted to list those basic features of objects that are reflected in the ways we talk about them. Reflecting on the idea that in making assertions we typically say something of, or predicate some characteristic or property of something, Aristotle attempted to capture the ways in which things must be such that we are able to do this. The independent things of which we can assert some characteristic of he called substances and distinguished the category of substance from the categories concerning possible ways such substances might be. In saying that Socrates is in the marketplace, then, I designate the substance Socrates, and say of Socrates, where he is, and Aristotle takes this verbal distinction to reflect an ontological distinction between the category of substance itself from the category of the being somewhere of such substances. In the Transcendental Analytic Kant provides his own account of the categories, but while Aristotle seemed to consider the categories as telling us something about things (primary substances) "in themselves", from Kants reversed Copernican point of view, these categories reflect the logical structure of our cognition of things. That is, while Aristotle thinks our talk reflects the form objects actually have, Kant thinks of the form as projected onto the objects in our judging of them. For the main, much of what Kant calls the Transcendental Analytic is concerned with this reversal of Aristotles approach to the categories. The basic idea seems to be that we bring the categorical structure of the understanding to the objects we perceive in the same way as we bring the pure intuitions of space and time to those objects. The focus here is on the form of objects that encounter and make judgments about in perceptual experience. In contrast, the metaphysician presupposed in the second half of the book, the Transcendental Dialectic is Plato, and there Kant is interested not in isolated judgments about perceptual objects, but in our capacity to reason inferentially. It is this more Platonic theme that seems linked to a further set of remarks regarding Copernicus which suggest an extension of the Copernican analogy beyond the range of the categories. In the third of a series of footnotes in which he attempts to spell out the parallels between his new approach to metaphysics and Copernicus's approach to cosmology, Kant points out that if Copernicus had not been able to adopt his new "point of view" (which takes the movement of the sun to be an illusion brought about by the movement of the earth), the subsequent discoveries of Galileo and Newton (the role of the force of gravity in explaining motion) in would not have been possible.
[T]he fundamental laws of the motions of the heavenly bodies gave established certainty to what Copernicus had at first assumed only as an hypothesis, and at the same time yielded proof of the invisible force (the Newtonian attraction) which holds the universe together. The latter would have remained for ever un-discovered if Copernicus had not dared, in a manner contradictory of the senses, but yet true, to seek the observed movements, not in the heavenly bodies, but in the spectator. Copernicuss move had broken the grip of the unreflectively ego-centric environing picture of the Ptolemaic cosmos, it had thereby undermined the idea of the segmenting of the cosmos into supra- and sub-lunar precincts. By rendering space as infinite and homogeneous, rather than as finite, ego-centric and stratified, Copernicus provided Galileo with the resources to take the next important step of unifying the mechanical principles explaining movement on earth and the circular movement of the planets, of which the earth itself now counted as one. In turn, Galileos advance enabled Newtons hypothesis of the force of gravity as the force which holds the universe together. In these footnotes Kant goes on to compare the method he employs in the Preface (but not in the text of the Critique of Pure Reason itself) to Copernicus's hypothetical adoption of the new point of view, 14 and I suggest that he conceives of his own metaphysical "hypothesis" as itself leading to a discovery similar to that of the post-Copernican discovery of the "invisible force which holds the universe together. What Kants hypothesis leads to, I suggest, is what he regards as the truth of Platos forms or ideas in that he comes to see Platos ideas play a role something like that played by gravity in "holding the universe together", but while Newtons forces hold the actual objects together, Platos ideas hold our representations of the universe together, because they are effectively what underlie our capacity to make inferences, and it is the capacity to reason inferentially that allows us to know the universe as a world of facts rather than as an assembly of environing objects and events. 4.3 Kants Copernican reversal of Platos Ideas: Some historians of the rise of the new worldview in the early modern period have pointed out the importance played by the renaissance revival of Platonism in the modern overcoming of the more traditionally Aristotelian cosmology of the middle ages. 15 The role of Plato in this type of revolution in thought is at least implicitly
The change in point of view, analogous to this hypothesis, which is expounded in the Critique, I put forward in this preface as an hypothesis only, in order to draw attention to the character of these first attempts at such a change, which are always hypothetical. But in the Critique itself it will be proved, apodeictically not hypothetically, from the nature of our representations of space and time and from the elementary concepts of the understanding. This thesis had been put forward by Ernst Cassirer (Renaissance Philosophy) who stressed the role of the 15th century neo-platonist German cardinal Nicholas of Cusa whose
15
14
present in Kants account. In the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant comments on Plato's notion of "idea": Plato made use of the expression 'idea' in such a way as quite evidently to have meant by it something which not only can never be borrowed from the senses but far surpasses even the concepts of understanding (with which Aristotle occupied himself), inasmuch as in experience nothing is ever to be met with that is coincident with it. For Plato ideas are archetypes of the things themselves, and not, in the manner of the categories, merely keys to possible experiences. In his view they have issued from highest reason, and from that source have come to be shared in by human reason, which, however, is now no longer in its original state, but is constrained laboriously to recall, by a process of reminiscence (which is named philosophy), the old ideas, now very much obscured. In the scientific extension of experience we go beyond knowledge of isolated individual things, and link up different areas of our experience in systematic ways, as did Galileo when he linked up the movement of objects on earth to the "eternal" circular movement of objects in the heavenstypes of movement that Aristotle thought was of a different kind. But as we have seen, this requires going beyond the immediate evidences of the senses, as Copernicus had done in reinterpreting the apparent movement of the sun around the earth. Elsewhere Kant appeals to a type of hypothetico-deductive reasoning in which one conjectures some hypothetical state of affairs as a possible explanation of some observable fact. What would count as possible explanation here is that from the hypothesized truth of the conjecture one could infer the truth of the perceived state of affairs, and here Kant relies on the types of syllogistic inferences of ancient logic to capture such reasoning. But Aristotles syllogistic was itself a form of reasoning which went together with a conception of things as organized into hierarchical patterns of natural kinds, a conception effectively derived from Platos top-down method of collection and division. In this way, then, the Platonic goal for a conception of the cosmos as a unified whole underlies this form of explanation. As Kant says of Plato early in the Transcendental Dialectic, only the whole of its combination in the totality of a world is fully adequate to its idea. 16 Plato had thought of his ideas as archetypes for things in themselves, but for Kant, Platos ideas are rightly understood as demands for the unification of the understanding, and so play for Kant a role analogous to the role played by Newtonian gravity cosmology by holding together the universe as it is known by us. I have suggested that it is from the vantage point of this type of inferential reasoning, that we will tend to think of the world as a totality of facts rather than of
theologically derived ideas on a homogeneous law-governed cosmos seemed to anticipate Copernicus and Galileo. The importance of Cusa has been stressed more recently by Hans Blumenberg and Karsten Harries.
16
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A318/B3745.
objects, but of course inferential reasoning itself seems to presuppose some very basic logical truths, such as the law of non-contradiction. We cannot reason in such a way that we end up holding inconsistent beliefs about the world, such as is found, say, in the conjunction of beliefs that Alan is taller than Mark, that Mark is taller than Alice, and that Alice is taller than Alan. That all our beliefs (in Kants language, our representations) are consistent seems to be the requirement that is implicit in the type of unification of belief that Kant relates to what he calls the transcendental unity of apperception. 17 This is the degree of logical coherence of facts that is demanded by the understanding and that characterises the relations between judgments considered from the point of view of the transcendental analytic. This degree of unity is the basic requirement of a world that sets it apart from what I have called an environs. But we generally conceive the world as we strive to know it as having a greater...