A Categorically Imperative Sidestep

 

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), to whom I’ve referred before, is one of the greatest and most important philosophers of all time. I mean, this guy was crazy-smart!

 

Now, not every philosopher agrees with Kant, but almost all historians of philosophy regard this German professor’s thoughts and writings as a major turning point in the history of Western thought. Kant’s greatest contribution was (arguably) in the realm of epistemology. This branch of philosophy deals with the "theory of knowledge" - that is, it is concerned with what, if anything we can actually know, as well as how we can know it. (How do you know what you know, you know?)

 

In Kant’s massive and ground-shifting work, A Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he set out to explain the relations and limitations of reason and knowledge itself. In what was perhaps the most thorough critical examination of the process of human cognition ever attempted, Kant came up with some radically new and different ways of looking at what we call "knowledge," all of which had an enormous impact, both on our theories of science, as well as our understanding of metaphysics, or "speculative philosophy." His ideas are often referred to as "a Copernican revolution" in philosophy, and his influence in modern thought is felt almost everywhere - even where his methods and conclusions are still in question.

 

Now, this is not the time to embark on a thorough review of Kant’s philosophical analysis - though if I live long enough, I thoroughly intend to do just that sometime in the future. But I believe that in order to help us more clearly understand some of the earlier speculations in the history of philosophy, some basic principles derived from Kant can help us to keep from becoming too confused in our thinking.

 

Without going too deep into Kant’s reasoning process (which is very deep indeed), I believe that one of his most helpful concepts is his separation of reality into two different realms: the "phenomenal world" and the "noumenal world." Just what did Kant mean by the concept of the "Noumenon"? Well, to make it easy, let’s just look it up in Wikipedia see what it says there:

 

Noumenon

The noumenon is a posited object or event that is known (if at all) without the use of the senses.

 

How do you like that, folks? Pretty straightforward and simple if you ask me.

 

Or is it?

 

Now, what?

 

It is . . . an object or event . . . that is known . . . without the use of the senses.

 

Like what?

 

Angels?

 

Nah, we can’t know there are angels. In fact, I’m pretty sure there aren’t any - I mean not really.

 

But what if there are something like angels?

 

Fine, but we can’t know what they are, can we?

 

Well, then . . . what about . . . justice?

 

Oh, shut up, Socrates! We’ve still got the pre-Socratics to get through!

 

Maybe it would be helpful if we read a little further . . .

 

The term is generally used in contrast with, or in relation to "phenomenon", which refers to anything that appears to, or is an object of, the senses.

 

Okay, that puts everything in a little bit clearer perspective, doesn’t it? "Phenomenon" refers to anything that we can perceive with our senses. If we can see, hear, smell, taste or touch it, then it’s a "phenomenon". Right? Right.

 

So all the things, people and places that appear to us in our physical world are phenomena, right? Absolutely. If we can sense it, it’s a phenomenon. Birds, dogs, trees, televisions, tits, fudge, packing crates, elevators, oil derricks, pantomimists (but not what they’re holding), etc., etc., are all phenomena. It’s everywhere we look. Everything we see is phenomena. Everything we hear. Everything we taste. (Okay, you get the drill.)

 

So if phenomenon is something we can sense, then what is noumenon? Obviously, it’s something that we can’t sense. Like what?

 

Okay, I’ve got two big ones right away. What are two things that we all believe are everywhere, all the time, but we can’t see, hear, or feel them, etc.? Come on, it’s not that hard. When I tell you, you’re really going to feel silly. You ready? You sure? Okay. Here they come . . .

 

Time and space.

 

What?

 

Think about it! We can’t see time. Well, okay, we watch things happening, we listen to music. We go to work. All these things take time, right. So we observe time, literally, all the time, right?

 

Nope. Never. We can see the movement, we can hear the music, we can spend the day at work. But we’re never, ever going to observe, in any way, shape or form, time itself.

