BEISER'S IDEALISM (9): KANT contra Berkeley

Kant found himself having to face accusations that he was inadvertently becoming like Berkeley. For Berkeley, the patterning of experience is ultimately the outcome of habits, associations and the constancy of God’s volitions. Generalities emerge from repetition. There is no strict necessity that tomorrow resemble today. What holds the world together is not an inner lawfulness of experience as such, but the fidelity of a divine will whose reasons are opaque to us. For Kant, by contrast, the order of experience is grounded in the very conditions under which anything can be experienced at all. The rules are not discovered by noticing frequent conjunctions, they are presupposed in any act of noticing. This means that the contrast between reality and illusion can be drawn without appealing to a contingent history of associations, and without smuggling in theological guarantees. It follows from the very form of experience, not from any further metaphysical posit. He called these synthetic a priori principles and everyone wonders how they are even possible.

Beiser shows that Kant insists that synthetic a priori principles are not just a convenient summary of how things usually go, but the very framework without which there would be no “things” for us in the first place. The lawfulness that distinguishes waking experience from dreams is not a higher vividness or a longer run of successful habits, it is the fact that the manifold of intuition is ordered according to rules that hold for any possible subject with our forms of sensibility and understanding. If those rules were absent, the idea of an object persisting through time, occupying a determinate place in space, standing in causal relations, would collapse. Berkeley’s empiricism has no resources to secure that level of necessity. At best it can say that our experiences so far have displayed regularity, and that we have become accustomed to expect more of the same. It is true that, taken in isolation, Kant’s gesture towards things in themselves looks pale beside the concreteness of Berkeley’s metaphysics. Kant does not claim to know that appearances are of things in themselves, only that this is thinkable and that nothing in his critical principles forbids it. At the same time he insists that nothing in those principles entitles us to deny such a relation either. 

From a Berkeleian point of view this looks like evasion: either there are such things, or there are not. From a critical point of view, however, the suspended judgement is the entire point. The critical philosopher refuses to convert a condition of possible knowledge into a statement about absolute being. Berkeley’s metaphysics is precisely such a conversion. He reads his own epistemological insight, that we meet only ideas and spirits, as a description of the ultimate structure of reality. Kant takes the same starting point but refuses that step. The difference emerges particularly sharply over the status of space. For both thinkers, space is not a container in which ready-made things are placed. It is tied to experience. But for Berkeley, spatiality is built up from correlations between visual and tactual ideas, and ultimately reduced to patterns of sensible signs. Its structure has no independent necessity; it is whatever order God in fact uses to regulate the sequence of ideas. For Kant, by contrast, the form of space is not itself a product of association. It is the a priori condition under which any outer intuition is possible. The possibility of geometry, with its strict universality and necessity, is therefore for Kant an index of the fact that space must come from the side of the subject as form, not from the side of experience as a slowly assembled construction. On Berkeleian premises, genuine geometry is hard to account for; at best it becomes a codification of how God usually arranges our ideas.

This shows why Kant thinks Berkeley is, despite his intentions, driven towards a kind of illusionism about spatial perception. Berkeley wants to affirm that the table and tree are real, yet he is forced to say that strictly speaking we do not see distance, that what presents itself as an ordered spatial field is a system of signs whose interpretation depends on past tactual experiences and expectations. Common sense says that we see things over there. Berkeley’s theory says that what we really have are ideas here which, by custom, lead us to anticipate other ideas if we move our bodies. For Kant this is already a retreat from the objectivity of space. It makes spatial order parasitic on learned correlations within a flow of sensations. By contrast Kant insists that the spatial determination of objects is already present in outer intuition itself, that it is not a post hoc construction out of non-spatial materials. Kant’s appeal to universal and necessary rules is not an optional strengthening of Berkeley’s looser criteria, but a way of changing the subject. The point is not simply that stricter rules track reality more reliably than looser habits. The point is that without a structure which is valid for any possible subject like us, there would be no stable standpoint from which to speak of reality and illusion at all. Berkeley’s own criteria, vividness and coherence, quietly presuppose something akin to this: they assume that there is a shared world in which different subjects can compare their experiences and sift illusions from genuine perceptions. But that shared world, with its public objects and repeatable structures, is precisely what Kant tries to ground in the a priori forms of sensibility and understanding. Where Berkeley leans on common sense and God to do that work, Kant tries to make the dependence explicit.

