The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (36 page)

46
The terminology is mine, not Kant’s.

47
Or at least, it has no answer
as intended
. Thus if the question is which of two apparent contradictories holds, where each of these apparent contradictories involves the confused concept, then it has the answer: neither. See A503–505/B531–533.

48
That Kant is particularly concerned with debates between Leibnizians and Newtonians is convincingly argued by Sadik J. Al-Azm in Al-Azm (
1972
).

49
This is the passage cited in n. 43. Cf. also A307–308/B364–365.

50
This is the section of the first
Critique
entitled ‘The Antithetic of Pure Reason’. These arguments, together with the others mentioned in parentheses, constitute what he calls the four ‘antinomies’. The arguments concerning the age and size of the physical universe constitute the first of these. I do not propose to dwell on these arguments here (I have done so elsewhere (Moore (
1992
) and (
2001a
),
Ch. 6
, §3)). There are, however, three points to which I think it is worth drawing attention, because commentators often miss them or even deny them. First, Kant never calls into question the infinitude of time or space themselves, of which he thinks we have synthetic
a priori
knowledge (A25/B39 and A32/B47–48). Indeed, their infinitude is a crucial part of the reason why the physical universe cannot be finite (A427–429/B455–457). The second point is related to the first. In the temporal case at least, and possibly also in the spatial case, there is an asymmetry in the two things that Kant denies, i.e. that the physical universe is infinite and that it is finite. The asymmetry is that the first of these is, so to speak, closer to the truth than the second. (After all, the Causal Principle ensures that whatever happens in nature is preceded by something else, which, in one good sense, requires infinite history.) The point, of course, is that the physical universe does not exist as a (temporally) infinite whole because it does not exist as a whole. Finally, although (as we are about to see) Kant believes that the dialectic here provides further support for transcendental idealism, this should not deter us from reading controversial elements of transcendental idealism into the arguments that he parades. He accepts the arguments (except, of course, for the offending assumption: see
Prolegomena
, 4:340) and it is important for his purposes that we accept them too. But he is not offering them in a spirit of persuasion. He is offering them in a spirit of descriptive rational psychology. He takes them, rightly or wrongly, to be arguments that already force themselves upon us as soon as we think about these issues (e.g. A339/B397 and A464/B490).

For further discussion of the first antinomy, see Strawson (
1966
), Pt Three,
Ch. 3
; Bennett (
1982
); Allison (
1983
),
Ch.3
; and Guyer (
1987
),
Ch. 18
. (I agree with what P.F. Strawson says at ibid., pp. 203–206: the most fundamental objection to these arguments is an objection to Kant’s approach too, namely that questions about the age and size of the physical universe are scientific questions, to be tackled empirically.)

51
One important difference between Kant and Hume is that the former is altogether warier of what is natural.

52
It is certainly irresistible for us to
raise
such questions. As Kant says, in the very first sentence of the Preface to the first edition of the first
Critique
, ‘Human reason … is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, … but which it also cannot answer’ (Avii).

53
He deals with attempts to establish the existence of Cartesian souls, or thinking substances capable of surviving the destruction of their bodies, in ‘The Paralogisms of Pure Reason’. He deals with proofs for the existence of God in ‘The Ideal of Pure Reason’. He deals with attempts to establish our freedom in the context of the third antinomy. For extensive discussion of all of these, see Bennett (
1974
). For something much pithier, see Copleston (
1960
),
Ch. 13
, and Gardner (
1999
), pp. 225–243. For discussion of the relation between Cartesian souls and our existence as things in themselves, see Ch. 6, §3.

54
It also reinforces Kant’s love of the genuine article. Later in the first
Critique
he reflects on how noble and exalted proper metaphysics is, as against the impression that we might have formed in the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ from our encounter with its impostor. ‘We will always return to metaphysics,’ he observes, ‘as to a beloved from whom we have been estranged’ (A 850/B 878).

55
Not that a legitimate regulative use of a concept need correspond to an illegitimate constitutive use of it. Both may be legitimate. An example would be a regulative use of the concept of the unconditioned in framing the principle ‘never to assume anything empirical as unconditioned’ (A616/B644).

56
I am here condensing a vast and complex discussion: see esp. ‘The Canon of Pure Reason’ and 2nd
Critique
, passim, esp. Pt One, Bk II,
Ch. 2
. I treat these issues in greater depth in Moore (2003a), Themes Two and Three. For an outstanding discussion see Wood (
1970
).

57
Cf. Engstrom (
1996
), p. 133.

58
See nn. 45 and 53. The apparent conflict between the Causal Principle and our belief that we are free is at the heart of the third antinomy.

59
Thus Kant holds that one and the same situation can both exhibit complete (freedom-precluding) causal determination, as it appears, and involve an exercise of freedom, as it is in itself (A532–558/B560–586 and
Groundwork
, 4:455ff.) The third antinomy arises because we do not properly separate our idea of freedom from the concept of physical reality.

Note: it is because the postulate that we are free concerns how we are in ourselves that its truth cannot be inferred from the fact that we cannot help believing it. Contrast this with the proposition that the straight line between two points is the shortest. In that case such an inference is permitted. The fact that we cannot help believing such a thing is due to what our spectacles are like; and our belief is a belief about how things (must) appear through our spectacles; so what we believe must be true. This obviously bears on Descartes’ Reflective Question (see
Ch. 1
, §3). Kant’s bipartite approach to this issue illustrates one of the many respects in which he resists easy classification as far as his attitude to the Creativity Question in §6 of the Introduction is concerned. (Even in the case of the postulate that we are free, he takes the fact that we cannot help believing it to mean that we are ‘really free in a practical respect’ (
Groundwork
, 4: 448).)

