by Henry Piper (all rights reserved)
A Review of Hume’s Empiricism
We have seen that Hume’s empiricism insists that all knowledge is based on experience, and moreover that no idea is real if it is not derived, at least indirectly, from some immediate sense impression. In short, for Hume there is nothing other than experience; even the self is simply a “bundle of perceptions” without any reality of its own independent of the perceptions of which it is composed.
Having argued for this extreme, empiricist point of view, however, Hume finds himself caught in an extreme skepticism that would seem to make knowledge as such impossible. Following Berkeley, Hume’s reasoning effectively cuts him off from any direct knowledge of the physical world, since, like Berkeley, our only reality is perception; however, unlike Berkeley, Hume refuses to posit any metaphysical ground for our existence, such as Berkeley’s God, that would account for the consistency and relative stability of our experience and our ability to communicate with others about it. So Hume’s philosophy leads him to reject both the existence of an external, physical world and of a spiritual or metaphysical world, leaving him, effectively, with nothing, trapped, like Descartes at the end of his first Meditation, doubting everything.
Facing this difficulty, Hume takes refuge in the “feelings or sentiments” that arise from our observation of the “constant conjunction” of certain events; this leads us effortlessly into adopting, by “custom and habit,” a basic understanding of the regular workings of nature which in turn leads to certain “beliefs” upon which we have no choice but to rely, and it is such beliefs that for Hume constitute “knowledge.” Notably, we observe, but only after repeated experience, that nature is characterized by certain constantly repeated patterns such as the observed “constant conjunction” of certain sorts of events, following which we develop over time a feeling that certain things appear to cause other things, when, for example, one kind of event, like the motion of one billiard ball, appears “constantly” immediately prior to another event, such as the motion of a second billiard ball upon impact with the first. From the observation of such “constant conjunctions” we inevitably, over time, develop a natural habit of concerning how things are likely to happen, which leads us to the reasonable expectation that the future will resemble the past, permitting us to make reasonable predictions about future events; indeed, we seem to have no choice, says Hume, but to infer a “necessary connection” between a perceived cause and its effect, and it is precisely such inferences of necessity that go to constitute our “knowledge.” Such knowledge, however, thus all knowledge, is strictly empirical, thus never perfectly certain and never, unlike mathematical truths, a priori, but it is all we can ever hope for; even the idea that the future will resemble the past, and the “law” of cause and effect, are known only empirically, as there is, insists Hume, no reason, apart from repeated experience, that such things are infallibly “true.”
Finally, we have no choice but to extend the inferences of necessity that constitute our knowledge to all the phenomena of nature, to everything that we see and know, including, therefore, ourselves. Our only knowledge of our “selves” is derived in the same way as our knowledge of everything else: we build it up over time by the repeated observation of certain patterns. The resemblance of certain ideas over time leads us to infer the existence of a common source, namely our “self;” and we infer the determinations of our wills to be the causes of our actions, just as we infer the motion of the second billiard ball to be caused by that of the first. As for our wills themselves, we cannot directly observe what determines them in the way that we can observe what causes the motion of the first billiard ball; however, since our selves are no different in essence from any other natural objects, we have no choice but to conclude that what we think of as the “liberty” of our selves, like the motions of everything else in nature, is governed and constrained by the same necessary laws, and thus that our “will” is subject to the same necessary determinations as the motions of the billiard balls. Thus, according to Hume, “free will,” as traditionally understood, is a metaphysical illusion, and does not exist.
Kant’s Response to Hume
We now turn to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who appreciates the skeptical challenge to traditional metaphysics that Hume’s arguments represent and who shares some of that skepticism. Hume’s empiricism poses a stark challenge to a long tradition in philosophy, known as rationalism, which is intent to rely exclusively on the faculty of reason, rather than sense experience, as the sole source of the ultimate knowledge of reality. Kant, unlike the strict rationalists, agrees with Hume that experience is essential to human knowledge; however, Kant is not satisfied to limit his philosophical speculation to the empirical experience of what is right in front of him and insists that a purely rational, a priori foundation is required for knowledge, even if knowledge of the world must also be informed by experience. In other words, it is Kant’s project to attempt a synthesis of rationalism and empiricism, according to which some knowledge can achieve the firm footing of universal and necessary—that is, a priori—truth, while at the same time remaining rooted in and relevant to our experience of the material world around us.
Specifically, Kant steps behind empirical experience, as it were, to investigate the conditions for its possibility. Hume effectively takes experience for granted, without wondering how it is that we could be having it, and, moreover, assumes that experience is all that there is to rely on; by contrast, Kant asks the deeper question of how experience itself is even possible. In other words, Kant agrees with Hume that we have experience: who would dispute that? Kant also agrees that our knowledge of the world is in some sense bound up with and limited by that experience. But Hume overlooks the question of how we can even have experience in the first place: why should we take it for granted, how can we?
In confronting the question of how experience itself is possible, Kant employs a method of reasoning he refers to as “transcendental.” This term must not be confused with the term “transcendent,” which means “beyond all human comprehension”; the term “transcendental,” rather, is Kant’s term for the investigation of the conditions of possibility of our experience. Thus, as we noted above, we have experience, nobody disputes that, but how can we have experience; that is, what must the conditions of the world, including our selves, be to make that possible? There is a related meaning element between the terms “transcendent” and “transcendental,” as both terms refer to something that is beyond our immediate experience; however, whereas “transcendent” refers to something, for example God, that is so utterly superior to and separated from our own human nature that we cannot comprehend it at all, “transcendental,” by contrast, refers to a possibility or possibilities that are firmly rooted in our own experiences themselves and in our own natures. Kant, in short, is engaging in philosophical speculation, which is the very stuff of all philosophy, but it is speculation that, I hope to show, makes sense.