If one strips away the thing in itself and the language of transcendental versus empirical, Kant’s position does indeed begin to look more like a sophisticated version of Berkeley’s. This is why some critics suggest that a fully consistent Kant would have to become an idealist of the Berkeleian sort. Yet Beiser says that this suggestion neglects that the very distinction between appearance and thing in itself is what allows Kant to separate questions about the objectivity of experience from questions about ultimate being. Without such a distinction, any discussion of the structure of experience is always in danger of turning metaphysical by accident. That is precisely what Kant wants to avoid. His idealism is meant to be limited: it concerns how we must represent objects, not what objects are in themselves. Berkeley’s idealism, in Kant’s eyes, erases that limit. The “small but real” differences therefore amount to more than a verbal quarrel. They express two incompatible pictures of what philosophy should do. Berkeley offers a single-level ontology of spirits and ideas and uses it both to explain experience and to state what is ultimately real. Kant proposes a two-level account: a transcendental analysis of conditions of possible experience, and an agnostic stance about things as they may be in themselves. Both begin from the recognition that we deal only with what can be given to consciousness, and both reject the naïve demand to compare ideas with a reality wholly outside the field of representation. But where Berkeley concludes that there is nothing beyond that field, Kant insists that such a conclusion is precisely the step a critical philosophy must refuse.

Once this is seen, Beiser says the accusation that Kant’s position “collapses” into Berkeley’s if he abandons certain troublesome doctrines loses much of its force. If one removes the very elements that constitute the critical standpoint, of course the result will resemble more traditional forms of idealism. That is not a discovery about Kant, it is a reminder that his system hangs together. To preserve the difference from Berkeley one must preserve the whole critical apparatus: the distinction between form and matter of intuition, between intuition and concept, between empirical and transcendental, between knowing and merely thinking. Only within that web of distinctions do appearances retain their peculiar status as objectively valid for us without being promoted to the rank of ultimate reality. The proximity between the two thinkers, then, lies at the level of their shared rejection of crude realism and their recognition that the sceptical problem of comparing ideas with things in themselves is insoluble. The distance between them lies in what they do with that recognition. Berkeley takes it as a licence to flatten ontology into a world of mental items upheld by God. Kant takes it as a constraint which forces philosophy back onto the analysis of our own cognitive capacities. If he sometimes speaks in a way that lends itself to a Berkeleian reading, this is because he is fighting on the same battlefield of post-Cartesian scepticism. His eventual revisions are best read, not as changes of doctrine, but as attempts to close down precisely that reading and to keep his idealism within the bounds of a critique of reason.

Beiser shows that time is another thing dogmatic scepticism can't explain because the permanent that grounds temporal determination cannot be supplied by the content of inner sense. Inner sense, taken strictly, offers only the flux of mental states, one damn thing following another without stability. Nothing within that flux can serve as a fixed point of reference. All my inner representations, whether they are perceptions, thoughts or imaginings, present themselves only as successive modifications of my consciousness. If I tried to locate one of them by appeal to any other, I would be caught in an endless regress of states, each as fleeting as the next. Temporal order would dissolve into an undifferentiated stream. There must therefore be something that does not share the transience of my inner states, something that can serve as the anchor for relating my changing perceptions to one another. This is what Kant means when he says that the determination of time presupposes something permanent in perception.

Once that point is established the next question naturally arises, namely where this permanent is to be found. It cannot be found in the subject, because the inner self, as it appears in inner sense, is never given as a stable object. It is always presented as an evolving field of sensations and thoughts. The only candidates that can satisfy the demand for permanence are those empirical objects that present themselves in outer sense. They alone exhibit the stability and continuity needed for the application of temporal predicates. A tree standing in the garden or a building on the street can be perceived to persist while my own inner states come and go. Against that background of relative constancy I can say that a feeling occurred before another or that a thought succeeded a sensation. The spatial object provides the fixed point without which my temporal self-awareness could not be ordered.

This brings us naturally to the next step of Kant’s argument. If the determination of time requires something permanent, and if that permanent cannot lie within inner sense, then it must lie outside me in the empirical sense. The permanent is encountered through outer intuition, not inner. To perceive something as persistent is already to be in a world structured by spatial order. That is why Kant insists that the permanent cannot be an intuition in me. The very nature of inner sense forbids it. What is within me, considered as appearance, is always changing. The unchanging can only be something that stands over against the inner flow, something that endures while my inner states pass. Kant presents this as an immediate consequence of the very notion of temporal determination, and it is here that the argument begins to exert pressure on the Cartesian premise. The idealist might object that even the seeming permanence of outer objects could be illusory. Perhaps what appears as persistence is only a steady sequence of ideas. But Beiser says this misses the point. The question is not whether the permanent truly is permanent in itself, but whether my capacity to represent duration at all would be possible unless some element in perception presented itself as remaining while others change. Without such an element the temporal relation between my experiences could not be fixed. The sceptic wants to treat the problem as if it concerned the truth of some inference about the cause of my perceptions, but Kant repositions it. The problem concerns the necessary conditions of being able to place experiences in a temporal order. Those conditions arise from the structure of experience rather than from any hypothesis about the hidden grounds of perception. It is not an hypothesis but a transcendental constraint.

