13. Kant 2 - Transcendental Idealism

Phenomena vs. Noumena

- The phenomenal world (as the term is used by Kant) is the world as it appears to us. It is the world we see, touch, taste etc. Kant is at the time when people accepted that what we experienced was like a representation of the real world.

- The noumenal world is the way that the world is in-itself. i.e. the world as it is when no one is looking at it.

This distinction Kant makes really isn't anything new, it goes all the way back to Descartes. The difference between thinking and representations. So Kant is really just renaming the distinction that already has been talked about by the previous philosophers. This is why he is going to end up call his view a version of transcendental idealism, because he accepts that the phenomenal world is the world of experience, that's the world we have access to and can know about. And yet, he's not an idealist, like Berkeley, because he thinks there are things which transcend our experience.

It is part of Kant's view that all we can know is the way our experience of the world will be and not anything of the noumenal world in and of itself. We cant know the noumenal world. According to Kant, while we cant know anything about the noumena, we can at least know that the noumena exist.

Kant thinks that space and time are mental phenomena. They are produced by the mind. Kant denies that space exists apart from our experience. In the noumena world we cant say that there is space, because to be located in space is a property of an experience of something and not a property of the thing we experience. Notice also the self is located outside of experience and this is going to be Kant's way of solving Hume's problem of where Hume said when I look inside my experience I can never find this thing called the self. There are representations of ourself and other people and so forth and we do have phenomenal experience of ourselves, but that's not what is meant by the self. The self is supposed to be something permanent, that doesn't change through time and of course our experience is changing. So Hume is right that we never find anything within our experience, or in Hume's terminology we never have an impression which we can identify as the self, and Kant is going to solve that by saying the self if the unifying principle of experience. Its the transcendental noumena which is putting all this stuff together and we know that its got to be there, because our experience has to be ordered by something, we can tell that its ordered, there's got to be something which is putting all that stuff together. So the noumenal self is reached as a pre-condition of having experience at all. So this is Kant's standard move here, we find the thing that we are interested in, that someone has criticised, and we show how we can transcendentally deduce that it must exist. Transcendentally deduced means we ask this question, how could this be possible at all? What would the world have to be like given that this is in fact true? So Kant argues that we know there must be a self because all our experiences are put together, they're made for us basically, they're generated by something and ordered in a certain way as being located in certain places and being earlier and later and so forth, so there has got to be something which is putting all that stuff together and that is the self.

Kant's Philosophy of Mind

- The mind has two components - sensibility and understanding

- Sensibility takes in 'raw' unorganised noumena and organizes it into phenomena (our experience)

- Each has their categories that they use in order to construct our experience- The sensibility has space and time. These are fundamental categories that the mind comes equipped with.

- The understanding has 12 categories.- Unity, plurality, totality, reality, negation, limitation, substance/property, cause & effect, community, possibility/impossibility, existence/non-existence, and necessary/contingent. These are concepts which are used in organising the noumena and constructing the kinds of experiences that we have.

With these categories and the two from sensibility, our mind constructs our experience. - We can know with absolute certainty that our experience will conform to the categories. Kant is saying that all these categories and properties are phenomenal and don't apply at all to noumenal objects.

- That is the only way that experience like ours is possible. - The same cause must bring about the same effect or else our experience would be like a dream.

- Yet this comes at a heavy cost because Kant is saying that all science studies is our experience of the world and doesn't capture anything "independent" of our experience. Science does not, cannot, study the noumenal world.

There is another interesting problem for Kant's view which some people have pointed out is that it can seem that Kant is a solipsist. Solipsist is someone who thinks they are the only person that exists. So in Kant's view, we each have a noumenal self and each of us is locked in our phenomenal world, so how do we communicate with each other? How do we know that the other people who are in our phenomenal experience are representative of other noumenal selves, other transcendental entities? (He doesnt really answer this question in the video (at about 29-30 minutes)

To sum up everything we have been saying about Kant

- Kant calls this a Copernican Revolution in philosophy. Copernicus reversed the position of the sun and the earth. Instead of earth centric it became sun centric. So Kant sees himself as doing something like this, it used to be that the world was out there. - Instead of the mind passively acting as a recorder of an outside reality, Kant sees it the other way around. The human mind is actively constructing reality. Reality is something that is mental. Reality is constructed by the mind, behind the scenes, working to certain universal laws.

- This is his mix of Rationalism and Empiricism. - Empiricism is the sense that he thinks that science is a synthetic activity, that science generates new knowledge and without doing the science we cant tell what is going to come from what. - But at the same time he endorses a priori rationalism based on a priori categories.