So Hume and Kant both begin their respective philosophies with experience, but whereas Hume simply takes experience for granted and goes forward with it to consider what he can learn from it, Kant asks the more foundational question—Kant goes behind physics to pose the metaphysical question—going backward from experience to consider how it could be occurring in the first place. And not surprisingly, perhaps, we shall see that Kant’s conclusions differ radically from Hume’s, on knowledge, on freedom and on morality.
Knowledge Begins With, but Does Not Arise Out Of, Experience
Kant famously remarks that he credits Hume with “interrupting my dogmatic slumber,” by which Kant means essentially that Hume’s empiricism forced Kant to reexamine the very foundations of traditional metaphysics that Kant had long simply accepted; in other words, Kant had been content to “slumber,” without serious thought, in the assuredness that traditional, generally accepted or “dogmatic” notions about knowledge and reality could be counted upon. But Hume, as we have seen, challenges the very notion that any rational certainty about traditional metaphysical subjects can be achieved: since, according to Hume, all ideas come from impressions, and since we can have impressions only of what we directly experience through the senses, and further since traditional metaphysical ideas like the law of cause and effect and the very reality of the self cannot be directly sensed, then we can have no certain, rational (a priori) knowledge of any metaphysical subjects.
On considering Hume’s objections, Kant observes that Hume, like all traditional philosophers of the past, had considered that to have knowledge of an object must require that we have an idea in our mind that accurately corresponds to, represents or reflects the object in the world: to have “knowledge” is to have a true idea of a thing, along with an account of why the object is that way. (The “account” is required to assure that we don’t mistake mimicry for knowledge; thus, a parrot can learn to repeat the phrase, “two plus three equals five,” but because the parrot cannot give an account of the process of how he “knows” that—by, for example, performing other simple addition problems—we would not credit the parrot with actual knowledge.) So again, and in short, if an idea that we have of an object is not like the object, then our idea does not qualify as reliable knowledge of that object; by contrast, if the idea we have in our mind of an object is like the object, then our knowledge is reliable or true.
When Hume considers his knowledge of the world, which he refers to as “matters of fact and existence,” he observes that his only source for that knowledge ultimately comes down to sensible experience. And since we have no sensation of the law of cause and effect, or of the self, as these are not sensible objects, we cannot truly know these things, at least not by reason. This is the point at which Kant’s dogmatic slumber is interrupted, for Kant appreciates the logical force of Hume’s point and realizes, further, that experience must be a crucial element of our knowledge of the world. However, Kant makes a revolutionary break from Hume when he claims, “though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience.” In other words, it will be Kant’s fundamental claim that though we would not have the occasion to know anything of the world if we did not first experience it, nonetheless the ultimate source of our most basic knowledge of the world will not be experience but a priori reason.
Kant’s “Reverse Copernican Revolution”
So Kant’s fundamental claim will be that our knowledge of the world begins with experience, but that it arises from mental structures that are themselves a priori, that is, independent of experience. It is thus that Kant will attempt to secure a foundation for knowledge that is rationally certain, rather than be bound by the inevitable uncertainty of Hume’s purely empirical knowledge.
In order to make this case, Kant reverses the way that Hume, and all previous philosophy, had gone about seeking knowledge of the world. As noted above, traditionally one would seek knowledge of the world by observing objects in the world, that is by experience, and then attempt to formulate ideas of the objects that accurately reflect them. But if we proceed this way, as Hume has made us realize, our knowledge can only be empirical. Kant sees this clearly and therefore begins his quest for knowledge in an entirely different way. Kant begins by examining the process of knowing itself, rather than the thing we are attempting to know. It is easy to overlook that there are two distinct entities when it comes to knowledge: there is the object I want to know, but there is also the subject that is doing the knowing, namely “I.” So Kant, rather than starting with the object, will first examine the subject. Kant refers to this procedure as “reverse Copernicanism” because the astronomer Copernicus, who is famous for positing that the earth revolves around the sun, rather than the sun around the earth, in a sense made the opposite move.
Copernicus inherited an astronomical tradition, based on Church teaching, that the Earth must be the center of the universe, and astronomers before him had sought to account for the observed motions of the heavenly bodies on the assumption that this geocentric assumption was true; however, from the point of view of the Earth, the stars and planets often move in what appear to be very haphazard ways (thus the “retrograde” motions of the planets, for example), and this resulted in explanations such as the tortured machinations of Ptolemy’s cycles and epicycles. But as soon as Copernicus shifted his point of view for observing the heavens from the earth to the sun, suddenly the motions of the planets and stars took on a much more orderly and harmonious appearance, leading to the conclusion that the geocentric worldview had been scientifically wrong.
In assessing the possibility of a priori knowledge—of the powers of reason to gain knowledge of the world, Kant shifts perspective in the other direction, from the outside world of objects to the inner world of our perception of those objects, analogous to shifting from the point of view of the sun (the objects outside) to the Earth (our internal perception). Thus, where Copernicus had shifted his point of view from the subjective, Earth-centered point of view to the external, objective point of view of the sun, Kant shifts his point of view, in the other direction, from the external object of knowledge to the individual knowing subject. More specifically, Kant begins with an examination of the internal perceptions that make up our experience, and poses what he refers to as the transcendental question of how we can be having the experience we all so clearly agree that we do have, the question, that is, of what the conditions of possibility must be in order to permit the experience even to occur.
