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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
The whole of our human experience is determined by certain material conditions which cannot themselves be a part of that experience. In particular there exist objects, inaccessible to our senses, which nevertheless interact with ourselves to produce that experience. But the selves which are so affected by these objects outside our experience, and the internal mechanisms which somehow construct that experience, are also just such material conditions of, and not parts of, that experience. We might describe this appeal to material conditions of experience in Kant's technical terms as the ‘intelligible’ or even ‘transcendental’ background to our empirical experience. In its attempt to provide some explanation, in terms of things in themselves, of empirical objects (whether physical things or persons) it forms a central part of what Adickes called Kant's ‘double affection’ theory.
1 Adickes, Erich, Kant's Lehre von der doppelten Affektion unseres Ich (Tübingen: Mohr, 1929).Google Scholar
2 Strawson, P. F., The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966), 16–17 and 192.Google Scholar
3 Kant, , ProlegomenaGoogle Scholar, section 13, Anm.II: Kann man dieses wohl Idealismus nennen; es ist ja gerade das Gegenteil davon. See also B519 and note 24 below.
4 Apart from the central doubt over Bennett's supposition that Kant made so strong a connection between meaning and evidence, the account of evidence ascribed to Kant in the passage is also over-simple. For Kant shows in many passages that he is aware of the fact that one thing's being evidence for another may depend on the meditation of accepted natural laws and not just on the perceptual presentation of some object. See note 10 below.
5 The suggestion implicit in Bennett's further argument is that if Kant did not avail himself of this view, then he would lose a demonstrable benefit. But it is highly doubtful if Bennett's argument is any more successful in establishing the view than others which are generally thought to have failed.
6 E.g. B451.
7 Kemp Smith translates this passage badly as: … provide for them body and meaning. It is possible, though, that his translation was an attempt to capture the pun on the German word ‘Sinn’ which may perhaps account for Kant's rather untypical use of the term. Kant uses ‘Bedeutung’ in the Critique much more often than ‘Sinn’.
8 Strawson, , op. cit., 190–192Google Scholar, assumes without argument that this is the only way to understand Kant's notion of emptiness.
9 B347: thus the object of a concept to which no assignable intuition whatsoever corresponds = nothing. That is, it is a concept without an object…
10 Thus, despite Strawson's insistence (op. cit., 194–196) that transcendental Idealism in the Antimony is essentially a phenomenalistic theory, it is worth noting that Kant often expresses his view in the passage without any such explicit commitment, e.g. at B521:
The objects of experience, then, are never given in themselves, but only in experience, and have no existence outside it. That there may be inhabitants in the moon, although no one has ever perceived them, must certainly be admitted. This, however, means only that in the possible advance of experience we may encounter them. For everything is real which stands in connection with a perception in accordance with the laws of empirical advance.
It is surely not enough to express a phenomenalistic theory that one should require that claims about empirical reality be testable against perceptual experience in conjunction with natural laws. The passage also indicates a more complex account of evidence in relation to perceptual experience than that summarily offered by Bennett. See note 4 above.
11 This point is also made in A1-Azm, The Origins of Kant's Arguments in the Antinomies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972)Google Scholar. See ‘The First Antinomy’, and especially p. 21.
12 B507: the cosmological ideas alone have this peculiarity that they can presuppose their object, and the empirical synthesis required for its concept, as being given. The question which arises out of these ideas refers only to the advance in this synthesis, that is, whether it should be carried so far as to contain absolute totality—such totality, since it cannot be given in any experience, being no longer empirical.
13 B447: The ideas with which we are now dealing I have above entitled cosmological ideas, partly because by the term ‘world’ we mean the sum of all appearances, and it is exclusively to the unconditioned in the appearances that our ideas are directed, partly also because the term ‘world’ in the transcendental sense, signifies the absolute totality of all existing things. B511: in its empirical meaning the term ‘whole’ is always only comparative. The absolute whole of quantity (the universe) … (has) nothing to do with any possible experience … Yet it is just the explanation of this very whole that is demanded in the transcendental problems of reason.
14 Bennett, , Kant's Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 287Google Scholar, and A1-Azm, op. cit., both take this view, which was put forward in my ‘The Beginning of the World’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume (1961).Google Scholar
15 Cf. Strawson, , op. cit., 235–277Google Scholar, where essentially the traditional doctrine outlined in Parts I, II and III is identified as the metaphysics of transcendental Idealism.
16 These views are similar to those outlined in my Kant's Theory of Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), Chs. 1–3.Google Scholar
17 E.g. B50–51, B69, B155–156, and A386. But apart from these explicit commitments it is surely undeniable that Kant requires parity between our knowledge of outer objects and our knowledge of our empirical selves, in so far as both are classified as appearances.
18 There is, of course, here a serious problem of interpretation, which cannot be satisfactorily tackled merely by claiming, as some commentators have, that Kant was closer to Berkeley than he (Kant) believed (see Strawson, op. cit., 22, 35, 192, 197). For just as Kant's views are not entirely determinate, independent of their interpretation, so the same is notoriously true of Berkeley as well. But to suggest that within the range of views ascribable to Berkeley some are close to views within the range ascribable to Kant is to say virtually nothing. It is essential in such matters to ‘fix’ one or other view, and then compare it with some interpretation, or range of interpretations, of the other. In this case I believe that it is vital to consider where Berkeley and Kant stand with respect to the denial or rejection of common sense beliefs.
19 See Bennett, J., Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 68–70Google Scholar. In relation to Leibniz I gratefully acknowledge the help of Guy Stock in pursuing the detail of Leibniz's views.
20 Carnap, F., ‘Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie (1950)Google Scholar; Korner, S., Categorial Frameworks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970).Google Scholar
21 I indicated above (note 10) that such a claim is not sufficient for phenomenalism, but it is at least necessary. Philosophers have not, generally, stressed the different variety of phenomenalistic theories, for example, the substantial differences between a theory such as Ayer's in The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, and one such as Goodman's in The Structure of Appearance.
22 Kant, , ProlegomenaGoogle Scholar, Introduction.
23 It also begins to explain Kant's references to the collective ‘we’ throughout the Critique, which have evidently puzzled commentators. Cf. Strawson, op. cit., 197, 257.Google Scholar
24 E.g. for objects, B50–52, B306–307, B337, B345–346, B522–523. For selves, A397–398, B404, B409, B426–427, B429. And on Idealism itself see B519 note, which reads:
I have elsewhere called it (transcendental Idealism) formal Idealism in order to distinguish it from material Idealism, i.e. the usual sort which either doubts or denies the existence of outer things. It seems sometimes prudent to use this terminology rather than that used above in order to prevent any misunderstanding.
Kemp Smith's translation omits the final sentence from this passage.
