Topics Philosophers

Question Kant believed that Space and Time were synthetic a priori concepts that our mind imposes on experience. From this, he claimed that we can only know objects as they appeared to us, mainly as occuring in Space and Time. So, only phenomenon can be known, not the noumenon, or the thing-in-itself. My question is this: If Space, Time, and their product Causality, are concepts provided by the mind, and objects are independent of our existence (as Kant believed) then does this mean that reality is structured so the second it is perceived? Is the universe, then, chaotic the second we turn our backs to it? I basically wish to know if Kant addressed this consequence of his assertion--provided I have properly understood his assertion. I hope you can address my question for there is no one that I can ask in person, nor have I come across any mention of this problem from Kant's writings. Thank you in advance.

Accepted:
February 26, 2009

Comments

I think the short answer is that Kant's transcendental idealism and empirical realism does not imply the each of us "structures reality" at the very moment we perceive objects and events in the world because one part of what it means to assert the empirical reality of the spatial and temporal world we experience and within is that all of us live together in a single world whose existence and structure is not dependent on acts of our minds. This is part of what Kant has in mind when he argues that his transcendental idealism should not be interpreted as empirical idealism – he accepts empirical realism and argues that transcendental idealism is needed to explain how it is possible for us to experience the empirically real world.

To be sure, each of the Kantian claims and assertions that you discuss raises exegetical and philosophical puzzles and there are also interesting puzzles about how these various strands of Kant's thought fit together and about how Kant's thought on these topics changes over the course of his philosophical career. So, there are any number of good questions and concerns that you could raise either about what Kant really had in mind or about whether his views are correct. To my mind, however, none of those issues lead us toward the thesis about “structuring reality” that you describe in your question – although I would be able to say more if you had said more about why you think that Kant is committed to that view.

Finally, Kant does address one interesting question about “chaotic” nature, although his thought here is also notoriously hard to understand and assess. In the First Introduction to the Critique of Judgment Kant addresses the importance of the assumption that nature is uniform, and he discusses why we are justified to assume that this is the case. I think that one of the things Kant was concerned about nature becoming “chaotic” at a moment’s notice, and so this might be a good text for you to study. Alas, however, it is unclear exactly what Kant takes himself to justify, an in particular it is unclear whether he is attempting to defend the uniformity of nature as a regulative principle (for example, one that we need to make to provide us with motivation to continue scientific investigations of the world) or a constitutive one about the nature of the world.

Finally, I think your question rightly identifies a lacunae in Kant’s discussion of empirical reality in the Critique of Pure Reason: he doesn’t address issues related to the uniformity of nature there, and I believe that his account of the twinned doctrine of transcendental idealism and empirical realism isn’t complete until he does. So, I congratulate you for picking up on an issue that Kant came to appreciate as he continued to develop his critical system of philosophy!

Let me add a short note to Andrew's fine answer. Imagine thefollowing reasoning:

The mind 'imposes' space and time upon the empirical world. Theconcepts 'at the moment of' and 'before' have meaning only because ofthat imposing. Therefore, it makes no sense to ask what empiricalreality was before or at the moment of the mind's act. It makes nosense not because we cannot get back to that prior reality, butrather the question itself is meaningless.

Now, I agree with Andrew's assessment that Kant did not in factagree with the first statement above. Nevertheless, the conclusion tothe above bit of reasoning is still salient. Kant was interested indiscovering the transcendental conditions of any experience of ashared empirical reality. He was not interested in the empirical orpsychological 'mechanics' of the human mind such that it arrives asperceptions (as were, arguably at least, his great predecessorsHobbes, Locke and Hume).