Beginning with Experience
By beginning with the subject of knowledge, that is, the knower rather than with the objects to be known, Kant’s philosophy takes a revolutionary new direction; however, it also constitutes a direct reference to the ancient beginnings of philosophy in Plato. Recall that Plato’s epistemology was rooted in the theory of recollection according to which the origin of knowledge is precisely the knowing subject, that is, the immortal soul, which, by virtue of its eternal immutability, is already in touch with the objects of knowledge, which for Plato are limited to the eternal, unchanging truths of the realm of Being—that is, Forms and Ideas and mathematical objects like 2+3=5. And Kant, like Plato, is intent on establishing a foundation for knowledge that is necessary and universal, that is, a priori, independent of experience. However, Kant, unlike Plato, is not content with limiting knowledge to what is purely rational, for Kant, like Descartes, is primarily concerned with knowledge of the world; moreover, Kant disagrees with Plato that the phenomena of sense appearance are, as Plato asserts, purely illusory, even if we are easily fooled by our senses if we fail to rein them in with the use of our reason. It is thus that knowledge, for Kant, “begins with” experience, but Kant’s project is to avoid the limitations of sensation by achieving knowledge that does not “arise from” experience but is grounded securely by pure reason, thus knowledge that can be a priori and not merely empirical.
Kant suggests that Plato’s method of completely denying the reality of the physical world, and limiting knowledge to pure, rational recollection, will leave him as isolated in his own mind as Hume is in his, with the only difference that Plato is essentially focusing on what Hume refers to as “relations of ideas” and Hume on “matters of fact.” Kant remarks,
The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of the pure understanding. He did not observe that with all his efforts he made no advance―meeting no resistance that might, as it were, serve as a support on which he could take a stand, to which he could apply his powers, and so set his understanding in motion.
The bird in flight might experience the air around it as an impediment to its flight, since it is buffeted by the friction and uncertainties of the winds, and thus might imagine that flight would be easier if there were no air at all; but upon reflection, we understand that it is precisely upon the air that it flies, for its wings use the support of the air to keep it aloft. So, says Kant, Plato imagined that in a realm of pure thought, without the “resistance” of changing and uncertain physical objects, knowledge might be the more pure, but Kant asserts that this is not so, as knowledge requires the “support” of experience on which to ground itself, in order, that is, for it to have something to know.
What Kant seeks to do, therefore, is to bring the powers of reason to bear on our experience of matters of fact and so achieve a synthesis, as I noted above, of the rationalist tradition that started with Plato and the empirical tradition of Locke, Berkeley and Hume. Thus, Kant insists that in order to know anything both sensation and thought are required: Kant argues that Plato is wrong to insist that knowledge derives exclusively from pure reason, and Hume is wrong to insist that knowledge derives exclusively from sensible experience. Kant insists that both experience and reason are required: “Without sensibility, no object would be given to us; without understanding, no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.” In other words, we would have nothing to think about without experience of the world, but we would be unable to think or know anything about what we experience without the understanding that reason and understanding make possible: “The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise.” It is thus that Kant insists on the synthesis of thought and sensation as the condition of possibility of all knowledge. Moreover, this theme of synthesis, as we are about to see, extends also to experience itself, the very possibility of which is much more mysterious than we might have thought.
What Is Experience?
Let’s first briefly look at what “experience” really is, for it is much more complicated than it looks.
Kant essentially agrees with Hume that experience consists of perceptions; however, Kant’s account of experience, and how it is possible, is much more complex than Hume’s, as befits the topic, and Kant employs different and a wider range of terminology. Kant also agrees with Hume that our experience is limited to appearance; more precisely, Kant makes a distinction between phenomena, which appear to us through sensible intuition (akin to Hume’s “impressions”), and what he refers to as noumena, which constitute the underlying foundation of the objects that appear to us and which Kant refers to as “things-in-themselves.” Kant agrees with Hume that we can have no knowledge of these noumena, for the “thing-in-itself” is outside of our consciousness, and we can know only what appears to us in consciousness: we experience the appearance of a thing in our consciousness, but we do not directly experience the thing-in-itself. Indeed, as we shall see, this applies even to the idea of the self, which, as Hume observes, is not something we can have an impression of; from this observation, as we saw, Hume concludes that the idea of the self is not a real idea. Kant, however, while acknowledging that we can’t see the self, does not, on that account, assert its non-existence: to the contrary, as we shall see later, Kant argues persuasively that the idea of the self is as real as can be, and its existence can be known a priori, since, Kant will argue, we could have no experience of anything if the self did not exist.
While Kant fully appreciates that experience is limited to appearance, he is not content to stop there; he seeks, rather, a purely rational, a priori explanation for how the experience of appearance is possible, what he refers to as “the a priori grounds for the possibility of experience.” Thus Kant observes that what appear to us in experience are objects, that is, we see things. But as we noted above, we don’t perceive the things directly, in themselves, rather we can perceive only appearances. So, to be more precise, what we really experience, when we “see” an object, is a representation of an object, though clearly we do recognize what we see as an object, even if we cannot see the object directly, as it is in-itself.
Time and Space: the Pure Forms of Sensible Intuition
But this raises the question, how do we recognize an object as an object? To begin with, all experience takes place in time: our experience, by nature, includes an awareness of past and future, even if the only direct, immediate experience we ever actually have is right now. After all, it is clear that the past is not, it does not exist for us, strictly speaking, because it is no longer. Nor does the future exist for us, strictly speaking, because it is not yet. And yet, we do experience past and future! In fact, the very recognition of an object, of which we maintain a representation in our consciousness, is possible precisely because we connect the immediate perception of the representation of the object now with our memory of the past representations of the object, implicitly asserting that the object we see now is the same as the object we have been observing for the past few moments or minutes or days. In other words, we can only notice that we are seeing an object as the object it is if our consciousness is effectively creating a synthesis of the innumerable representations of the same object over a period of time. We hold the past representations in our memories, and we anticipate the continuing representation of the same object into the indefinite future; so we are synthesizing a constant stream of representations stretching from the past into the future through the now. This is what it is to experience an object, and without some synthesis like this we would not—indeed we could not—have an experience of an object, as an object (a continuing object, we might say), in the first place.
