Kant: Experience and Reality Analogies of Experience

Kant: Experience and Reality
Analogies of Experience
So Kant maintained that we are justified in applying the concepts of
the understanding to the world as we know it by making a priori
determinations of the nature of any possible experience. In order to
see how this works in greater detail, let's concentrate on the
concepts of relation, which govern how we understand the world in
time. As applied in the Analogies of Experience, each concept of
relation establishes one of the preconditions of experience under
one of the modes of time: duration, succession, and simultaneity.
1. Substance: The experience of any change requires not only the
perception of the altered qualities that constitute the change but
also the concept of an underlying substance which persists through
this alteration. (E.g., in order to know by experience that the
classroom wall has changed in color from blue to yellow, I must not
only perceive the different colorsblue then, yellow nowbut also
suppose that the wall itself has endured from then until now.) Thus,
Kant supposed that the philosophical concept of substance
(reflected in the scientific assumption of an external world of
material objects) is an a priori condition for our experience.
2. Cause: What is more, the experience of events requires not only
awareness of their intrinsic features but also that they be regarded
as occurring one after another, in an invariable regularity
determined by the concept of causality. (E.g., in order to experience
the flowering of this azalea as an event, I must not only perceive the
blossoms as they now appear but must also regard them as merely
the present consequence of a succession of prior organic
developments.) Thus, Kant responded to Hume's skepticism by
maintaining that the concept of cause is one of the synthetic
conditions we determine for ourselves prior to all experience.
3. Community: Finally, the experience of a world of coexisting
things requires not only the experiences of each individually but also
the presumption of their mutual interaction. (E.g., in order believe
that the Sun, Earth, and Moon coexist in a common solar system, I
must not only make some estimate of the mass of each but must
also take into account the reciprocity of the gravitational forces
between them.) Thus, on Kant's view, the notion of the natural world
as a closed system of reciprocal forces is another a priori condition
for the intelligibility of experience.
Notice again that these features of nature are not generalized from
anything we have already experienced; they are regulative
principles that we impose in advance on everything we can
experience. We are justified in doing so, Kant believed, because only
the pure concepts of the understanding can provide the required
connections to establish synthetic a priori judgments. Unless these
concepts are systematically applied to the sensory manifold, the
unity of apperception cannot be achieved, and no experience can be
made intelligible.
Phenomena and Noumena

Having seen Kant's transcendental deduction of the categories as
pure concepts of the understanding applicable a priori to every
possible experience, we might naturally wish to ask the further
question whether these regulative principles are really true. Are
there substances? Does every event have a cause? Do all things
interact? Given that we must suppose them in order to have any
experience, do they obtain in the world itself? To these further
questions, Kant firmly refused to offer any answer.
According to Kant, it is vital always to distinguish between the
distinct realms of phenomena and noumena. Phenomena are the
appearances, which constitute the our experience; noumena are
the (presumed) things themselves, which constitute reality. All of our
synthetic a priori judgments apply only to the phenomenal realm,
not the noumenal. (It is only at this level, with respect to what we
can experience, that we are justified in imposing the structure of our
concepts onto the objects of our knowledge.) Since the thing in itself
(Ding an sich) would by definition be entirely independent of our
experience of it, we are utterly ignorant of the noumenal realm.
Thus, on Kant's view, the most fundamental laws of nature, like the
truths of mathematics, are knowable precisely because they make
no effort to describe the world as it really is but rather prescribe the
structure of the world as we experience it. By applying the pure
forms of sensible intuition and the pure concepts of the
understanding, we achieve a systematic view of the phenomenal
realm but learn nothing of the noumenal realm. Math and science
are certainly true of the phenomena; only metaphysics claims to
instruct us about the noumena.
The Aim of Metaphysics
Although our knowledge of mathematics and natural science yield
easily to a Kantian analysis, the synthetic a priori judgments of
metaphysics are much more difficult to explain. Here the forms of
intuition and concepts of understanding are useless, since they find
application only in the realm of our experience, while metaphysics
seeks to transcend experience completely, in order to discover the
nature of reality itself as comprehended under pure reason.
Metaphysical speculation properly begins with the same method as
the "Aesthetic" and "Analytic," Kant supposed, but it invariably ends
up in a "Dialectic." The transcendental arguments we employ in
metaphysics need not restrict their determination to the
phenomenal realm alone, since their aim is genuine knowledge of
the noumena. Synthetic a priori judgments in metaphysics must be
grounded upon truly transcendental ideas, which are regarded as
applicable to things in themselves independently of our experience
of them.
Transcendental Ideas
Kant's exposition of the transcendental ideas begins once again
from the logical distinction among categorical, hypothetical, and

