Logos

by Tallis Raymond

  In short, by collapsing the distance between the mind and its experienced world, Kant seems to remove any basis for the way we experience what is out there, for our experiencing a particular “out there” – and a fortiori for being ourselves in that particular “there”, for being given in experience as well as givers of experience, being that in virtue of which there is objective, empirical knowledge and objects of that knowledge. The real outside is moved to an unknowable margin, the noumenal realm, and particular experienced outsides (and the contrast between outside and inside) seem groundless. The phenomenal realm of appearances from nowhere-in-particular would be of nowhere-in-particular. Timeless, locationless, noumena, not in a causal relationship to phenomena, can hardly stand surety for the validity of appearances that have specific spatiotemporal features and which are not hallucinations. Kant, it seems wants to retain an independent external reality to avoid pure (Berkeleian) idealism and yet cannot grant that outside any features to justify its appearances as appearances “of”. There is neither a causal nor intentional relationship between the phenomenal and noumenal world.

  What we have lost is the fullness of the idea of an objective world. Such a world, as we know and suffer it, is not simply an aggregation of objects like mountains and cups and human bodies whose unity and relationships are imposed by the mind. It is much more. It is a mind-independent law-governed, spontaneously active domain, within which our lives are regulated, our destinies enacted and, with some significant margins of freedom, determined. The noumenal realm that lacks all the properties of that world could not supply this. It is not the kind of “outside” into which we are plunged, into which we are born (without being consulted) and out of which we fall as we die.

  For these reasons, the Kantian collapse of the distance between mind and world does not help us to address, or in any way diminish, the mystery of the comprehensibility of the world, even less the kind of hard-won progressive comprehensibility that we associate with the advance of science.25 And Kant may well have accepted that, as a consequence of his commitment to a more modest mission for philosophy than the metaphysician’s traditional ambition to make the world intelligible. It was, however, not surprising that some of Kant’s successors, notably Hegel, saw the Kantian explanation of the world’s making sense as an unsatisfactory half-way house to a full-blown idealism and that understanding could be understood if we saw it as a progressive replacement of matter by mind and individual minds by an Absolute Spirit. In short, they rejected his transcendental idealism in favour of a pure idealism that allowed nothing outside of the realm of the mind.

  We have entered upon vast territory and it will be wise for this writer not to advance any further. However, it is worth noting that subsequent philosophers who have dismissed Kant’s approach to collapsing the distance between the comprehending mind and the comprehending world have often done so by sharing his objections to the way the problem has been framed. The original sin, it is argued, has been the Cartesian error of a dualism which begins with a mind that is directly available to itself but must somehow get outside of itself in order to acquire reliable knowledge of the material world set out in space. Locke denied that the mind had intrinsic properties separate from the experienced world: it was built up out of experiences. For Kant, however, this would not deliver the coherent unified world of causally, interacting, enduring objects set out in space and time for a consistent and coherent self. It seems too haphazard. Self and objects would be exposed as “logical fictions” or “logical constructions” as arch-sceptic Hume pointed out.26

  Kant thought that he had found the way of addressing the “scandal” of philosophy that it had not found a rational proof of the existence of an external world. His response – that the external world, insofar as it appears to us and is set out in space and time is in fact internal – simply moves the problem to a different place. An alternative response is the second-order scepticism of those who feel that there is something deeply fishy about a scepticism that questions the reality of the external world. Prominent among these meta-sceptics is Martin Heidegger and it is worth glancing at his hugely influential dissolution of the problem that Kant endeavoured to solve.

  In Being and Time Heidegger argued that the “scandal” of philosophy “is not that we lack this proof [of the existence of an external world of which we had certain knowledge] but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again”.27 Such proofs would not be needed if philosophers did not begin in the wrong place – the Cartesian place of a mind (or a self, spirit, or soul) divorced from a world assumed to be of an entirely different (material) nature, accessed through the mediation of a consciousness that had to piece it together.

  What is primordial, Heidegger asserts, is being-in-the-world and this is where we should begin our philosophical investigations. We are not therefore minds attempting to contact an utterly other reality to which we have only mediated access. On the contrary, as beings “whose being is an issue for itself”, we are thrown into, rather than sealed off from, the world: our very being – or Being-there or Da-sein – is to be engaged with, caught up in, caring for, the world, as an inseparable part of our caring for ourselves. The world, in the first instance, consists of entities that underpin a network of significations, not the inert objects transfixed by the “rigid staring” that characterizes the stance of the philosopher. The world of Da-sein does not therefore have to be discovered, constructed, unified: it is something deeper than all this – it is “the clearing of Being”. The work done by the Kantian mind is not therefore required because we do not begin in an inside that is trying to piece together an outside. Our very being is already out there and if we cannot see this fundamental fact of our existence, it is because of the intellectualist Cartesian spectacles through which we see our being in the world. Placing “disclosedness” – which is not of the world but is the world – at the centre of being-in-the-world bypasses the need for an interaction between the conscious subject and the world of which he or she is conscious. Kant’s unsatisfactory solution was to a non-existent problem.