Here we are engaged, we should continue to recall, in Kant’s transcendental method: rather than simply taking for granted that I see a house, for example, I am inquiring into the conditions of possibility for my doing that. Yes I see a house, that is a commonplace experience familiar to all; but we do not typically pause to consider how complex the process is that makes such an experience possible, which is what we are doing now. Indeed, when I see a house, like any other object in the external world, our experience does not only presuppose the existence of time, as we noted above, but also of space. The experience of pure, rational entities like mathematical truths do not necessarily require any recognition of space; though in adding two and three to get five I must have time to perform this operation, a pure mathematical truth like this does not presuppose any particular location or the need of any spatial location at all. By contrast, the experience of a physical object like a house is already an experience of something that occupies and takes up space and that is observed in a particular place in space, alongside other things in the space around it.
On observing how we must already have some consciousness of time to experience anything, and also of space to experience physical objects, Kant asserts that time and space are a priori conditions of experience which he refers to as “pure forms of sensible intuition”; he refers further to time as “inner sense” and to space as “outer sense,” since time-consciousness must be within us to permit the inner consciousness of any experience, and space-consciousness must be within us to permit the consciousness of things outside of us, that is, in space. In other words, our very consciousness must already contain time- and space-consciousness within itself, as original preconditions of experience, that is, a fundamental awareness of time and space must necessarily be already built into our consciousness in order for us to be able to have experiences of any kind.
The Three-Fold Synthesis of Apprehension, Reproduction and Recognition
So experience begins with pure sensible intuition of what Kant refers to as a manifold (since “thoughts without content are empty”). Such a manifold, as the term implies (many things folded together), is, of itself, just a mass of lights and shapes which in fact appears, at first glance, as a single, unified vision which, in itself, makes no sense to us. Strictly speaking, before we begin to process what appears before our eyes in a mere instant of vision, there is just a strobe-like series of disconnected flashes of sight, so to speak. This preliminary vision of simple, undetermined seeing Kant refers to as apprehension—pure sensation or intuition: the vision just happens, flashes before us, we come upon it of a sudden, before any thought has been exerted and thus before we can assert any knowledge of it—our vision of the manifold is simply there. But we are equipped a priori with time-consciousness, we are able to process this at-first undetermined manifold of appearance, and such processing entails what Kant refers to as reproduction, which simply refers to the functioning of the imagination, which copies and retains in memory, across the moments of time, the series of indeterminate apprehensions. Again, without such time-grounded reproduction in imagination our experience would consist of nothing more than a strobe-like series of immediate flashes of vision, with no connection from one moment to the next: it would be like always “living in the moment,” but in any given moment we would have no awareness that there had ever been or would be any other moments. But with the reproduction of imagination, we are able to reflect—or reproduce in consciousness—over time, on what is there in intuition.
One more crucial step is required, however, before we can identify any thing that we see as a single, unified and continuing thing; this step Kant refers to as recognition. In order to recognize a thing as any thing, much less as a particular thing with certain properties, set off against other things with different properties, the very idea of a thing, as such—the “thing in general”—must somehow be present to consciousness. And as we progress in our experience of some thing, we automatically observe it as one thing among other things, red and not blue, large and not small, etc. In short, in the apprehension of any object of experience, we automatically—that is, simply in our experience of it—think of it as belonging to certain “categories” of things according to such things as their size and shape and color, as being simple or composed of parts, of having a particular location in relation to other things and being a merely possible or necessary thing, etc. These categories of the innumerable properties that make one thing different from other things Kant refers to as “the pure concepts of the understanding”; in other words, Kant argues that we could not experience any object, as the object that it is and distinct from other objects, unless we had built into our consciousness, just as the pure intuitions of time and space are built into us, these various categories of how things can appear to us. It is only in experience of objects that we become aware of such categories, if we become aware of them at all; but it is Kant’s point that we could not recognize any object as the distinct object it is unless our consciousness were already possessed of such categories, starting with the basic category of “thing” itself. Thus, says Kant, the categories “are nothing but the conditions of thought in a possible experience, just as space and time are the conditions of intuition for that same experience.”
So this, in short, is the “three-fold synthesis” that, according to Kant, makes experience of anything possible; in other words, the very fact that we do have an experience of various objects in the world presupposes, even if we never bother to think about it, that our consciousness is constituted, or set up, in a certain way so as to make such experiences possible. Yes, we have experiences; but these mere sights and sounds of the world do not organize themselves into experiences; no, we do that—this is what it is to have an experience—and in order for us to do so, our consciousness must be previously equipped for the task. So, in sum, in order to experience even the sensible intuition of a thing we must have the built-in time- and space-consciousness of “the pure forms of intuition,” and in order to think about and so acquire knowledge of the things we sense we must have the built-in consciousness of the categories, “the pure concepts of the understanding”: in short, sensation presupposes the consciousness of time and space in which to sense, and thought presupposes the consciousness of categories of thought (and logic) with which to structure and organize our thinking (“intuitions without concepts are blind”).
The Self is Real, and We Know It A Priori
In our treatment of Hume, we observed at some length how he effectively denies the existence of the self; more specifically, what he denies is that the self can be known a priori, or that the self has a unitary identity―that there is an underlying, selfsame ground of personal existence. Instead, Hume insists that the self is simply made up as we go along through our experience of life, and that the self is simply that “bundle of perceptions” that coalesces according to the perceived similarities and causal connections of that constant stream of perceptions “which,” as Hume puts it, “succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”
For Kant, however, there must be a single, unified subject that is having an experience in order for there to be an experience. It is characteristic of Kant’s transcendental method that it forces us to notice what is behind our everyday experience that is making that experience possible; and the difficulty of Kant’s method often, it seems to me, has less to do with how mysterious the subject matter is than it has to do with how obvious it is. Thus, of course there must be some given apprehension of time and space, for otherwise no experience of any object would ever be possible; but such time- and space-consciousness is so tied-up with experience itself that we take it for granted and can hardly be aware that it is there. Similarly, though perhaps more subtly, when we develop the knowledge that one object is larger than another, we may not notice that some concept of size must already be built into our consciousness in order for us to apply it to the objects of experience; Hume would presumably insist that we develop the knowledge of smaller and larger from experience, but Kant, of course, insists that we could never have any idea of such a comparison without the prior category of magnitude being already somehow accessible to us, a priori.
