BEISER'S IDEALISM (13): Kant Finally

Imagine Kant as a sort of heroic but slightly baffled craftsman in a seventeenth century workshop, except the workshop is actually his own mind, and the tools are concepts, and the wood shavings on the floor are discarded Enlightenment certainties. Beiser’s account is like watching him frown and mutter politely to himself while dismantling the entire philosophical tradition that came before him, and then very carefully putting it back together so it still works but now looks nothing like the instructions on the box. Everyone before Kant thought ideas were like little internal pictures. You look at them, they look back at you, and that is experience. How charming and magical that sounds. 

Kant’s great move is to say that the mind is not a charming gallery but more like a very strict civil servant who organises incoming documents into neatly labelled folders. Experience is only possible because the filing system already exists. Before you even open your eyes, the categories are sitting there with clipboards ready to impose order. This is the mind as a grumpy administrator, which is not charming at all sadly. This is why the philosopher Ernest Gellner calls Kant the philosopher of disenchantment because he gets rid of enchantment and makes everything bureaucratic. 

Also Kant is saying all experience depends on something we never experience, and this is supposed to explain how experience is trustworthy, a bit like being told your kitchen is clean because your invisible housemate cleans it at night. You appreciate it, but you would still quite like to meet the housemate just to check out that she's not, you know, taking your drugs.

Beiser shows how Kant manages to explode both sides of the subjectivist/objectivist war. Subjectivists think everything depends on the mind, and objectivists think everything depends on the world, and Kant says, yes, the mind contributes structure, and yes, the world contributes content, but neither side is the whole performance. What matters is the show itself, the way sensations and concepts join to produce something that can be recognised as an object. Suddenly the object is not a secret thing behind the scenes, but the unity of appearances under a rule. It is more like a Calder mobile than a brick. It keeps its shape only because of an exquisite balance of forces. Remove the balance and the whole thing collapses.

Beiser is fascinated by how Kant stomps on the old idea that ideas resemble objects. Kant thinks resemblance is a childish fantasy, like thinking your drawing of a horse must be accurate because you drew it very carefully. He instead says what matters is rule following. A representation is correct when it plays its part in a lawful structure. This is an unsettling idea because it means the world is not justified by matching the mind, but by fitting into a system that the mind cannot help imposing. The world is what can be organised by us, which sounds arrogant, but Kant believes it is humility. We cannot know things in themselves at all, so we should stop pretending. In Kant’s world, the truly humble person does not peek behind the curtain.

Then Beiser turns to the transcendental subject, which is either the most brilliant or the most frustrating thing Kant ever invented, depending on your mood. Kant insists the I think is necessary for any experience. It is like the vanishing point in a painting. Nothing exists at the vanishing point, and the vanishing point isn't actually in the picture, yet everything depends on it. This is not the self of psychology, not the person who gets bored or hungry. It is a purely formal point that must exist for anything to be mine. Kant refuses to say what it is because saying anything about it would involve turning it into an object, which would ruin the whole thing. So Kant keeps gesturing vaguely at it, calling it X, the bare self, the unity of apperception. It is philosophical mime. But it makes sense, like a vanishing point makes sense. The outside frame of a picture isn't in the picture and a vanishing point is another frame, it is the inner frame, and so it isn't in the picture either.

Beiser finds this brilliant. Kant spends hundreds of pages proving that this subject must exist while also proving that we can never know anything about it. It is like a detective who discovers the culprit but then admits the culprit is invisible and cannot be apprehended. Kant says the subject is spontaneous, which sounds exciting, but then carefully explains that by spontaneity he does not mean free will or personality or anything humanly interesting, but simply that the subject must perform synthesis. The spontaneity is the spontaneity of a photocopier that cannot help copying. It is necessary spontaneity. Even Kant seems aware that this is not the sexy part of the system.

Beiser shows how the whole subject becomes even stranger once Kant introduces inner sense. Inner sense is supposed to be how we perceive our own mental states, but Kant quickly realises that if we perceive them then they are appearances and therefore not the real self. So inner sense reveals only a ghostly version of the self, a flowing series of states in time. The real self hides behind this like a shy animal. We know the self only as it appears, never as it is. Kant says this is fine. Others say it sounds like the self has become a rumour. The debate intensifies when Kant introduces the idea that both inner and outer experience are equally immediate. This breaks the entire Cartesian tradition. Descartes thought he had direct access to his own mind and indirect access to the world. Kant says no, both are appearances under strict conditions. Self-knowledge is no more privileged than world knowledge. It is a deeply democratic move. Everything is equally obscure. By the time Beiser gets to Kant’s battle with transcendental realism and his war against Berkeley’s subjectivism, you get the sense of Kant as a man trying to keep a thousand plates spinning. If appearances depend on the subject, does that not make Kant a Berkeleyan idealist? Beiser says Kant avoids this because appearances are intersubjective. They obey universal rules. So while they depend on subjects in general, they do not depend on any particular subject. Kant disperses the weight of the world across all rational beings. Instead of one person’s ideas sustaining the universe, everyone shares tiny responsibility. It is philosophical crowd funding.

Eventually we reach the late Kant of the Opus Postumum, who becomes unexpectedly tactile. He introduces the ether, which sounds like a throwback to pre-modern physics but is actually a deep point. Kant realises experience requires continuity, a medium of forces connecting bodies. He uses ether as a placeholder for this universal field. It is not the substance physicists imagined, but a conceptual way of saying the world must be a single connected system if perception is to hold together. It ties the unity of nature to the unity of experience. Suddenly the transcendental subject is inside a physical world that is itself structured by the same necessary laws. Subject and world interpenetrate like two halves of a Möbius strip.

Beiser’s Kant ends up being both worldless and deeply worldly, both anti-subjectivist and proudly subject-centred. He destroys the old way of ideas but preserves a ghost of it. He denies we can know the self yet insists the self is the necessary condition of knowing anything at all. He refuses to say the world is mental, yet refuses equally to say the mind discovers its structure in the world. 

It is all about the relation, the delicate architecture of appearance. Kant does not build a fortress but a suspension bridge, trembling and precise. The whole thing feels like watching an old master draw a perfect circle without ever touching the paper. Beiser wants us to see that Kant’s system is not a grand monument but a precarious balancing act, and that its power comes from its tensions rather than its resolutions. It is funny because Kant is always so certain while standing on a tightrope, and wry because he keeps reminding us not to look down. And in the end, Beiser’s Kant is strangely moving, because you sense a man who remade the whole world simply by refusing to pretend he understood it.