  Unfortunately, Heidegger’s rejection of Kant’s problem itself generates problems analogous to those we have identified in relation to Kant’s internalizing the outside world; namely, that of explaining the parochiality of our being, our lives, our knowledge, our viewpoint, and the fact that our understanding is partial and capable of growth (and contraction) with the passage of time, that certain things and not others are disclosed to us and that they vary from person to person and from time to time.

  Just as Kant exploits an ambivalence between Mind as a category and minds corresponding to individual consciousnesses, so Heidegger’s Da-sein is neither entirely a general category or an indefinite number of individuals. If it were a general category, then we would be unable to explain our individual lives and viewpoints (and their limitations), account for how the Open disclosed to us is closed off or limited, its being limited by an horizon. If on the other hand Da-sein were allocated to, or distributed between, individuals, the consciousness localized by its body (as opposed to being-in-the-world) returns, along with the problem of access to the world.28

  In contemporary thought, idealistic notions about collapsing the gap between mind and world have come from what might seem to be an entirely unexpected source: hard physical science, specifically the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. According to this interpretation no physical parameter – at least at the fundamental level – has a definite value, indeed a reality, until it is measured. Mind seems to permeate the physical world at the atomic level.

  This is an illusion but it is worth dwelling on at least briefly because quantum idealism is widely discussed and taken seriously by many thinkers.29 One of its most flamboyant exponents was John Wheeler who developed the idea of a participatory universe arguing that “IT” (the universe) came “from BIT” – that is bits of information. We shall return to this in Chapter 8 but for the present we note that this form of idea
lism would not address the inadequacies of either Kant’s transcendental idealism or Heidegger’s existentialism. If mind was everywhere – and we were able to access the universe because we had a crucial role in its creation or determination – it would be difficult to understand: a) how it would be gathered up into localized minds such as yours and mine that are aware of, perceive, or know, or understand, some things rather than others; b) the dependency of knowledge on the viewpoint of an embodied subject; or c) any form of liberation from cognitive limitation. Another way of putting this is that the entangled single wave-function universe of quantum mechanics does not seem to be able to accommodate the multiple, distinct, conscious viewpoints of the community of human minds – although it depends on such minds to make those measurements that impose determinacy on an indeterminate world.

  “It from Bit”, physics-based, metaphysics is a striking confirmation of Thomas Nagel’s astute observation: “Scientism is actually a special form of idealism, for it puts one type of human understanding in charge of the universe and what can be said about it”.30 The type of understanding in question grants ultimate authority to measurements, denies the fundamental reality of qualitative experience, and reduces what there is to “a system of magnitudes”.

  This, notwithstanding, “It from Bit” is a further illustration of the hopelessness of trying to account for the comprehensibility of the world by theories that deny the independence of our understanding minds and the understood world. Even if Kant’s Critique did not have the problems we have identified, it would not address our question at the right level: it is too fundamental for the higher-level inquiry into how it is we can have a general, and advancing, understanding of the universe that takes different forms as the natural sciences advance. Kant’s solution – or non-solution – addresses a question that is wider, and deeper, than that of our progressive cognitive advance to its present almost miraculous level of attainment. There is also the point (that we shall discuss in Chapter 6) that the parties to the relationship must of necessity be distinct and indeed independent for there to be the kind of knowledge that we are trying to explain.

  Even so, it is worthwhile examining another, currently more popular, approach to the comprehensibility of the world that also collapses the distance between mind and world. The opposite of a transcendental idealism that argues we can know the world because the world has been constituted by the mind, this other view maintains that the material or natural world is comprehended by the mind because the latter is a product of the former, having been shaped by evolutionary imperatives to deliver (reliable) knowledge. This is the theme of the next chapter.

  Addendum 1 The harmony of world and mind

  I have focused on Kant – as the exemplar of philosophers accounting for the comprehensibility of the world to our minds by enclosing in our minds the world we have to make sense of – because of his extraordinary depth of thought and his huge influence. In this brief note, I want to illustrate the kind of approaches to be found in the space between idealist and materialist explanations of our being attuned to the world in which we find ourselves.31

  Aquinas highlighted the harmony of the relationship between esse natural of the world and the esse intentionale of the thinking mind. What makes my thought of X is the very same thing that makes an X an X; namely, the form of X. Unfortunately, while this may help to identify what it is about mental contents that makes them be about the world, it does not address the question of why or how there are such truthful mental contents, such that thought can be “adequate” to things. What is more, precisely what is meant by “a common form” between thought and its objects remains obscure. We do not have a clear idea of what the form of a thought is – other than the thought itself – or what aspect of its object it captures – other than that specified in the thought. The thought “The cup is on the table” seems to have little in common with the state of affairs it asserts. “Logical form” delivers very little: it is empty of anything that would specify the scope of its applicability to bits of the material, even if it could itself be defined. And it would be difficult to apply the notion of common form to most of the statements that express the sense we make of the world, even lean scientific assertions such as “F = ma”.

