On Kant's 'Limiting' of Knowledge

 The distinction between phenomena and noumena plays a significant role in Kant's thought but much of his readership up to the present has reversed the significance of these terms in crucial respects.

To many, phenomena concern only that which is in our head while noumena are outside of our head and are thereby the really-real which we seek to know. Because of this, there is a tendency to be disappointed when our knowledge is (apparently) restricted to the phenomenal. This is correct: we cannot know things as noumena (i.e., in themselves). However, we should shake the notion that it makes sense to see this as a new limit to our knowledge rather than a clarification of what knowledge is already. To illustrate this I will characterize knowledge in a crucial respect, then I will show how phenomena and noumena relate to knowledge to see which is more suited to be considered knowing.

Knowledge is objective and so something known by me can also be known to others - at least granting that they have the same access. For example, I can know the weight of an object by placing it on a scale and anyone else can do the same as long as I do not withhold the object from them. To call something known, then, we must assume all knowers have the same access to the object in principle, for otherwise, this would not be able to be considered objective.

Now, let us consider phenomena and noumena to see which may best fit the criteria given above.

Phenomena are thoughts of objects mediated by their appearance. These appearances are the product of our sensible faculty and even if we must see the object as mediated by our sensible faculty we still recognize phenomena as resulting from objects affecting us in some way. A mediated access is still some access.

Next, we take up noumena. Noumena are not appearances and do not relate at all to our sensible faculty. As their name suggests, noumena are intelligibilia and are in our representation only as thoughts. If noumena are taken to relate to objects standing outside of all representation they will only have this relation to the extent we arbitrarily think it. Adding thought upon thought does not constitute any sort of access to an object outside of that thought.

From the above, we may see clearly why it makes sense to characterize phenomena as knowable and why this doesn't seem coherent to say regarding noumena. For we can comprehend that equal access to objects as phenomena entails that the object can affect all knowers via their sensible faculty. On the other hand, equal access to noumena would require something like equal access to the contents of our thoughts, or perhaps a pre-established harmony of these thoughts.

With this matter in hand, it will be beneficial to consider what is going on when we suppose, uncritically, that there is something more objective or significant to knowing noumena (i.e., things in themselves).

We have already seen that knowledge requires equal access to the object and so phenomena are suited to be called objects of our knowledge because our sensibility is a common access point to the object. Now it must be emphasized that the phenomena is not merely the appearance of the object but consists also in our thinking of the object through the appearance. If we divide the phenomena into its sensible and conceptual elements and look to just those that are conceptual then we are left with merely the thought of an object in general, that is, with noumena. Here we see that we can characterize noumena as our thought of objects so far as they do not appear to us, and this is one way Kant does characterize them. We also see how easy it may be to carry sensibly given predicates over to our thinking of the object and lose track of how these predicates were only able to be given by the senses.

As thoughts, we find that sensible predicates must conform only to the form of thinking which ultimately consists of avoiding contradictions. However, for these sensible predicates to have been given about the object they first must have been sensed by us and thereby appeared to us. Anything that appears must do so under the form of appearance just as all thought must under the form of thinking. Now, when we deal with these sensible predicates as mere thoughts we may lose track of the sensible conditions for their appearing, but these conditions still ground the significance of these predicates to the object whether we have lost track of them or not. By losing track of these conditions we risk converting conditions of appearance into conditions of thinking. For example, we may think that it would be a contradiction to have an object with no dimensions, but no contradiction can emerge from the mere lack of a predicate. However, an appearance of an object must have a dimension and for it to lack this would not violate the form of thinking but the form of appearance.

Without our recognition of the above confusion of conditions for appearance as conditions for thinking, we would find it difficult to preserve the difference between knowing objects and thinking them without contradiction. Further, we risk losing track of their being both aesthetic and logical form or the difference between these two entirely. This is what Kant refers to as the confusion of appearances as things in themselves. Kant seeks to remove this confusion which should not suggest a new limitation on knowledge but only an attempt to keep knowledge within its proper limits.

Understanding Philosophy Through our Commitment to Practices

I want to suggest and explain a strategy I have used while interpreting Kant and which I have been more regularly inclined towards in discussion. I will try to state it straightforwardly: 

Given any subject Kant discusses with regard to its form, a reader should look to the concrete practices that are indicated directly or indirectly in the analysis. These practices are read as what Kant is committed to, and what he assumes his readers are committed to. All of Kant's analyses should be framed by these commitments.