60
Kant defines faith as ‘reason’s moral way of thinking,’ and as ‘trust in the attainability of an aim the promotion of which is a duty but the possibility of the realization of which it is not possible for us to have any insight into’ (3rd
Critique
, 5:471–472).

61
In 2nd
Critique
Kant goes as far as to proclaim it a matter of great fortune that we cannot prove God’s existence. If we could, he says, ‘God and eternity with their awful majesty would stand unceasingly before our eyes…. Transgressions of the [moral] law would, no doubt, be avoided: what is commanded would be done; but … [mostly] from fear, only [occasionally] from hope, and [never] at all from duty…. Now, when it is quite otherwise with us …
then
there can be a truly moral disposition…. Thus what the study of nature and of the human being teaches us sufficiently elsewhere may well be true here also: that the inscrutable wisdom by which we exist is not less worthy of veneration in what it has denied us than in what it has granted us’ (5:147–148, emphasis adapted). Cf. in this connection A831/B859.

62
This is the knowledge to which I was referring in n. 13.

63
It is true that the laws of logic that we recognize depend on the concepts we possess, which leaves room for the possibility of beings who, because they possess different concepts from ours, use different laws of logic from ours in thinking about things in themselves. But that is no threat to the applicability of
our
laws to things in themselves. ‘Different’ does not entail ‘conflicting’. Cf. in this connection n. 40. And cf. the distinction between rejection and denial drawn below in the Conclusion, §3(b).

64
Kant is adamant that any truth about what there is is synthetic: see e.g. A225/B272 and A594/B622ff.

Note: the view that the phrase ‘things in themselves’ should strictly be used only syncategorematically (see n. 36) perhaps mitigates this concern in the following respect: it makes our supposed knowledge that there are things in themselves less obviously knowledge about what there is (as opposed, say, to knowledge that how things appear is
only
how they appear). But the mitigation is limited. For the view in question does not make our supposed knowledge less obviously knowledge of something synthetic – except insofar as it makes it less obviously knowledge.

65
We may also need to add ‘… and which is theoretical rather than practical.’ Cf. Bx; Bxxvi n.; 2nd
Critique
, 5:103; and 3rd
Critique
, 5:195.

66
In
Ch. 14
, §2, we shall consider a profound recoil from this view.

67
In the opening section of John McDowell (
1996
), McDowell comments on this passage as follows: ‘For a thought to be empty … would be for it not really to be a thought at all, and that is surely Kant’s point; he is not, absurdly, drawing our attention to a special kind of thoughts, the empty ones’ (pp. 3–4). But that is precisely what Kant is doing, or at least what he takes himself to be doing.

68
See also A139/B178, A239/B298, A240–241/B300, B308, and
Prolegomena
, §30. (The reference to a ‘relation to the object’ at A241/B300 is especially telling.)

69
See again the definition of ‘transcendental’ given in §4; and cf. n. 35.

70
Perhaps the most famous version of this argument occurs in the Preface to Wittgenstein (
1961
), where Wittgenstein writes that ‘in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought)’ (p. 3); we shall return to this in
Ch. 9
, §4. Cf. also the problem to which I adverted in §6 of the Introduction about expressing the idea that our sense-making is limited to what is immanent. And cf., for something structurally analogous, the issue on which Philonous says ‘[he is] content to put the whole’ of his dispute with Hylas in Berkeley (
1962b
), pp. 183–184.

71
It is worth adding that, since the threat has to do with making sense of things in themselves, then the view that the phrase ‘things in themselves’ should strictly be used only syncategorematically (see nn. 36 and 64) may also play, as it did earlier, a mitigating role.

72
The word translated as ‘bounds’ in the
aperçu
about philosophy from A727/B755 which I quoted in §6 is ‘
Grenzen
’. So too is the word translated as ‘limits’ in the passage from Wittgenstein (
1961
) which I quoted in n. 70.

73
See also
Prolegomena
, 4:361, esp. the reference to what Kant calls ‘the result of the entire
Critique
.’

74
It is in this sense that contemporary physics allows for the finitude but unboundedness of physical space: see Einstein (
1920
), Ch. 31. Note: here and subsequently I am drawing on Moore (
2010b
). I am grateful to the editor and publisher of the volume in which that essay appears for permission to make use of material from it.

75
We shall see Hegel raising related concerns in
Ch. 7
, §2.

76
Here, of course, I am presupposing my own definition of metaphysics. But lest anyone think,
contra
my reassurances in n. 2, that Kant himself would not count this exercise as an exercise in metaphysics – that he would not count meta-metaphysics as part of metaphysics – I refer to the following three passages. First, just before the definition that I cited in n. 2, he expressly says that metaphysics, so defined, includes ‘the critique’, in other words it includes that part of philosophy ‘which investigates the faculty of reason in regard to all pure
a priori
cognition’ (A841/B869). Second, in
Prolegomena
, 4:327, he identifies ‘the core and the characteristic feature of metaphysics’ as ‘the preoccupation of reason simply with itself.’ Third, in (perhaps a draft of?) a letter to Marcus Herz, written after 11 May 1781, he says of the investigation in the first
Critique
that it includes ‘the
metaphysics of metaphysics
’ (
Correspondence
, 10:269, emphasis in original). (It is only fair for me to add that there is something rather different in
Prolegomena
, 4:260, which suggests that meta-metaphysics is a propaedeutic to metaphysics. Still, I do not claim complete constancy in Kant’s conception of metaphysics.) I thus disagree with David Carr when he says, of the first
Critique
, ‘That work is indeed
about
metaphysics, but it is not itself a work
of
metaphysics’ (Carr (
1999
), p. 33, emphasis in original). (In fact, the ‘Transcendental Analytic’ is already a problem for Carr’s claim: see §5 above.) I should add that there is much else in Ch. 2 of Carr (
1999
) that I admire.