  Behind Aquinas there is an extensive scholastic tradition of the notion of “inexistence” in virtue of which one object (such as a referent) can be inside another (such as a thought). This has a direct line to the nineteenth-century German philosopher Franz Brentano who revived philosophical awareness of the distinctive feature of mental phenomena, namely that they include an object intentionally within themselves; they have aboutness or intentionality. For Brentano’s contemporary, Gottlob Frege, who shifted the focus from consciousness to language, it is because words express a sense that they are about anything at all. The word is about the object in virtue of the sense of the word being identical with the or a sense of the object. Since Edmund Husserl’s “noemata” (objects or contents of thought at the far end of the intentional relationship whose origin is in the “I”) and Frege’s senses cannot be reduced to something individuated perceptually, they seem attractive as mediators between mind (concepts) and the world (objects). They lie on the path between sense experience and sense-making that involves intelligible abstractions. On closer inspection, however, the problems unresolved in Aquinas are equally unresolved in the phenomenologists’ objects of the consciousness and the analytical philosophers’ accounts of the senses and referents of words: the principle of underlying the mapping of mind and world seems impossible to specify.

  I mention these as examples of approaches less radical than Kant’s as to how the mind can comprehend the world. They postulate a world that is, as it were, partly soluble in the mind. They are all, in a sense, piecemeal and do not offer a global solution to what is a global problem. For Aquinas, of course, that solution is already available – provided by God who ensures that the world is sufficiently intelligible to the favourites of his creation.

  Addendum 2 “The outside”

  One way of characterizing the gap between mind or self and world is to describe the latter as “outside” and the former as “inside”.32 This is, of course, vulnerable to criticism since the world is not outside the mind as items in the world are outside each other – in the way, for example, the garden is outside of the house or the matchbox is outside of the matches contained in it.

  Trying to deal with the “outsideness” of the experienced world is what in part motivates Kant’s endeavour to internalize the outside by making space simply one of the forms of sensible intuition. Space is not genuinely “outer” but sustained by the “outer sense”. So, when Kant speaks of “the starry sky above and the moral law within” – the twin miracles engraved on his headstone – the distinction between “above” (or “outside”) and “within” is not as we would normally understand it because the starry sky is also within, since it does not belong to the noumenal realm.33 Indeed, his Copernican revolution would place the starry sky (or its being “above”) within and the moral law without – in the noumenal realm.

  We seem, however, to require a genuine, subject-independent, outside in order to differentiate that which belongs to ourselves and that which belongs to the world. Kant himself seems to admit this when he says that there must be “a thing outside me” not “the mere representation of a thing outside me”.34 It is difficult, however, to characterize the boundary between that inside and that outside without borrowing boundaries that belong to the outside world – for example inside and outside of the body, or parts of the body such as parts of the brain. These are clearly the wrong kinds of boundary because they separate regions of the (phenomenal) outside. The boundary, for example, between the cerebral cortex (for some deluded individuals, the primary locus of the mind) and the rest of the world clearly does not delineate the border separating what we might call the metaphysical inside and outside. We are naturally inclined to think of the mind as “metaphysically” rather than emp
irically “inside”.

  So why does Kant internalize the outside in his metaphysics of experience? He gives various reasons. For example, he says that we can imagine space without objects occupying it but not objects or events that are not located in space or filling some of it up. Our idea of space, therefore, must precede any experience of items in space. The weakness of this argument, surprising in view of Kant’s astuteness, suggests that it must have undeclared intellectual motivation commending it. I suspect that it may lie in the puzzling nature of intentionality, particularly evident in the case of the most explicitly spatial of the senses – vision – but present throughout our experience of an external world. This warrants brief examination.

  My awareness of something “over there” reaches across, and hence seemingly overcomes, the intervening space but also maintains that interval. The glass on the table, and the interval between me and it, is incorporated in my mind as an object of perception. If the glass were truly separated from me, then I would not seem to be able to reach it; but if it were not separated from me, it would not be other than me: it would not be (a freestanding) “it”. So, Kant’s intuition is that the space in which the perceived object and the perceiving subject are located is separate from the object: the space belongs to the perceiving self as the form of sensible intuition which permits the object to be “out there”. Space becomes a kind of “ghost” presence between, or containing, things that are present: that in virtue of which there is, or can be, presence to.