An interesting result from this is that the interpretations following this method allow one to interrogate their own behaviors and see how they may relate to the transcendental picture Kant paints. This approach also tends to expose the relationship that Transcendental Philosophy and Metaphysics have to Anthropology. 

I will now provide some examples.

Moral Judgments

The Practice: There are occasions when we take someone to task for something we consider bad without any qualification. Additionally we could note that in some of these occasions we will not allow circumstances to have made the offending action necessary.

Reflection on Kant: If we consider these practices as the object of an analysis, then we will not be very far away from finding Kant's discussion of the moral law - a law that is given by the form of lawgiving rather than in relation to any end - as well as Kant's discussion of freedom.

Result: Rather than seeing Kant's moral philosophy as committed primarily to formulae (e.g., Categorical Imperatives), or to formalisms (e.g., Freedom) we should see him committed to practices of judging the unsuitability of actions and holding people to account. If we take this to be the central commitment, we can consider the implications of these practices, how they relate to other practices and if we are actually willing (or able) to do without them.

Objective Judgments

For Kant, moral judgments are a sort of objective judgment, and so it will be interesting what sort of insights we can get by considering objective judgments more broadly.

The Practice: Sometimes we demand the assent of others, yet in a way where moveable if we discover disagreement.

Reflection on Kant: In these cases we are both sovereign so far as we set out how things stand, yet also we are subject in that the judgments of others in that their disagreement may bring about a reconsideration of the matter. 

Result: If we consider "On having an opinion, knowing, and believing." (A 820/B 848), we find that objective judgments may be found out to be subjective when submitted to the judgments of others. This is a confirmation of reading objective or subjective as formal characteristics of a judgment, but also how these formal characteristics are exposed by our practices.

Reflecting this back upon Kant's moral considerations we may see some insight into the kingdom of ends formulation of the moral law, wherein we are all subject and sovereign in a possible kingdom of ends - rather than an actual nature as with theoretical cognition. Additionally, seeing that our judgments are subject to be challenged effects how we maintain and reason in their favor will be important for observing how moral disagreements play out.

* * *

I will be probably write more on this, expanding on these examples or contributing some more.

An additional topic that is worth considering here would be the relation between ratio essendi and ratio cognoscenti (see Preface to Critique of Practical Reason). 

Understanding Pure Color and Tone in the Third Critique

In the Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Kant discusses how color and tone can only be beautiful if they are pure.  Whenever I have studied this text on my own and in a group this has caused some confusion, since it is ambiguous what a pure color or tone is.

The typical understanding of this passage in Kant is that Kant means colors that are unmixed, or primary colors, or any solid color, and for tones similarly only a single tone (with no overtones), or one of the tones of the scale.  This interpretation does not work for me, since it clearly involves a quality of the content of the experience that we would be able to put a rule to, e.g., we could specify red blue and green are beautiful.  Since there can be no rules, or reasons, for saying that something is beautiful, this clearly cannot be correct.

Rather than interpreting pure in this case as a quality of the content, I suggest interpreting it in the same way pure is interpreted everywhere else in Kant's system: not containing any empirical content.  But what is color or tone without empirical content?  The answer to this is the same as any case where we remove content: we are left with form.  So, I suggest that we interpret pure color or tone in terms of form.  How do we understand form in this case?

The pure forms of intuition (for the cognition of objects) concern the arrangement of content spatially and temporally.  The form of color or tone will also concern arrangement of content, but not into these extensive and intensive magnitudes of time and space, but into magnitudes that allow us to have differences in color and tone - that arrange the content of sense such that these differences make themselves apparent.

Regarding Conflicts Between Science and Forms of Experience

   By 'forms of experience' (or forms of unity, forms of cognition, forms of order, or, simply, form) I understand the basic power (unities, orders, cognitions) we can speak of that make up our considerations of anything.  By 'forms of experience' I understand only primitive forms, not forms of things only knowable empirically; forms of experience concern only forms that are necessary, that is, where their possibility is sufficient to show their existence - things we cannot learn from experience, yet are required for experience.

