BEISER'S IDEALISM (11): KANT's Paralogisms

You get to think that we know our own thoughts and perceptions better than the world outside our heads. Our inner life is supposed to be transparent to us in a way that the world and other people's inner worlds aren't. Kant abolishes that asymmetry. In placing both self-knowledge and knowledge of outer objects under the same a priori forms and categories, he denies that we enjoy any privileged cognitive access to an inner realm of substances or states that could serve as an unquestionable basis for inferences to the world. Our inner life, no less than the spatial world, is given only as appearance, that is, only under the forms of time and the syntheses that make temporal order possible. There is therefore no standpoint from which we could first survey our inner states as fully transparent and then ask whether what we take to be outer things really exists; for the very distinction between inner and outer already presupposes the categorial unity of experience. So what I think is going on inside my thoughts is like what I think is going outside. Woah!

Beiser makes this clear when he talks about Kant's Paralogisms. Point 26 In the Paralogisms Kant makes this explicit by attacking the traditional inference from the ‘I think’ to a knowledge of the soul as a simple, immaterial, and immortal substance. From the mere form of apperception we can indeed infer that all my representations belong to a single consciousness, but we cannot infer what that consciousness is in itself, whether it is simple rather than composite, immaterial rather than corporeal, or capable of existing apart from all sensible conditions. All such predicates go beyond what is contained in the mere unity of ‘I think’ and therefore constitute a transcendental illusion. Thus the very move by which Descartes thought to secure an indubitable self wholly independent of the empirical world is shown to rest on a confusion between the formal unity of consciousness and the determinate characteristics of a thing. Once this is seen the Cartesian hierarchy collapses. Inner awareness is not more fundamental than awareness of outer objects; both arise only within a single experience ordered by the same rules. To say that I know myself only as appearance is therefore not to say that I know myself less well than I know external things, nor that I know nothing at all; it is to say that the only kind of self I can know is the empirical one that appears in time, with changing states and predicates, and that this self stands under the same conditions of possible experience as any body in space. The noumenal self, if there is such a thing, lies beyond the reach of speculative knowledge, just as do things in themselves; but this limit does not deprive empirical self-knowledge of its legitimacy, any more than it deprives empirical knowledge of nature.

The subjectivist will object that this seems to leave us with no self at all apart from a mere bundle of appearances. If the unity of apperception does not reveal the nature of the subject, and if inner sense presents only temporal states, what remains of the notion of a persisting I that owns these states? Kant’s answer is that the unity of apperception is indeed a necessary condition for thinking of any such owner, but that it is itself not an object and therefore cannot be known as a thing. The ‘I think’ must be able to accompany all my representations, otherwise they would not belong to one consciousness; yet this ‘I’ is nothing more, for theoretical cognition, than the form of that belonging. It is a transcendental condition, not an item that could be found among the contents of inner sense. To demand a further object behind this unity, in order to make it ‘real’, is merely to repeat the old mistake of hypostasising a function. 

Beiser says that this is precisely where Kant departs from Hume at the deepest level, even while agreeing with him that no impression of a substantial self can be found. Hume concludes that the idea of a self is a fiction generated by the smooth transition among closely associated perceptions; Kant replies that such a fiction could not even be formed unless all perceptions were already synthesised under a single apperception. The unity of the subject is therefore not an illusion to be explained psychologically, but a necessary condition of there being any illusions or experiences at all. What it cannot yield, however, is a metaphysical portrait of the soul; the critical philosophy allows only a formal, not a descriptive, self-knowledge. The same critical restraint governs Kant’s treatment of outer experience. Just as he denies that inner sense reveals a soul-substance in itself, so he denies that outer sense reveals bodies as they are independently of our forms of intuition and understanding. We know objects only as appearances in space and time, that is, only as determined by the conditions that we ourselves contribute to experience. But this contribution is not a private one of an individual mind; it is the work of the understanding as such, the set of rules that any finite knower with our forms of sensibility must employ. In this way the transcendental replaces the merely subjective: what seems at first to be a description of my mental states turns out, on analysis, to be a description of the conditions under which any subject like me can have experience at all.

Beiser ays that from this vantage point the old Cartesian picture of an inner theatre, with ideas passing before a solitary spectator who then wonders whether there is an external stage corresponding to the show, can no longer be maintained. There is no inner arena whose contents could be surveyed and described independently of the forms of unity that make them intelligible; and there is no external arena whose existence could be compared with such contents. There is only one space and one time, one system of possible experience, within which both my body and my inner states occupy determinate positions, and whose unity is grounded in the original synthetic activity of apperception. To ask, from some imagined standpoint beyond this system, whether it ‘really’ corresponds to things in themselves is therefore to ask a question that has lost its sense. Kant’s doctrine of inner sense thus plays a double role in relation to the subjectivist tradition. On the one hand, by insisting that we know ourselves only as we appear under the form of time, it seems to radicalise the older suspicion that the self is hidden behind its representations. On the other hand, by placing that same self under the same conditions as outer objects, it destroys the Cartesian asymmetry between inner certainty and outer dubiety, and with it the very basis for the sceptical problematic of the way of ideas. The outcome is not a deeper subjectivism but a levelling: both self and world are empirically knowable, both are transcendentally unknowable, and both are equally subject to the same network of a priori rules.

We can now see why Kant was so insistent that transcendental idealism is an empirical realism. It is an idealism because it makes the forms of experience depend on the subject, not on things in themselves; but it is a realism because within those forms there is a determinate order of objects that is not at the mercy of individual caprice. The categories and forms of intuition do not describe how things seem to this or that mind; they describe the structure of a possible experience in general. The standards of objectivity they ground are therefore intersubjective: what counts as real is what any subject, situated as we are and employing the same concepts, must represent in the same way. Beiser says that in this sense Kant replaces the inner certainty of the Cartesian ego with the shared certainty of a common world. That shift has a final consequence for the interpretation of the question with which the theory of ideas began: what does it mean for our representations to correspond to objects? Once correspondence is no longer a matter of resemblance between a mental image and an extra-mental thing, it must be understood in terms of lawful coherence within experience. A representation is objectively valid if it can be integrated into a system of possible perceptions according to the analogies of experience; if it cannot, it is illusory. The distinction between dream and waking, between hallucination and veridical perception, is drawn, not by appeal to some other order of being behind appearances, but by appeal to the rules that govern the connections among appearances themselves. The object, in the strict sense, is nothing over and above the unity of such a connected manifold. Thus the spectre of subjectivism vanishes, not because Kant discovers a hidden metaphysical bridge from ideas to things, but because he reconceives both sides of the alleged gap. There are no self-sufficient ideas whose agreement with things must be demonstrated, and there are no things in themselves that could be objects of comparison. There is only experience, structured by the forms of sensibility and the categories, and within that experience the distinction between subjective seeming and objective reality is drawn by appeal to the very rules that make experience possible. In showing this, Kant does not merely refine the way of ideas, he brings its fundamental presuppositions into question and opens up a different way of thinking about mind and world altogether.