 

Why is that? I don’t know. It’s pretty weird. What the hell is time, anyway?

 

Okay, let’s leave that alone for now and let it sink in. Maybe time is something special, something unique - something that we can’t directly observe.

 

But space? Space is everywhere! We can see space everywhere we look. We feel it wherever we go. I can jump up and down in it. Surely we can observe space?

 

Nope again. We can see things in space. We can move around in space. But we can’t perceive space itself with our senses. Just try it. Uh-huh. Told you so.

 

So just what the hell are time and space? If we can’t perceive them, are they really real?

 

I’m not going to tell you yet.

 

Actually, I’m not going to tell you, ever. And the reason is that - I don’t know!

 

We can’t know. And why is that?

 

Because we can’t perceive them with our senses, silly.

 

You see, Kant sat down and thought long and hard about such fundamental concepts as time and space, and he realized that he had a real problem on his hands. Not only had philosophers speculated for centuries about "absolute" concepts like God, the nature of being, eternity and transcendence, but they had all disagreed and broken up into warring camps. Every time a philosopher seemed to have a really good argument about any of these things, it seemed that some other philosopher would jump up and give equally good reasons why he was wrong and that reality was fundamentally different from what people generally thought.

 

Philosophy seemed to be getting nowhere - and it was taking its own long, sweet time about doing it as well. Meanwhile, the relatively new intellectual project called "empirical science" seemed to be growing by leaps and bounds.

 

The older philosophers believed that the senses couldn’t be trusted. The only thing that these traditional philosophers believed in, going back at least to Plato among the ancient Greeks, was in the conclusions of "pure reason." It was obvious that we couldn’t know "ultimate reality" by just looking around us. But if you could prove something using the methods of pure deductive reasoning, then you really had something!

 

The problem was, philosophers kept right on philosophizing this way, using "pure reason" to get at the truth. Only they all seemed to come up with different answers that contradicted one another. Was there something inherently wrong with the way that philosophers went about conducting their business?

 

Well, by Kant’s day, there was a whole new breed of philosophers - mostly from England (yes, the land of Francis Bacon) - who decided that trying to figure out reality by deducting from pure reason wouldn’t get you anywhere. The only way you could actually find out something was to actually "look at it" - that is perceive it, in some way or another. This new group of philosophers called themselves "empiricists" because they believed that the only way knowledge could be attained was through the use of the senses.

 

Well, this new approach went pretty well, to say the least. And when the advocates of "empiricism" started applying their ideas to the world of physical science, they got big results. Finally, this whole movement seemed to reach a peak by 1687, with Isaac Newton’s publishing of his groundbreaking, all-encompassing Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica ("Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy").

 

Everything was moving along quite nicely there for awhile, but suddenly someone dropped a huge turd into the punchbowl. In 1739, a Scottish philosopher named David Hume (1711-1776) published a little book called A Treatise of Human Nature. In it, Hume argued not only that we did not have any innate ideas that could allow us to reason about reality in general. We couldn’t even be sure of all of the basic assumptions that we carried around us that made empirical science - and even simple "common sense life" - possible.

 

 

All we have are sensory perceptions, Hume argued. That’s the only place we get knowledge. And if we look hard and square at ourselves, we had to admit that all that we really knew was that even we, ourselves, were just big bundles of perceptions. What gave us the right to assume that we were subjective beings, let alone "souls"?

 

Hume really hammered after it. Two of the really big assumptions that took it on the chin from him were the ideas of "induction" and "causation." Now, you’ve got to have those two things working for you if you’re going to have any sort of knowledge at all. But let’s take a look at them a little more closely.

 

"Induction" is the kind of reasoning upon which science (and common sense) is really based. It is the name for the process by which we observe particular things around us, and go on to make more general conclusions about those things and other things. Now, in order for induction to work, we have to be sure that everything in nature is going to go on consistently behaving like it always has. But, since it was quite conceivable that nature could change tomorrow, we really didn’t have any proof. Of course we could say it was more likely that it would continue to be consistent, but just on what exactly were we basing that presumption? That it always has in the past? Well, that’s the very thing that we were trying to prove - hence, we were arguing in a circle. Induction really couldn’t be justified.