   Because sciences are higher level organizations of what is given through our forms of experience, it is clear that all sciences are governed by forms of experience.  By being drawn from only some forms of experience, a science excludes consideration of other forms, or brackets them from consideration, which excludes concern with sciences grounded through other forms of experience.  Additionally, no science can undermine a form of experience, nor should it be considered rightful in any science to reject a form of experience.  This is because either a science has bracketed forms of experience, and so has no dealings with them,  or the science is developed out of those forms of experience, and so depends upon them.  (It is true that science first begin without a clear determining ground, but this does not mean that they do not depend upon this ground.)

   In spit of the relationship between forms of experience and sciences, confusion about this relationship leads forms of experience to be challenged by arguments drawn from the vantage point of certain sciences.  More often than not, these challenges really arise from conflicts between two sciences which are each grounded on different forms of experience, and seem to have incompatible concepts.  Compounding these difficulties is the apparent fact that many conceptions of a science are given the same name, and so different things are sometimes spoken of as equal.  The summation of all this is that many disputes that proceed along the lines of these perceived difficulties are chaotic and undisciplined (they  have no clear grounding principles).  In time I would love to address all of these difficulties, but for now I will restrict myself to clarifying the supposed conflicts between forms of experience and sciences, so far as these forms of experience lead to sciences that appear to compete.

   When someone is drawing from a science in order to reject a form of experience they are either:

a) demanding that the analysis we have carried out for some form of experience be clarified, since we have excluded possible experiences, or including impossible experiences, within the forms we have accounted for.  Or,

b) that the science is itself concerning forms of human experience.

In the former case there is no conflict of science, but if there is something excluded (or superadded) by our account of the forms of experience, then we have an excellent opportunity to improve our account of the forms of experience.  In the latter case, there will be a conflict of metaphysics (systems of forms of experience), and we can work to see if the basic principle of our forms of experience are compatible or not with the others suggested.  When comparing different systems of metaphysics we must decide if there are real conflicts, or if the conflict is ultimately over terminology and the structure of terms - a procedure that is beyond the scope of this essay.

   In my experience of philosophical disputes, a conflict between forms of experience is rarely acknowledged, and usually  a distinction between forms of experience and sciences is needful.  In order to illustrate this more common scenario, I will select an example that, I hope, will be familiar.

   Physics draws its basic concepts from some forms of experience of objects (of a possible experience), while excluding other forms of experience.  It is often supposed that freewill is in conflict with laws of physics.  I do not intend to resolve this debate here explicitly, but merely to show the landscape of the debate from the vantage point of the distinctions I have been articulating.

   If we grant that the science of freewill, which I will call praxology, is derived from forms of experience excluded by physics, then physics and praxology are not themselves in conflict; instead, we have a question concerning our understanding of forms of experience.  As we already noted, if a science has a concern with the accuracy of our articulation of the forms of experience, this conflict is to be understood as a demand to clarify, and once more explicate, our forms of experience - a practice that is always needful.  However, the debate rarely becomes this productive since the following circumstances are often in play:  someone thinking vaguely along the lines of physics - a science which is not, by its nature, interested in freewill - does not recognize that they have bracketed certain forms of experience which praxology depends upon, and concludes the absurdity of praxology.  At the same time, a praxologist who also does not see this bracketing will be unable to understand how their own manner of thinking is able to be rejected, but is also unable to justify it.  By ignoring the difference between forms of experience, and sciences, this arrangement will never lead to a productive discussion, but only confusion.  

   Praxology, understood along the lines of Kant's practical philosophy, depends upon a different conception of cause than physics does, namely the notion of a self-cause.   Cause and self-cause both form foundations for different manners of organizing knowledge, and their is no need to suppose that the discussion of either comes in to determine what the state of the other is.  I hope to face this particular example in greater detail soon in order to clarify the notion of a self-cause, but there is no room in the current essay for this.

   The arrangement above is not an attempt to describe disputes between sciences as empty, but as typically in a chaotic state.  There is a lot to be gained by coming to terms.  I hope that all of this suggest that when sciences come into conflict, and particularly when they come into conflict with forms of experience, there is a lot to consider in order to make sure that those who argue do not make a spectacle of themselves.  Unfortunately, the crowd who may recognize such a spectacle for what it is seems to be small, since it is far more common that these sorts of conflicts tend to divide people into factions immediately, and before any investigation into the origin of the dispute has been made.