Logos
Page 9
In summary, concerning the noumenal realm, not only is there nothing to be said about its intrinsic properties, there is nothing intelligible to be conceived of its relationship to, in particular its role in the genesis of, the phenomenal realm, either as a totality or as regards the particular dispositions of its contents. Without causation, or any other power of “becausation”, it does no work at all and, indeed, it must remain idle if it is to serve the purpose for which Kant introduced it.10 Its job is to save Kant the embarrassment of being regarded as a Berkeleian idealist. As such, it seems little more than a “placeholder” to reassure us that appearances are not disconnected, free-floating, and unjustified and that our knowledge has grounds outside of knowledge. They do not, however, deliver much reassurance because the phenomena are appearances of things (noumena) that have no intrinsic properties relevant to the appearances. As objects of (purely) intellectual intuition they would be available only to God who would think and create them in the same instant.
It might be argued in Kant’s defence that when he says that there is nothing that can be said about the noumenal realm (or reality behind appearance), he means exactly what he says. So we cannot even discuss its having or not having specific causal properties to justify the specific experiences that our minds order according to the forms of sensible intuition and the categories of the understanding. That, however, is to evade the question and also to be inconsistent in the application of the limits he places on metaphysical explanation. His claim, for example, that space and time are forms of sensible intuition that are not inherent in reality seems to transgress beyond his self-imposed limitations in two ways. Firstly, it gets outside of experience (admittedly using reason rather than experience) to look behind it to its workings. Secondly, it defines the noumenal realm at least privatively by asserting that many things are not true of it – such as spatiality, temporality and causal connectedness.
At any rate, it is evident that minds in the plural, actual minds, your mind, my mind, minds of subjects embodied in bits of flesh, cannot each, individually, be the bearers of space and time which for Kant are unified, connected totalities (as they are in common sense) in which all things are located. Their specific experiential contents presuppose spatial and temporal locations conferred upon them through living bodies that are themselves located in space and time. What we experience depends on where we are and where we are is anchored in the location of our bodies – in a pre-existing, objective, shared space-and-time – that could not themselves be synthesized, nor located through, the activities of our minds since the latter would lack a point d’appui.
This is not to reject the Kantian notion of the spontaneous activity of the mind. There is a sense in which our minds are active inasmuch as we can, of course, adjust our experiences by redirecting or resetting our attention. That, however, is a liberty we exercise within the constraints of a pre-given sensory field. I can look to the left or to the right, focus on the colour of something rather than its shape, or on the voice of the person talking to me rather than the background bruit. I have no discretion over seeing unaided a village in another continent or the back of the moon. I cannot hear a whispered conversation ten miles away or observe George III ascend the throne. In short, I have – or in some sense am – a viewpoint that is in the first and last instance located in, and both enabled and constrained by, the location of a body itself occupying a certain location in space and time. Collapsing the gap between mind and world by locating the primordial outsides even of physical space inside the mind, in “us”, cannot accommodate this fundamental aspect of experience.
It has been suggested to me that this is no more problematic than the recognition that many features of the world are both mind-generated and constrained by extra-mental reality.11 These may be gathered under the general heading of “secondary qualities” that Galileo drew attention to and Locke made central to epistemology. Tomatoes are not red in themselves: they become red only to conscious beings with a particular kind of nervous system; their redness is not an intrinsic property but a disposition to induce a sense of redness that is realized only when they fall within a particular kind of visual field. This does not, however, palliate the scandal of Kant’s gathering space (the source of primary qualities such as size, shape and location) and time into the mind. The idea of mind-dependent secondary qualities at least presupposes distinct objects and minds, located in space and time, and causally interacting. Kant’s mind-dependent space and time takes away all of this, folding all the constraints on objects into the mind. That is a fundamental difference between Lockean (and comparable forms of anti-realist) empiricism and Kantian transcendental idealism.
The fact that I find myself in a particular region of space and over particular stretches of time cannot therefore be reconciled with the (seemingly disembodied, de-situated) Kantian mind as the source of space and time. Viewpoints are populated with the objects and events located in the portion of space in which they are, courtesy of living bodies, located. More precisely, they are populated with objects and events seen from a certain perspective, without which there would be no appearances. Think of the (non-) appearance of a rock from no perspective, observed at no scale.
If the human body – an object located in space and time – owed its most important features to the activity of the mind, there would be no basis for the token world that is the cognate object of an individual consciousness. More specifically, space and time would appear twice: as, according to Kant, that which any viewpoint (or mind) must generate to order its experiences; and that, according to common sense, in which the viewpoint is already located, and more broadly individuated, courtesy of the body of the subject. The viewpoint has to be found a place in the very view he/she upholds and thus lay claim to his own patch of space-time.