 

Closely connected to the idea of induction was the idea of "causation." Now, we are in the habit of saying that we see one thing "cause" another, and while that may be a reasonable enough assumption, the fact remains that we don’t really see any causes at all. We see one thing happen, and then we see another thing happen. We just assume that the first thing causes the second. All we really see are sequences.

 

Now of course, David Hume was no idiot. He wasn’t seriously arguing that there isn’t such a thing as cause-and-effect, nor was he arguing that we couldn’t reasonably predict the future based on the past. He was merely pointing out that our capacity for real knowledge was severely limited. If we couldn’t even be absolutely certain about about inductive reasoning and causation, how on earth did we think we could construct grand metaphysical systems that actually proved anything about ultimate reality? Hume argued that we should forget about all that kind of speculation and stick to what our senses can tell us about the world.

 

When Immanuel Kant, being a German philosopher in the rationalistic tradition, read Hume’s critique on knowledge, he announced that "the scales had fallen from [his] eyes." Kant realized the devastating implications of Hume’s radical skepticism and took him quite seriously. After all, if we cannot be certain even about our most basic assumptions concerning the world around us, how could we possibly possess any true knowledge of things that transcended our observation?

 

After thinking over Hume’s objections long and hard, Kant finally had a breakthrough idea. What if, along with the capacity to receive sensations, our minds had a built-in way of organizing those sensations? Kant finally came to the conclusion that Hume hadn’t been looking at perception on a deep enough level. Sensations not only came to us through our senses, but they were filtered through the structure of our minds themselves! Induction and causation weren’t things that we observed - they were how we observed and the way we understood reality itself. Likewise, we didn’t see space and time. We experienced everything in space and time. All of those notions were already in our heads before we ever got any sensations whatsoever!

Kant called these built-in ways of understanding "categories of thought, and he argued that they were a kind of "a priori knowledge" - that is, they were a kind of knowledge that was hard-wired right into our brains themselves. The more Kant analyzed the way that we perceived, thought and reasoned, the more convinced he became that these a priori categories of knowledge had to be there, working all the time. Otherwise, there would be no explanation for how we could know or understand anything!

 

This created a little bit of a problem, though. Since everything we knew about the so-called world around us were actually sensations that were filtered through conceptual principles that were in our brains themselves, how could we know that what we saw and thought corresponded to the world outside of us?

 

Kant’s answer?

 

We couldn’t. Period.

 

What?

 

Here we go.

 

According to Kant, the only world of information to which we have any actual access whatsoever is "the phenomenal world." That is, the world of phenomena that we perceive with our senses and analyze with our innate categories of understanding.

 

As for the world beyond "the phenomenal world" - the so-called "noumenal world" - well, we had no access to it!

 

Kant referred to the "noumenal world" as "the thing-in-itself." That is, whatever is was, in real reality, in all its glory, as it actually is. We can’t get to that. Only a hypothetical "mind of God" could reach there. As for us, we’re stuck right where we always have been - in the "phenomenal world."

 

Now, did Kant mean to imply that the "phenomenal world" - everything we sensed and understood - only existed inside our heads?!!

 

Nein!!!

 

Okay, hold on. I’m going to try to explain this as best as I think I understand it.

 

Kant reasoned that it was a rational assumption that there were actual objects that existed in the world external to us, and those things were were the things that we were perceiving. And not only that, but those things probably actually existed - at least to some degree - in the way we perceived and understood them.

 

But that’s all we could say about them. What they were really like, what their ultimate nature or reality was in all of its glory, we would never be able to know. We couldn’t know "things-in-themselves". They were noumena. And noumena was off-limits for limited human beings, with their limited capacities of perception and categories of understanding. We were stuck in the "phenomenal world," and we had to be satisfied with that!