As we turn now to the consideration of the existence of the self, the situation is substantially the same, since Kant argues that we can know the existence of the self a priori, since the self must be already present from the beginning of our first experience, as we could have no experience if there were not already a self there to have it. As with time- and space-consciousness and the categories, we rarely, if ever, have occasion to notice the existence of the self, since it is so close to us, as it were. Again, the difficulty of the existence of the self is not a matter of how mysterious it is so much as of how obvious it is: of course, Kant would say, the self must be there for how otherwise would I be having the experience I am so obviously having? I do not doubt, do I, that I see the house; but it is easy to overlook that there is no seeing of the house without the I that sees! So Kant agrees with Hume that we cannot have a direct sense impression, or in Kant’s terms, intuition, of the self as a distinct object in the world (for the thing-in-itself belongs to the realm of noumena); however, Kant very much disagrees with Hume’s notion that the self is simply made up as we go along collecting perceptions, and moreover, Kant also insists that the self must have an underlying reality preexisting all experience, for it is the self that provides the ground for experience and not, as for Hume, the other way around. In other words, whereas for Hume we first have perceptions and then from them formulate an idea of the self, for Kant all experience presupposes the prior existence of the self. Here again we are encountering Kant’s transcendental method, for it is Kant’s argument that the self must exist as the necessary condition for the possibility of experience: though we cannot see it directly, it must of necessity already be there, a prori, that is, prior to any experience that we might have, just as our time-and space-consciousness must be there to make sensible intuitions possible and the categories to make the cognition of the objects of experience possible.
The Self as Transcendental Unity of Apperception
Thus, concludes Kant, “We are conscious a priori of the complete identity of the self in respect of all representations which can ever belong to our knowledge, as being a necessary condition of the possibility of all representations.” In other words, prior to and independent of my experience, that is, the representation of objects to my consciousness, there must be a single, unified subject that is bringing together the unity of the manifold of perceptions that are coming into my intuition over time, for it is this unified subject, “I,” my self, that is responsible for the reproduction of the intuition of a given object over time so that the object can be recognized as the object that it is, over against and distinct from other objects (and for that matter, over against and distinct from myself). What Hume, in his reduction of the self to a “bundle of perceptions,” fails to account for is the act of bundling: Hume speaks as though there is something in the perceptions themselves that is going to unify and reproduce them over time so that they can be sensed and organize them so that they can be thought. Kant, however, notices what Hume does not, namely that this “act of bundling,” which is effectively what is going on in Kant’s three-fold synthesis of apprehension, reproduction and recognition, requires an agent, that is, the experiencing subject, the I that thinks, a self.
Kant refers to this action of experiencing with the term, “the transcendental unity of apperception.” By the term “apperception” Kant refers simply to the consciousness that we are perceiving something, that is, self-consciousness. More precisely, the self is already necessary even at the very first stage of the three-fold synthesis, immediate sensation or apprehension, since there has to be something to do the apprehending; but with simple apprehension, the self is entirely passive. At the stage of reproduction in imagination, the self must be active, as the imagination acts to connect the present apprehension to those of the past; but here the self is not necessarily yet conscious of itself. Self-consciousness is a necessary condition of the third stage of synthesis, recognition, since recognition entails, by nature, the awareness that I am having an experience: to recognize an object as the object it is implicitly requires that I recognize the object as separate from myself, thus the awareness of the self must be there in the process of recognition.
Although Kant’s phrase, “the transcendental unity of apperception,” is daunting on its face, it captures only what is required to make sense of the having of experience, the consciousness of the experience I am having and the consciousness of myself as the one having it, all of which must occur together in order for experience to be possible. In short, it is “transcendental” because it sets forth the conditions of possibility for experience; experience requires a “unity” because all experience occurs over time, thus there must be a “bundling” into a unity in order to make of the flow of representations over time an experience; and experience requires the activity of the one having the experience, including the awareness of the experience as an experience, which necessarily implies the a priori reality of a conscious self.
So Kant, while agreeing with Hume that the knowledge of the self, like all knowledge, begins with experience, insists, contrary to Hume, that it does not arise out of experience: the self must already be there as a necessary and prior condition of all possible experience. And we might note as well, in passing, that Kant differs also, though in a different way, from Descartes’s view of the “I think,” since for Descartes, contrary to both Kant and Hume, the knowledge of the self is at least in principle totally separate from the world of experience. So, in our knowledge of the self, we see a working example of Kant’s synthesis of the rationalism of Descartes (and Plato) and the empiricism of Hume: from Descartes Kant takes the a priori necessity of the “I” of “I think,” but, unlike Descartes, Kant insists that it is empirical experience that provides the occasion for its discovery. Unlike Hume, however, it is not the self that comes out of experience, rather experience is only possible due to the structure of the self, or in other words, for Hume experience is the necessary condition for the self, whereas for Kant it can only be the other way around, that is, the self must be there already if experience is even going to happen, thus the self is the necessary condition for experience.
The Law of Cause and Effect Must be True A Priori
Having now established, a priori, that the self must exist in order for knowledge to be possible, it is time to consider a particular rule or law of empirical knowledge and to establish that it is true a priori. In this we will have an example of Kant’s synthesis of understanding and sensation, of reason and intuition, of the rationalist and empiricist approaches to knowledge. The example that Kant takes up is none other than the law of cause and effect, which, as we have seen, constitutes for Hume the basis of all knowledge of the world, but the basis for which, Hume insists, can be only empirical. Again, for Kant the challenge is to establish that Hume is wrong about the empirical basis of the law of cause and effect and to establish rather that this law must be true a priori.