Making sense of this becomes even more difficult when the self undergoes Kantian treatment.12 Kant agrees with Hume that the self is not an object, an item, that can be encountered in perception. It is sustained by an activity: the apperception of perceiving and unifying one’s own perceptions. The self is the product of the “synthetic unity of apperception”, in virtue of which I ascribe my experiences to myself, and which also unifies the objective world.
The connection is lucidly expressed by P. F. Strawson:
What is required for a series of experiences to belong to a single consciousness is that they should possess precisely the rule-governed connectedness which is also required for them collectively to constitute a temporally extended experience of a single objective world. The burden of the entire argument is thus shifted to the necessary unity of consciousness.13
And this is amplified by Gardner: “The Copernican strategy of explaining objects in terms of our mode of cognition amounts to explaining objects in general in terms of one privileged real object, the self, which has the role of providing a fundamental ontological condition for all other objects.”14 The self is not merely the epistemic underpinning of our knowledge of objects but the condition of there being (discrete, stable, unified) objects at all.
Kant speaks of the self as having the capability of accompanying each perception with “I think” and in virtue of this claiming ownership of those perceptions.15 The transcendental self is the necessary condition of perception. It is, however, difficult to see how the self could identify itself as the same self – the thinker as the same thinker – without a spatiotemporally trackable body tagging it.16 And it is the body, of course, that ensures that the experiences are valid and relevant to a person’s life. Kant’s claim that the synthetic unity of apperception is secured by a transcendental subject belonging to the noumenal realm, simply compounds the difficulty of a) securing the intersection of mind and noumenal world, and b) of explaining how our experiences are about or of individual worlds bespoke to our individual lives and minds. The body that seems to be necessary to secure the life of the (empirical) self that has, or is, a viewpoint on the world, and synthesizes that world into a unity, is an ill-mat
ched partner for the transcendental self, given that the former is located in space and time and is an object on all fours with, moving among and interacting with, other objects, denizens likewise of the phenomenal realm. The body appears to be required to sustain that in virtue of which the self has a particular world – namely, the sensorium that delivers particular sense experiences and the mind that allocates sense experience to spatiotemporally located objects and places them under the categories of understanding.
It may be argued that the synthetic power of the mind or self merely orders what is given but doesn’t itself give anything.17 We have already noted the problems that arise if we think of the noumenal realm serving itself up to individuals: what would it serve up, to whom, and how? If there were intrinsic “givenness” in the noumenon that was harvested by minds or empirical selves, the latter would seem to be superfluous to requirement or as idle as the noumenal realm in the more conventional interpretation of Kant that we discussed earlier. If the mind was not idle and did have the role Kant assigned to it, then what is served up would lack spatial location and temporal order, location, or duration, which would not be much of a constraint on the operation of the mind. At the risk of mixing metaphors, we might say that the mind, imposing primary qualities (and presumably secondary) qualities on the noumenal offer, had a pretty free hand.
There is another defence of Kant; namely that identifying the self with a viewpoint as it is usually construed is to miss the entire point of his analysis of the subject, by reducing the latter to the empirical self. Kant postulates that there is a transcendental self which is itself divisible into the self as transcendental subjectivity (the condition of there being objects), and the self as a thing in itself, as a noumenon. But this distinction only displaces, without resolving, the problem of how to connect the individual, empirical self situated in, or relating to, a particular, bespoke, world with the self as a category that transforms the noumenal realm into the phenomenal one. The doubling of the self into transcendental and empirical realizations simply highlights the paradoxical notion of undifferentiated noumenal items grounding individual differentiated phenomenal realities, and by so grounding them providing the basis of a distinction between veridical perceptions and hallucinations.
There is another challenge to the Kantian system – opposite to the mystery that is driving the present inquiry. It is not that of how we understand so much – the mystery of the comprehensibility of the world – but how we understand so little: how our knowledge is so far from completeness. If knowledge arises out of experience and experience is shaped by the mind – even to the point where the synthetic power of the mind is the lawgiver of nature18 – how are we to account for cognitive growth – both in individual lives and over successive epochs of humanity, even if we are careful to distinguish between law-governed nature and the laws that are extracted by the non-natural means of scientific inquiry? And how are knowledge and understanding developed to such different degrees in different people, and different cultures, or at different times in the same person?