So Kant now presses the decisive point. Since I am conscious of my own existence in time, and since such consciousness presupposes the perception of something permanent, and since the permanent can be perceived only in outer intuition, it follows that outer experience is a condition of inner experience. My awareness of myself as temporally ordered is possible only if I am also aware of something situated in space, something given as enduring. This is the reversal of the Cartesian model. For Descartes, inner experience was certain and outer experience derivative. For Kant, the certainty of inner experience already involves the structure of outer experience. Inner self-awareness is not the independent foundation but an achievement whose possibility rests on the spatial order of things. This yields the conclusion that consciousness of my own existence is at the same time an immediate consciousness of objects outside me in the empirical sense. The term immediate must not mislead. Kant does not claim that we have an intuition of things in themselves. He means merely that our temporal self-awareness is inseparable from our awareness of spatial order. It is not that we infer the outer from the inner but that the two stand in a relation of mutual implication, one being impossible without the other. The experience of time is bound up with the experience of space, and the experience of the self is bound up with the experience of objects.

Beiser says that when the argument is read in this way its intent becomes clearer. Kant is nt attempting to prove anything about transcendent reality. He is not claiming that the objects outside us, in the transcendental sense, exist as things in themselves. He is instead showing that to have inner experience at all is to have outer experience in the sense that outer sense supplies the framework of permanence needed for temporal determination. Outer objects are therefore not introduced by inference. They are presupposed by the very act of self-consciousness. The argument thus escapes the charge of circularity. It does not assume what it proves because it appeals to features of inner experience that the Cartesian must concede if he is to retain the coherence of his own claims.

The sceptic might insist that the apparent permanence of outer objects still falls short of certainty. He might claim that even if such objects appear to persist, they could be merely ideas coordinated by some unknown power. But this counterargument again rests on confusing the transcendental with the empirical. The question is not whether the permanence corresponds to a thing in itself. The question is whether the representation of permanence is necessary for temporal self-consciousness. Kant’s answer is that it is. And because inner sense cannot supply this permanence, the representation of something outside me is unavoidable. Even if the sceptic denies the existence of things in themselves, he cannot deny that my consciousness of time requires something that presents itself as enduring in outer sense. This brings to light why Kant believed that his argument did not beg the question. The Cartesian does not deny that appearances present themselves as spatial. He doubts whether such appearances correspond to anything real outside consciousness. Kant does not attempt to refute that doubt directly. Instead he shows that the Cartesian’s own certainty about inner experience cannot be made sense of unless the spatial order is already in place. Once this is understood the Cartesian position undermines itself. It requires the stability of temporal experience even as it erodes the framework that makes such stability possible. The more the sceptic insists on the certainty of inner awareness, the more he is pushed into acknowledging the conditions that make that awareness coherent. Those conditions include the representation of enduring objects in space.

Another way of viewing this is to say that Kant’s argument employs the notion of a transcendental object not as something known in itself but as the rule for synthesising appearances into an ordered whole. The transcendental object is not another item alongside the objects of empirical intuition. It is the unity of the manifold, the formal requirement that all perceptions be connected according to stable rules. This unifying function ensures that experiences can be treated as belonging to the same world. When Kant speaks of objects outside us in the reputation of idealism, he is referring to empirical objects, but these empirical objects are unified according to the principles supplied by the transcendental object. They can therefore be distinguished from individual representations while remaining within the bounds of possible experience.

This helps clarify what Kant means when he says that the permanent cannot be a mere representation. He does not deny that empirical objects are appearances. He denies that they can be reduced to momentary mental states. Their identity lies in their lawful unity, not in the fleeting images through which they are apprehended. A tree is not a collection of successive perceptions but the rule-governed synthesis of those perceptions into a single object that endures. The fact that this endurance is a function of the understanding’s activity does not make the object illusory. On the contrary it is the ground of its empirical reality. A mere succession of inner states could never supply what is needed for objectivity.