Kant’s argument, though perhaps subtle, is at the same time very simple. He begins by observing that all experience is successive—all our experience takes place over time, as we apprehend one thing after another, each moment’s apprehension succeeding that of the previous moment. We have discussed this previously in the context of the three-fold synthesis that experience essentially is, of the apprehension of the sensible manifold, the reproduction of this manifold over time by the imagination and the recognition of specific objects from within the manifold by virtue of concepts of the understanding. This three-fold synthesis, as we have seen, constitutes a set of necessary conditions for the possibility of experience; that is, we could not have experience of the world if these syntheses were not happening. So experience itself is a happening, we might say, which by nature plays out constantly over time and requires a synthesis of past and present, or of past and future in the present, in order to make it possible for any awareness of anything to occur.
Kant next observes that there are two fundamentally different kinds of “objects” that we experience: there are things like houses, which simply stand whole before us, and there are events, which happen over time. But Kant points out that in the case of our apprehension of a house, no less than in the apprehension of an event, a succession of perceptions is involved in our experience of it: “the apprehension of the manifold in the appearance of a house which stands before me is successive.” In other words, clearly it takes time to experience a house, to take it all in, to observe the arrangement of doors and windows and roof and so be able to recognize the house as a house, for the mere apprehension of the thing in one momentary “flash” would be gone as soon as it had occurred, and such a “flash” could not remotely constitute any kind of experience, much less constitute knowledge of what I was experiencing or the fact that the experience was mine; moreover, I need time to take in its various parts and to put them all together in consciousness to recognize that what I’m seeing is a house. In the case of thing as familiar as a house, the synthesis of successive perceptions happens so quickly it may seem to be instantaneous, but in fact it takes at least a few moments to experience the house, as a house—that is, to recognize what it is I’m seeing, which is just another way of saying that my experience is successive since I observe first one part of it, then another, etc., over time putting it all together into a single, unified synthesis of the experience of a house.
But, Kant continues, “The question then arises, whether the manifold of the house is in itself successive. This, however, is what no one will grant.” When he refers to “the manifold of the house,” Kant means the various parts of the house that we synthesize in our imagination over time to be able to recognize the house as a house, and by the term “in itself” Kant refers to the way the house itself is, apart from our experiencing of it. So the question he raises here is whether the manifold components of the house are themselves arranged in any particular order in time, and this “no one will grant” because clearly that is not the case since when I experience a house I can take in its various components, the manifold of its appearance, in any kind of order, starting with the roof and going successively to windows and then to the door, or vice versa, or right to left or left to right etc. Thus, though a succession of parts over time is required of my experience, there is no necessary order in which the apprehension of those parts must be arranged, that is, there is no prior determination of how I must apprehend the various parts that go to make up the overall experience of the house—again, I can look first at the roof and then proceed to look at windows and door, or start with the door, etc.
The matter is utterly different, however, in the case of the apprehension of an event. The very apprehension of an event, or something that happens, consists of a fundamentally different kind of succession than occurs in the apprehension of a thing like a house, for in the case of the event the apprehension consists of the observation of a coming-to-be of a “state” or condition of things that did not previously exist. The house, as long as it just stands there, is not experienced as coming to be, for it is all there as I experience it; the experience of an event, by contrast, is precisely the experiencing of a happening in time, of the replacement of one state of things with another. Consider, for example, the event of billiard ball A impacting billiard ball B and the subsequent movement of B. These movements are each distinct events unto themselves (as Hume observed); however, together they constitute a single, unified event, and the experience of this unified event involves the change from the state in which A was moving and B at rest, to the state in which B is moving. To experience that B was at rest and then moved is to experience that a complete change in the state of B, from rest to motion, happens. Notice that I used the term “subsequent” to qualify the movement of B, which implies, of course, that the movement of B comes after the impact with A, and this, of course, is quite true; but the significance of this is that the order of succession of the movements of A and B is objectively determined in its order—that is, it is not determined by me as my apprehension of the house is—and moreover that such determination is evidently necessary, since it is impossible for me to experience the event of A hitting B and B moving in any other order. Consider that Berkeley’s reasoning distinguishing sensation from imagination is analogous to Kant’s concerning our apprehension of events: Berkeley observes that we can control our own imaginings but we can not control our sensations, indicating that there is some power external to us that determines them, and for Berkeley that implies that something must exist that is prior to us in Being, namely God; similarly for Kant, we are unable to determine the order in which we perceive the movement of the billiard balls, implying that there is something prior in Being that enables our experience of events, which, as we shall see, must be the law of cause and effect.
Thus in the case of the apprehension of an event, says Kant, “The order in which the perceptions succeed one another in apprehension is in this instance determined, and to this order apprehension is bound down.” As we have seen, I am responsible for my experience to a point, in that, following the immediate apprehension of the sensible intuition that presents itself to me, I must act to employ the synthesis of reproduction by the imagination to unify the succession of apprehensions over time to form a single, coherent experience, and then I must supply the further synthesis of recognition to achieve the fuller unity of consciously recognizing that I am observing and what I am observing. In the experience of a thing like a house, it is up to me to determine what components of the object I apprehend, in what order, as I engage in the synthesis that constitutes the experience of the house; however, in the experience of an event, the order of succession of the various components of the event is not subject to my determination. In other words, whereas the experience of the order in which I apprehend the manifold of the house is subjective, since I can apprehend the various parts of it in whatever order I choose, here the order of apprehension is objective since it clearly is not determined, subjectively, by me. Therefore, in the experience of an event there must necessarily be an objective “rule” that determines the order of synthesis for me, a rule that places the motion of A before B and connects the two in precisely that way, and this rule is, of course, the law of cause and effect. This law is necessarily and universally true, thus true a priori, argues Kant, for the event can be experienced in no other order than what is given and determined prior to experience; indeed, the very fact that I experience the movements of A and B as constituting a single event, that is, the very fact that I experience the entire event as a single experience, establishes that the connection between them is not one that I create by my repeated experience of like events, as Hume would have us believe, but a connection without which I could not experience the event, as an event, at all.