 

As far as Kant was concerned, however, that really wasn’t that bad of a thing. Actually, he was quite relieved. And this was because he believed that his theories about a priori categories of thought had "saved" both the physical sciences, as well as ordinary, everyday thought from the extraordinary challenges that had been hurled at them by David Hume. Those really were some quite serious problems that Hume had brought up, and whether one agrees with Kant or not about his solutions (philosophers, as always, are divided in their opinions), I think you’ve got to admit that his system was a pretty thorough and brilliant response. So if we agreed with him, we could go on quite confidently in our assumption that we could at least know the "phenomenal world."

 

But what about speculative philosophy? What about metaphysics? What about all those "ultimate" questions that we all really want to know, like the existence of God, the nature of Being, the problem of free will, eternity, infinity, and (like we were thinking about before), absolute unity?

 

We couldn’t know shit.

 

That stuff - if it existed at all - was all in the noumenal world.

 

And we couldn’t get in there!

 

In the conclusion to his fantastic little book, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), which Kant wrote (thankfully) since his Critique of Pure Reason was too long and complicated for us ordinary folks, he points out some neat little observations about human reason. You see, according to Kant, reason has its limitations, or as he liked to say, it was bounded. Human reason was constructed in such a way that it could comprehend "phenomena." But the human mind didn’t know when to quit. So it kept on trying to comprehend "noumena" without realizing that it was impossible. Philosophers had just been chewing on air, so to speak, for hundreds of years. The "ultimate" questions of metaphysics are simply out of our reach - there’s no way we can actually "know" them, because we can’t see or touch them - they’re cut off from us.

 

We’re in the dark.

 

But, wait, Kant said. That’s not so bad. By the very fact that we recognize that there is a boundary to our knowledge, it is perfectly rational to go ahead and assume that there really is something beyond that boundary! Just like we couldn’t have access to "things-in-themselves" but we could reasonably assume they were there, giving us our sensations, we could likewise very well assume that there could be something very much like a Supreme Being. We just couldn’t know if it were true or not.

 

So there. That just about wraps it up for speculative philosophy, doesn’t it?

 

Well, yes and no. With Kant’s "boundary" on pure reason, it is true that we can’t reach any absolute answers about "ultimate reality" like Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, and so many others had attempted to do. (So it was no surprise that all these great minds had come to different conclusions.) But it doesn’t mean we still can’t think about them.

 

What did Kant mean? Well, what he maintains in his book, is that we can still reason analogically about such matters. We can be rational and logical in thinking in terms of relationships of such ultimate terms as "God" to ourselves and the world - we just couldn’t prove that such a term like that actually existed or what it was really like.

 

And whether you want to go along with Kant’s entire philosophical structure or not, I still think he has a very valid point. We can sit and conceptualize and theorize about these "ultimate questions." We can even clearly rationalize about them analogically - in a kind of "what if" way. We just can’t ever completely know whether we’re right or not. We may think we are getting closer to the truth (and who knows, we might?). But we’re never going to know if we’ve got the right answer.

 

And in the last analysis, we have to be satisfied with that.

 

Ah, that’s not so bad, is it?

 

Like I said before, we would have to have the mind of God to actually understand and know all of ultimate reality. And I’m not sure how smart we really are, but one thing’s for sure: God we ain’t!

 

So now that we’ve taken this little detour to try to get our bearings - to find out just what we can know and what we can’t - we can go back to thinking about the Pre-Socratics and monism, and even pantheism and all kinds of fun things without losing our minds trying to figure out who’s right and who’s wrong.

 

‘Cause if Kant’s right - and I think he just might be - we ain’t never gonna know for sure!

 

NEXT: Back to monism, unity, pantheism, and all sorts of fascinating stuff!

 

- petey