disjunctive syllogisms. From this distinction, as we have seen, the
understanding derives the concepts of substance, cause, and
community, which provide the basis for rules that obtain as natural
laws within our experience. Now, from the same distinction, the
reason must carry things further in order derive the transcendental
ideas of the complete subject, the complete series of conditions,
and the complete complex of what is possible. Thus, the
"completion" of metaphysical reasoning requires transcendental
ideas of three sorts, but Kant argued that each leads to its
characteristic irresolvable difficulty.
The Psychological Idea is the concept of the soul as a permanent
substance which lives forever. It is entirely natural to reason (as in
Descartes's cogito) from knowledge that "I think" to my real
existence as one and the same thinking thing through all time, but
Kant held that our efforts to reach such conclusions are
"Paralogisms," with only illusory validity. It is true that thought
presupposes the unity of apperception and that every change
presupposes an underlying substance, but these rules apply only to
the phenomena we experience. Since substantial unity and
immortality are supposed to be noumenal features of the soul as a
thing in itself, Kant held, legitimate a priori judgments can never
prove them, and the effort to transcend in this case fails.
The Cosmological Idea is the concept of a complete determination
of the nature of the world as it must be constituted in itself. In this
case, Kant held, the difficulty is not that we can conclude too little
but rather that we can prove too much. From the structure of our
experience of the world, it is easy to deduce contradictory particular
claims about reality: finitude vs. infinity; simplicity vs. complexity;
freedom vs. determinism; necessity vs. contingency. These
"Antinomies" of Pure Reason can be avoided only when we
recognize that one or both of the contradictory proofs in each
antinomy holds only for the phenomenal realm. Once again, it is the
effort to achieve transcendental knowledge of noumena that
necessarily fails.
The Theological Idea is the concept of an absolutely perfect and
most real being (or god). Again it is natural to move from our
recognition of dependence within the phenomenal realm to the
notion of a perfectly independent noumenal being, the
"Transcendental Ideal." But traditional attempts to prove that god
really exists, founded as they are on what we experience, cannot
establish the reality of a being necessarily beyond all experience.
The general point of the Transcendental Dialectic should by now be
clear: metaphysical speculation about the ultimate nature of reality
invariably fails. The synthetic a priori judgments which properly
serve as regulative principles governing our experience can never
be shown to have any force as constitutive of the real nature of the
world. Pure reason inevitably reaches for what it cannot grasp.
The Limits of Reason

Now that we've seen Kant's answers to all three parts of the
Prolegomena's "Main Transcendental Question" and have traced
their sources in the Critique of Pure Reason, we are in a position to
appreciate his careful delineation of what is possible in metaphysical
thought and what is not.
What most clearly is not possible is any legitimate synthetic a priori
judgment about things in themselves. The only thing that justifies
the application of regulative principles in mathematics and natural
science is their limitation to phenomena. Both sensible intuition and
the understanding deal with the conditions under which experience
is possible. But the whole point of speculative metaphysics is to
transcend experience entirely in order to achieve knowledge of the
noumenal realm. Here, only the faculty of reason is relevant, but its
most crucial speculative conclusions, its deepest convictions about
the self, the world, and god, are all drawn illegitimately.
What is possibleindeed, according to Kant what we are bound by
our very nature as rational beings to dois to think of the noumenal
realm as if the speculative principles were true (whether or not they
are). By the nature of reason itself, we are required to suppose our
own existence as substantial beings, the possibility of our free
action in a world of causal regularity, and the existence of god. The
absence of any formal justification for these notions makes it
impossible for us to claim that we know them to be true, but it can
in no way diminish the depth of our belief that they are.
According to Kant, then, the rational human faculties lead us to the
very boundaries of what can be known, by clarifying the conditions
under which experience of the world as we know it is possible. But
beyond those boundaries our faculties are useless. The shape of the
boundary itself, as evidenced in the Paralogisms and Antinomies,
naturally impels us to postulate that the unknown does indeed have
certain features, but these further speculations are inherently
unjustifiable.
The only legitimate, "scientific" metaphysics that the future may
hold, Kant therefore held, would be a thoroughly critical, nonspeculative examination of the bounds of pure reason, a careful
description of what we can know accompanied by a clear
recognition that our transcendental concepts (however useful they
may seem) are entirely unreliable as guides to the nature of reality.
It is this task, of course, that Kant himself had pursued in the First
Critique.

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Kant: Experience and Reality

Phenomena and Noumena

from the logical distinction among categorical, hypothetical, and

The Limits of Reason

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