Hume makes the point, in observing the motions of the billiard balls A and B, that the motion of A is an entirely different event than the motion of B; from this he draws the conclusion that we have no way of experiencing them as being connected to each other by the law of cause and effect except empirically, by the repeated experience of like events. Thus, Hume argues, the law of cause and effect is known only empirically and not a priori: the knowledge of it, he has claimed, comes only from and after experience (a posteriori); Kant insists rather that the law of cause and effect must already be true a priori because it must be part of our consciousness prior to our experiencing of the event in the first place, just as there must exist the self, a priori, before we can engage in the active syntheses required of experience. Thus Kant observes, “If, then, we experience that something happens, we in so doing always presuppose that something precedes it, on which it follows according to a rule. Otherwise I should not say of the object that it follows.”
In other words, Kant too acknowledges that the movement of the two balls exist as separate events; however, the fact that I can experience the event of the second ball as an event, as a happening, already presupposes, as a necessary condition, that something has preceded it, since what the experience of an event is is the experience of the state of things now as replacing the state of things that came before, as we saw above with the change in the state of B from a state of rest to a state of motion. Thus Kant says, “That something happens, i.e. that something, or some state which did not previously exist, comes to be, cannot be perceived unless it is preceded by an appearance which does not contain in itself this state.” In other words, in experiencing ball B as undergoing the transition from rest to motion, we are already experiencing the concept of succession in time that is determined not by me but for me, thus prior to my experiencing of it; thus, to experience this transition is already to presuppose, though we do not ordinarily have to think about it, that some other event preceded this one, and that that prior event is what caused the transition from rest to motion.
This is Kant’s transcendental method at work: whereas Hume just takes experience for granted and omits to consider how it is even possible, Kant recognizes that the very fact that we can have experience demands explanation; moreover, it must be a metaphysical explanation since we cannot have an empirical experience of what makes such experience possible. As we have seen, Kant observes that there must be a subject (a self) having an experience prior to any the experience of any object, and this self must be equipped to see, to remember and to recognize things, in time and space; and in the case of events, we observe that there is a fixed order of succession in which the various episodes within the event (movement of A, collision, movement of B) occur thus indicating that there must be an objective rule that determines this order. We cannot have a direct experience of the law of cause and effect, for it is not a physical thing, which brings Kant to ask the transcendental question—what are the necessary conditions of possibility —what must be true prior to my experience—for the thing that I do have an experience of such as the event of the motion of the billiard balls. As we have seen, I cannot fail to conceive, in the case of my experience of an event, that a certain order of apprehension is determined for me, since it is impossible for me to experience the event of the motions of A and B in any order but that in which I do experience them. I could dream of a backward motion, or perhaps even hallucinate things in reverse, or otherwise imagine, fictitiously, the balls moving otherwise; but I cannot actually experience them in any other order, try as I might.
In sum, whereas the order in which I perceive the manifold of a thing, such as the house, is purely subjective, the experience of any event depends upon, as its necessary, a priori condition, my assumption of the existence of an objective rule that determines the order of my experience in time. This rule is the law of cause and effect, and it must be true a priori in order for me even to have any experience of any event. “The experience of an event (i.e. of anything as happening) is itself possible only on this assumption.” And since I do experience events, and I could not do so without the prior existence of that rule, the rule must be true, prior to my experience, that is not empirically but a priori.
The Autonomy of the Self: Human Freedom and the Moral Law
The law of cause and effect, as we have so far been considering it, has been the law that governs the motions of objects of sensible experience; so the transcendental method, as applied to that law, has sought the conditions of possibility for the way that these objects of experience appear to us, for is it is only as appearances that we can know them. This recalls the distinction mentioned early on between the realms of phenomena and noumena, the former being the realm of appearance, which we can observe, the latter of things-in-themselves, which are totally beyond our direct apprehension or comprehension. Thus, as we have seen, both the idea of the self and the law of cause and effect belong, in themselves, to the realm of noumena, but we can know them a priori, as we have also seen, by employing the transcendental method according to which the idea of the self and the law of cause and effect must necessarily be real and true since no experience would be possible if they were not.
As we turn to the issue of human freedom, we will be dealing again with cause and effect, for human freedom is itself essentially a causal power, that is, it is a faculty or ability to act, to make things happen, to create its own reality, so to speak; however, the law of cause and effect involved with human freedom is, for Kant, fundamentally different from that which governs the world of phenomena or appearance. Recall that for Hume (as for Hobbes), by contrast, there is only one sort of cause and effect that governs both the motions of natural phenomena—that is, physical objects—and the actions of human beings; so for Hume there can be no real distinction between human liberty and natural necessity. Thus, on Hume’s account there is no genuine freedom of the will since human liberty, as in Hobbes’s materialist view, amounts to nothing more than the lack of a constraint, and there can be no free will because we are not free to will what we will, we do not originate our own actions, for our wills, along with our actions, are the products of strictly natural necessity that can only follow from the same necessary, causal links that govern the motions of billiard balls.