It also follows that the sceptic’s proposal to treat all experience as a dream misfires. The distinction between waking and dreaming is not drawn by noting differences in the vividness of perceptions, but by examining whether they conform to the rules of experience. A dream lacks the coherence and lawful interconnection that characterise waking experience. It is not anchored by the perception of something permanent. It cannot therefore support the kind of temporal awareness that waking life displays. The sceptic wants to disregard these structural features, but they are the very criteria by which the distinction between truth and illusion is made. To deny them is to deny the very basis of his own claim to know that he has inner experience. Once one recognises this, the radical doubt proposed by the Cartesian begins to lose its grip. The doubt depends on treating the entire field of experience as if it were one more object within it that might or might not correspond to something outside it. But experience is not an object in that sense. It is the framework within which objects can appear. To subject that framework to empirical doubt is to demand a standpoint beyond all experience from which experience could be compared with reality in itself. Kant’s philosophy closes off that standpoint. It shows that such comparison is unintelligible, not because it is false but because no meaning can be attached to it. We can speak coherently about illusions only within the limits of experience, not about a possible illusion of experience as a whole.

Beiser says this is why Kant describes the sceptical challenge as self-defeating. The sceptic uses the very principles he pretends to question. He applies the category of causality in order to argue that his perceptions might be produced by a malicious being, yet he denies that the category has lawful application to the very world in which such an inference could be assessed. He wants to claim that the entire order of experience might be false while relying on the very concept of order that experience supplies. The sceptical stance therefore depends on what it denies. It contains within itself the conditions that undermine its own coherence. 

From this perspective the realistic tone of the second edition is not a retreat from transcendental idealism but an attempt to articulate more clearly the distinction between the empirical object and the representation of it. Empirical objects are not things in themselves, yet they also are not reducible to inner states. They occupy a middle position. Their reality consists in their conformity to the a priori forms of space and the categories of the understanding. They are distinct from their representations only in the sense that the unity of the object transcends any particular perception of it. This allows Kant to speak of them as if they stood outside me without attributing to them any transcendental independence.It becomes clear as well why Kant felt compelled to revise the exposition from the first edition. The earlier identification of outer objects with representations made his view too vulnerable to the suspicion that it merely restated Berkeley in different terms. By stressing the necessity of outer experience as the condition of inner experience, Kant shifts the centre of gravity. He emphasises the structural role played by the a priori conditions of experience, rather than the descriptive claim that objects are nothing but representations. This shift is not a change in doctrine but a clarification of what his doctrine was meant to assert all along.

At the same time the argument provides an answer to the core sceptical worry. The sceptic fears that there might be no external world at all, that the entire field of experience could be a fabrication. Kant replies that such doubt misunderstands the nature of experience. The external world is not a hidden domain lying behind our perceptions. It is the lawful order of appearances, the single space in which objects are encountered and within which temporal awareness is possible. To know that I exist at a given time just is to know that my representations occur within that order. Unless that order were already in place my self-awareness would lack temporal determinacy. The external world is therefore not an optional add-on but an indispensable condition, woven into the fabric of inner consciousness itself.

One can now see how the various interpretive puzzles find their resolutions. The realistic language of the reputation reflects the view that empirical objects have a unity independent of any single perception. It does not commit Kant to a doctrine of things in themselves as spatial. The continued affirmation of transcendental idealism in the second edition shows that he has not abandoned the claim that the spatial character of objects is a feature of our sensibility. The role of the transcendental object secures the formal unity of appearances. The emphasis on the priority of outer sense clarifies how that unity makes temporal self-consciousness possible. The sceptic’s doubts crumble because they have no purchase once the transcendental conditions of experience are acknowledged.

In this way Kant’s new strategy can be understood as an elaboration of the same critical standpoint he had occupied from the beginning. His concern was always to show how the possibility of empirical knowledge rests upon the a priori structures of sensibility and understanding. The reputation of idealism extends this insight to the relation between inner and outer experience. It demonstrates that the coherence of inner awareness presupposes the unity of outer intuition. It also shows that the sceptical worry about the reliability of experience arises only when one forgets that experience is constituted by these structures rather than being an unanalysed collection of sensations.If the argument feels elusive it is because it asks us to alter our vantage point. Instead of standing outside experience and assessing its validity we must look at the internal framework that makes experience possible. Once one adopts this standpoint the sceptical challenge loses its apparent urgency. The doubt that all might be illusion assumes a standpoint no human subject can occupy. The critical philosophy teaches us to remain within the bounds of possible experience and to take those bounds not as constraints on knowledge but as the very conditions that enable it.