In Pursuit of the Object: Kant's Thinking in Development

by Philip McPherson Rudisill

This essay is directed toward an understanding of the later, moral writings of Kant. A thorough grasp of the context of these, and especially that of the Critique of Practical Reason (Kant's primary work on morals), requires an understanding of his work on nature. Therefore we must begin with a review of Pure Reason.

We know (from Pure Reason) that the objects which appear to us are, subjectively and transcendentally speaking, really no more than figments of our imagination, but which we necessarily conceive in order that the specters of our vision can be relegated to images of objects instead of remaining as objects on their own. In other words, in order that the table which Hume reported getting larger and smaller in tandem with his perspective of that table, in order that this table not really get larger and smaller on its own but only appear to, it was necessary that Hume (see Circles in the Air) conceive of an object called table and which was so conceived that it remained the same size and was merely sighted in time and space so that its appearance changed, but not the table itself. This understanding, we shall now discover, was not possible in any of the other approaches to knowledge, namely the traditional ones of empiricism and rationalism.

Kant early on rejected empiricism and opted for what he (and all the world with him) considered to be the only alternative, namely rationalism. His complaint of empiricism was the general, rational complaint (just expressed), namely via empiricism we cannot tell an illusion from reality, e.g., we cannot tell that a table does not change its shape and size as we change our perspective to it.*

[* In the closing portion of his masterpiece on Human Understanding (Section 118**), David Hume, the foremost empiricists, admits to an utter defeat in accounting for the independence and uniformity of his table, although he knows that the table itself does not change size and shape.]

[** See section 118 here. Use back button to return.]

In the rationalist system, Kant was able to find a concept of the table which humans then merely identify in and amongst the plethora of sensual data, and therefore we are able to account for our own role as viewers and see that the table does not actually change size and shape at all, but merely appears to because we are viewing it from a particular perspective and viewing point. This seemed at first glance a very easy victory over the empiricists. The story went in this way: we are endowed at (or by the time of our) birth with a knowledge of all possible objects, e.g., tables, and we simply find a correspondence to this knowledge (in the form of a concept) in our sightings, and our only difficulty is in discerning the coding system of the culture in which we are raised, e.g., that the sound "table" refers to this and the sound "me" refers to that and the sound "white" refers to that, etc. In other words we are fully aware of all that is about us, but we are confused at first and must sort out the coding and language system. And thusly does it appear that we are learning as the empiricists thought and asserted, but that is merely due to a confusion as to what we are about. We are figuring out the language.

But despite this apparent superiority of rationalism over empiricism, Kant soon became disenchanted with rationalism also due to a serious flaw he discovered with it, an internal inconsistency. The only reality for the rationalist is that of objects, and so space and time, since they are not really objects at all, have no reality and are merely a subjectively seated consideration of the relationships among objects. Remove the objects and you remove all space and time, and remove the vagueness in our cognitions and you also eliminate all need for any reference to space and time.*

[* We say "that fellow over there" until we learn that his name is Bill, whereupon we begin speaking of "Bill" and whereupon the phrase "over there" is dropped. This elimination of the phrases would eventually eliminate all references to space (as it would also to time).]

Now Kant realized that the left and right hands could be adequately identified and distinguished by means of feelings (the muscle movements and the nerve endings) and other marks associated with each of the hands. And this would mean that there would be no reason to look further for spatial and temporal aspects, for the objects, the left and right hands, would have been entirely distinguished and no more is required. But we go further, Kant noticed, and find a difference which is not intellectual at all, but entirely spatial, namely the fact that the two hands are incongruent counterparts, i.e., the description of one also describes the other, and yet they still are different, but the difference is entirely spatial and requires a space which is independent of the object.* But this is contrary to the essential hypothesis of the rationalist regarding space (as just cited above), and so rationalism must also fall.

[* The difference, simply stated, is the inability of the left glove to fit the right hand, even though the left and right gloves are the identical shape and identical size. And again the point being that since time and space are not real and merely short-hand references to realities (true differences) until the realities are made plain, and since the left and right hand are adequately distinguished without spatial references, it follows that the one that that we would never have discovered per the rationalist system is the reality of the incongruent counterparts, i.e., that the left and right hands (assuming a perfect match) are described by the same drawing rule, e.g.,draw a thumb, and next to the thumb draw an index finger, etc.; but we obviously do discover this difference, and so we see that rationalism is a failure.]