It would be a fundamental misunderstanding of Kant to suggest that he imagined that he believed that science advances by introspection; or that we arrived at the field equations of general relativity by turning our gaze on the forms of sensible intuition and the categories of the understanding.19 After all, he maintains that nature is “not a thing in itself but merely an aggregate of appearances”.20 Even so, there is no way of engaging with the partial comprehensibility or the progression towards more complete understanding. We are either omniscient from the start – since what we know is internal to us and the synthetic power of the mind is the lawgiver of nature; or – since the noumenal realm has the monopoly on reality and is inaccessible to experience – we are and remain totally ignorant of what is real, although, through the power of reason, we are somehow apprised of our ignorance. There seems to be no place for the gradual, painstaking uncovering of the laws, and even the nature, of nature in his system according to which “the order and regularity of the appearances, that we entitle nature, we ourselves introduce”.21
Thus, Kant’s transcendental idealism would seem to turn our mystery upside down: it is no longer the fact that we know so much but that we know so little that demands explanation. We are at a loss to explain the influence of location in space and time, and our personal and collective history, on the growth of our knowledge, and the constraints on what we individually and collectively know. We cannot give an account of why advances in understanding nature do not merely amount to an advance in self-understanding or an understanding of our understanding. If the laws of nature are intrinsic to all possible experience, Kant may as well concede that they belong to nature herself, a nature independent of any particular mind and hence of “mind”.
Moreover, Kant does not begin to address the character of something that lies between the individual mind and “mind” as a category; namely the community of minds in which knowledge, understanding, intelligibility is progressed and held in store – though it has to be realized in individual minds – and which is reflected in the individual self that grows in, and makes sense of itself and its world. The problem presented for Kant by the community of minds, consisting of separate individual viewpoints with distinctive histories, but profoundly interdependent, further highlights the fundamental weakness of his account of the relationship between mind and world: namely, its failure to distinguish between mind-in-general and mind realized in individual consciousnesses. This failure makes it impossible to account for, or even conceive, the individual configuration of our experiences and of the individual scope of our ability to act.
That these questions do not figure as large as they should perhaps may be because Kant and the Kantians do not clearly specify whether the mind is a general category or, on the other hand, a collection of individual consciousnesses that are indissolubly caught up in individual living bodies, and which can be extinguished by fatal damage to those bodies. This ambiguity makes it possible to avoid the obvious question of how the space and time that constitute the forms of (sense) experience are differentiated into specific insides and outsides, particular “heres” and “theres”, specific “nows” and “thens”, my world and your world. If individual minds were constituents of an undifferentiated “mind-in-general” supporting a unified phenomenal realm – “the world” – there would be no way of explaining the multiplicity of distinct worlds, the difference between a private and a public realm, and even the vulnerability of those worlds to a particular bash on a particular head. Even less would it explain how the mind, as a shifting viewpoint, would be able to travel in space.22
A direct consequence of this ambiguity – whether mind is a non-located category or is distributed through independent embodied subjects that are themselves located – is that Kant can seem to get away with giving no clear account of the relationship between the transcendental, ideal, space and time imported by subjects and the empirical spaces and times in which objects are located and subjects live and objects are encountered by people. Accepting that space and time could not be discovered through experience but must be presupposed in it leaves conspicuously unexplained our individual descent to the particular spaces and times in which we and the things we live among are experienced. The particular “outsides” and “insides” remain unexplained if we gather the General Outside into the subject, and subject and object underwrite each other, and we do not assign a key role to our (non-transcendent) bodies. Or if, as Gardner has expressed it, “self-consciousness [is]… viewed … as the encompassing ground of the world of objects”.23 This leaves token worlds that are the cognate objects of individual subjects conspicuously unexplained if the living body, that would seem to provide the basis for the individuation and coherence of consciousness, itself owes its unity to the unifying power, the transcendental apperception, of the mind.
As we have seen, the problem this presents is no way alleviated by invoking the distinction between the transcendental a
nd empirical selves; it simply moves the problem on from minds to selves. The transcendental self is merely the unifying principle accompanying all perceptions and other mental phenomena. Its relationship is an internal one: the self-consciousness of the self identifies its ever-changing contents as belonging to the same individual. It clearly contributes nothing to the localization of mind or minds within the world or in its own world. What is more, the Kantian transcendental self or subject is unnervingly impersonal, being over-and-against the experienced world and the empirical self. It is not clear how it interacts with the latter; or how the two aspects of the subject – transcendental and empirical – are united such that the mind that underpins space and time is able to locate itself within a portion of space over a stretch of time.24
Could Kant defend himself by arguing that, while subjects or minds are independent, they are not spatially or temporally located in virtue of their being associated with an individual living body? I think not, for it would leave unanswered the legitimate question as to what confers their individuality upon individual minds? A mind is a viewpoint, a “take”, on the world and such a take would not be possible without an indissoluble relationship to a body located in space and time. Such a relationship must be more intimate than a (dualist) partnership: it must be embodiment. The body in virtue of which actual minds are embodied is (among other things) an object among other objects, located in space and time.