For Kant, by contrast, human freedom of the will represents an essentially different kind of causality, a causality governed by reason, which thereby separates human actions from all other purely natural actions such as those of animals and physical objects: “The will is a kind of causality belonging to human beings insofar as they are rational,” whereas “natural necessity is the property of the causality of all non-rational beings.” In short, human beings, unlike all other (non-rational) beings, whether animate or inanimate, are, in the first instance, aware of their actions; in this Hume and Hobbes would agree. But, according to Kant, human beings can act in accordance with reason—that is, we have the capacity (though we may sometimes fail to exercise it) to act for “reasons of our own,” we might say, to think our actions through, that is, to deliberate; it is thus that we hold ourselves morally responsible for our actions, and we say such actions are “intentional” and are done “deliberately.” Recall, of course, that Hobbes also employs the term “deliberate” to qualify human actions, but Hobbes explicitly applies the term to “beasts” as well as to humans, which reminds us that “deliberation,” as Hobbes uses the term, refers only to a mechanical weighing of desires against aversions and very explicitly does not refer to genuine freedom of the will. Thus for Hobbes and Hume, the will itself is not free, in-itself, because the same principles of natural necessity are at work in the determination of the motions of the will as in the motions of billiard balls; in the case of Hobbes, in particular, the external—that is, “heteronomous”—forces at work are the capacity of external objects to furnish pleasure or pain. By contrast, Kant insists that human actions are “autonomous”—“auto”-“nomos,” i.e. “self-ruled.” For Kant human beings are genuinely free and capable of responsible and thus moral action because the human will is not mechanically determined by external forces, rather the will rules itself and is determined only by itself. This does not mean that the decisions of the will are made without reference to external events in the physical world of appearances; on the contrary, we would never have occasion to make such decisions in the first place if it were not for that experience, just as we would have no occasion to seek knowledge were it not for experience. But as we have seen in the case of knowledge, for Kant the fact that knowledge begins with experience does not entail that it arises from experience, and the same is true of the determination of the will: the fact that the decisions of the will are directed to actions in the world of sensible appearance does not entail that the will’s decisions are determined by, or derived from, the world of appearance, for in fact, argues Kant, the decisions of the will are autonomous and thus derived, using reason, strictly from within the will itself.
Kant’s “Two Worlds”: The World of Appearance and the Intelligible World
So the will, like physical objects, is governed by a kind of cause and effect, but the law of cause and effect that governs the will is not the law of physical motions but the law of reason; it is this law of reason that furnishes the “rule” that makes possible the will’s autonomy, that is, its self-rule. When people talk commonly today about freedom they are always concerned with the self; however, those who think of freedom in the materialist Hobbesian terms, as I have suggested, are dealing with a limited and superficial version of freedom, one concerned only with the self’s being free of physical restraints, leaving aside any notion of “rule.” But for Kant, human freedom is not a matter of a lack of restraint on the self, for it does involve a rule; however, it is a rule imposed not from without, but a rule that one gives to oneself through one’s own exercise of reason, one’s own rational deliberation.
In short, the causal law that furnishes the rule for human autonomy must be essentially different from that which governs the physical actions in the world of appearance. Indeed, the autonomous determinations of human actions, while influenced by external events, are nonetheless determined by one’s own internal, rational deliberations. Thus human autonomy belongs to a “world” altogether separate from the world of sense, or of external, physical appearance; this other world Kant refers to as the intelligible world, where the laws of causality are governed not by the mechanical laws that govern physical bodies in the world of appearance, but by the moral law which guides human decisions and actions. Thus, it is by no means the case that human freedom is lawless, arbitrary and unconstrained; on the contrary, human freedom is governed by its own, internal law, the law not of mechanics but of morality.
The basis for the distinction between the world of appearance and the intelligible world has in fact already been prefigured in Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena. We have seen, for example, that the law of cause and effect, in itself, cannot be observed as a phenomenon, directly, and therefore that it belongs essentially to noumena; likewise, the human self, in itself, also belongs to noumena, as it is essentially a thing in itself which, while necessary, like the law of cause and effect, to the possibility of experience, cannot be seen, as such. So, says Kant, “we must admit and assume that behind the appearance there is something else which is not appearance, namely, things in themselves,” thus there must be “two worlds,” one world of things that appear to us, as phenomena, governed by the mechanical laws of cause and effect, and another world that does not appear, but must necessarily exist as the world of appearance could not appear to us as it does, or at all, without it.
Kant’s Moral Theory
For further exposition of the basis of Kant’s views, it is now necessary to turn to his moral theory, which is the subject of a later chapter. For the present, let me conclude this chapter with a final note, which may serve as a brief preview of that later chapter.
Kant famously writes, “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.” This chapter has focused on matters falling under the category of “the starry heavens above,” the areas of metaphysics and epistemology—what is “real” and what we “know.” Kant, as we have seen, insists that certain laws of nature, such as the law of cause and effect, are necessarily true and that the self, likewise, certainly and necessarily exists; moreover, the fact that we can discern the necessity of the existence of these things entails that our knowledge of them must be a priori.
Kant’s “reverse Copernicanism” takes its point of departure, as we have seen, not from the objects of the world but from the self and its experience, asking, transcendentally, for the conditions of possibility of that experience. And in so considering the self, we have quite naturally been brought to consider the issue of freedom, which is the condition of possibility for moral action, since there would be no point in exercising ourselves over what we ought to do unless it were up to us, through our free action, to bring it about.
Finally, just as there is, for Kant, a domain of law, such as that of cause and effect, that governs the mechanical motions of the physical bodies in the “world of appearance,” there must also be a domain of law that governs the free determinations of our wills in “the intelligible world,” and this is precisely “the moral law.” In the case of the mechanical laws that determine the movements of physical bodies, such movements are determined heteronomously, that is, externally, such as the motions of the second billiard ball being caused by that of the first. By contrast, the law that governs the free determinations of the will is autonomous, that is, governed from within, by the will itself.
Indeed, human freedom, on Kant’s terms, is not, as we have noted, a “negative” capacity, as in Hobbes and Hume, to do whatever one wants, without external restraint, but a positive power to create a new world, so to speak, to determine not merely what is, but to determine what ought to be. As a positive power, it must also have reference to some real and objective meaning, thus it must be subject to some cognizable rule; however, such rule, because determined from within the self, autonomously, is the rule not of mere mechanical necessity, but the rule of freedom.
This, then, is the subject of Kant’s moral theory, to the chapter concerning which the reader is now referred.
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