But empiricism is no better, having been rejected earlier for very good reasons, and therefore is not the "natural" alternative which would have been expected earlier.

The upshot was a new and quite ingenious approach, a middle way, that Kant called the Inaugural Dissertation.*

[* so called for it represented a demonstration of his competency upon his elevation to professorship at the university in his hometown of Königsberg.]

In the Inaugural Dissertation Kant has us sighting objects in space and time and realizing that they (the sighted objects) are tempered by these spatial and temporal sightings and that we therefore are not seeing objects as things on their own, but merely as appearances of objects. The space and time that we see them in are actually creatures of our own imagination, i.e., we do in fact position objects in space and time and then we subsequently become aware of this our own mental activity in doing this, e.g., that is A over there and B over here and C over there. The same thing held of time: we saw A earlier and now we see it again, and so the difference is time and that is our way of looking at things (and if we did not have this subjectively seated capacity for noticing time [and space] the notion of time [and space] would never rise to consciousness nor enter into our knowledge of things).

Now the work of the intellect comes in in the connection of these objects in a single system of interactive objects. Therefore, essentially, we spy objects in time and space and then justify their behavior in that time and space by reference to other objects, all such that they can be derived from a single system called: the world.

Essentially then Kant has objects sighted by the senses and in accordance with the formal conditions of sighting, namely time and space, and then considering the objects as things on their own via the laws of the intellect. These laws are applied automatically to find groupings, and are abstracted from this usage and brought to light as pure laws of the intellect.*

[* In other words, and as a restatement: in the Dissertation Kant has us actually sighting objects, but only as phenomena, i.e., as objects in space and time. This means that we basically solved Hume's difficult with regard to the changing size and shape of the table by intuition, i.e., we know that his table is in time and space and that we are seeing merely a phenomenon. Then we continue and bind Hume's table and other objects (as phenomena) into a single whole called a world by means of the laws of the intellect, whereby we are able to deal with objects as they really are, and not be imposed upon by the phenomena which is merely the way that objects appear to us.]

Almost immediately upon the publication of this dissertation, Kant recalled Hume's attack on rationalism. He had thought to have dismissed Hume earlier when he turned to rationalism, and then again when his dissertation took care of the problems of rationalism and empiricism together. But how Hume rises to haunt Kant anew. For Hume questions the very premise of Kant's system, namely that the intellect's laws are applicable to the objects of sense. Therefore the question of this connection arises: how is it possible that laws which the intellect dreams up can hold for objects of senses, which are of an entirely different species?

In the rational sphere this was easy, for the intellect and the objects of the senses were all the creations of God who saw to this unity, and whose mind was actually the source of the laws and thus which utilized these laws in the formation and creation of the objects which were called sensitive. But Kant lost this advantage when he rejected rationalism, and now he was floating without a rudder and even without direction.

Kant's intellectual salvation came when he realized first of all that arithmetic proceeds in a synthetic way, e.g., that while 12 can be dissected into 7 and 5, 7 and 5 do not logically lead to 12, and the discovery that 7 and 5 do in fact render 12 required a pure envisagement in assistance, a pure sighting in the space and time that Kant had already isolated in the Dissertation. But then, and this was the second realization, actually the objects of the senses were themselves composites just like 12, e.g., the face was a composite of other objects, e.g., the nose and eyes, etc., all of which were distinct enough on their own.* But then we put these together, first in a sighting, a mere envisagement, and then we bind them together into an object by means of a concept which we dream up for that very purpose. Once done we recognize the objet, the face, and see that it is independent of our looking, i.e., we see that it is a thing on its own (empirically speaking), and that it was only just now recognized by us.

[* Kant realized, perhaps in a stroke of sudden genius, that it was unnecessary to see objects like faces in order to negotiate oneself about in the world (as the animals do). It was sufficient to look at the elements making up the face in the same way that Leibniz conceived of objects, namely as a grouping of independent objects which moved in tandem due to some internal drive which was coordinated by God (which reason, of course, was not necessary to notice to pattern of proximity), much as schools of fish and flocks of migrating birds and heaps of ants are found to function almost as a single entity, respectively. Thus the sighting of a face was synthetic, and the recognition of a face was synthetic, and would arise with the certitude that we have in the same way that the certitude of the unique status of numbers, namely that 7 and 5 necessarily render a 12 while a top and a leg to not similarly render a table, even though they, the top and the leg, are as much a part of a table as 7 and a 5 are of a 12, i.e., given a table we have a top and one or more legs.]

In this way Kant answered Hume's complaint, for the fact was that the very objects that Hume learned from in experience were actually synthetic composites assembled by the envisagement/sighting (intuitively, without recourse to reason and the intellect) and bound via the categories of pure thought, and then so assembled into a system, called nature, such that the object and its behavior might be derived from that nature, e.g., the reason that the table looks smaller is because you are looking at it from a distance and the angle of viewing becomes smaller and therefore, etc.

It will worthwhile to pause for a moment and consider Kant's solution a bit more closely: if 7 and 5 led to 12 logically, then when I have a seven I also have a 5 (as a part of the seven), and therefore I have a 12. But this is obviously flawed (although the flaw is not discernible via the intellect alone).*And when I have a top and a leg, I do not necessary have a table, for I may have merely the parts to a table, and even then they may not be parts that fit together, i.e., a top to one table and a leg to another. Thus a sighting is required to put this all together, but that sighting cannot be empirical, for else there is always the possibility of a variation, i.e., we could only speak about what we had thus far encountered; the sighting must be pure, and this is given in space in the same way that the pointing of the finger is distinguished form the finger itself (for otherwise a pointing finger and a shown finger are identical in appearance), and in the same way that a pantomimic circle is sighted.

[* And even here the logic does not follow that if I have a 7 of something and a 5 of that same thing that I have 12 of that, and the blind, unused to this question, will reply with only a guess when they are asked if having a 7 and a 5 means having a 12.]

Now we are finished with Kant's system of the knowledge of objects, and have provided an explanation of experience which is consistent with our knowledge of mathematics. But a problem arises immediately with regard to moral thinking, for all moral discussions are predicated upon the fact of freedom, and it is precisely freedom that is abolished in Kant's system of nature, for it is only via the necessitations of all specters (retinal objects and sensual objects in general, like hearing and touch, etc.) that we are able to come to the knowledge of any connection (the details of this are given in Kant's infamous Transcendental Deduction of the Categories of the Critique of Pure Reason, and which is the subject of the essay on Circles in the Air on this home page). The solution to this problem is given in the Dialectic of Pure Reason and in the so-called Third Antinomy, where a reconciliation is found for the necessity of nature and the freedom of morals.

The upshot of the reconciliation is that the objects which we conceive to exist such that what we spy before us is the specter or appearance of them, these objects, since they are our own conception, we are now free to think in other ways than the way necessary for experience, at least as long as we do not think them in ways which are contrary to experience or the conditions leading to experience. For example, while a leaf is seen to be blown off the tree by the wind and constitutes an integral part of our experience with objects of the world, we are also free, if we want to, to say that the leaf did not have to be blown off, but chose freely to let go and to float down via the wind (and that the wind,too, for that matter, also happened to choose to blow, etc.)*

[* This is actually Leibniz all over again; for in his conception of the world, all things were independent of each other and harmonized entirely by virtue of the act of God in creating them all for a single world, where each reflected in the others mutually, but without actually influencing any physically. Therefore, for example, if God were to miraculously annihilate me, he would also independently have to annihilate my shadow.]

Now while there is no reason to consider leaves with this sort of freedom (although it may be appropriate for children's' books and fairy tales), there is some reason to think that humans might have this capacity, i.e., a capacity to conceive of principles of actions and to act in accordance with them. If so there is still no conflict with experience, for the same necessitation of our behavior as humans in the realm of experience can be conceived as free in the realm of freedom. And the acceptance of the principle of actions, of which each adult can be conscious, is acceptable to the behavioral scientist as long as heshe is able to explain how it is that we might take these principles of actions as principles for our own behavior, e.g., that our parents would be pleased, and some such. Therefore there is no problem at all with science, and the door is open to a consideration of morals as a possible reality.

And it is on this note that we can now turn to an examination of the moral writings of Kant, beginning with the Foundational Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals and from there going into a consideration of a primary work, namely: the Critique of Practical Reason.