[I] was then making plans for a work that might perhaps have the title, “The Limits of Sense and Reason.” I planned to have it consist of two parts, a theoretical and a practical. The first part would have two sections, (1) general phenomenology and (2) metaphysics, but this only with regard to its method. (Letter to Marcus Herz, 21 February 1772 [C 10: 129])
Previous Installments:
#1: Introduction to The Limits of Sense and Reason
#3: Aiii/Biii/GW93-97 The Dedication
#4: Avii-ix/GW99 Preface to the First (A) Edition.
#5: Axi note/GW100-101 Preface to the First (A) Edition
#6: Axi note/GW100-101 Preface to the First (A) Edition
#7: Axii-xiv/GW101-102 Preface to the First (A) Edition
#8: Axv-xvi/GW102-103 Preface to the First (A) Edition
#9: Axvi-xvii/GW103 Preface to the First (A) Edition
#10: Axvii-xx/GW103-104 Preface to the First (A) Edition
#11: Axxi-xxii/GW104-105 Preface to the First (A) Edition
#12: Bviii-ix/GW106-107 Preface to the Second (B) Edition
#13: Bix-x/GW107 Preface to the Second (B) Edition
#14: Bx-xii/GW107-108 Preface to the Second (B) Edition
#15: Bxii-xiv/GW108-109 Preface to the Second (B) Edition
#16: Bxiv-xv/GW109-110 Preface to the Second (B) Edition
Because LSR is an ongoing and indeed infinite task, yearly installments of the book will be published in the online journal Contemporary Studies in Kantian Philosophy (CSKP).
Correspondingly, LSR, Part 1 has been published in CSKP 6 (2021): 11-109, and can be read, downloaded, or shared in .pdf HERE.
Moreover, a bibliography of Kant’s writings listed by English translations of their titles, alongside the abbreviations used for infratextual references in LSR, has been also been published in CSKP 6 (2021): 1-10, and can be read, downloaded, or shared in .pdf HERE.
CPR TEXT Bxv-xxii/GW109-113 Preface to the Second (B) Edition
I should think that the examples of mathematics and natural science, Bxvi which have become what they now are through a revolution brought about all at once, were remarkable enough that we might reflect on the essential element in the change in the ways of thinking that has been so advantageous to them, and, at least as an experiment, imitate it insofar as their analogy with metaphysics, as rational cognition, might permit. Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objectsa must conform to our cognition, which would agree better with the requested possibility of an a priori cognition of them, which is to establish something about objectsb before they are given to us. This would be just like the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, when he did not make good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions if he assumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the observer, tried to see if he might not have greater success if he made the observer revolve and left the stars at rest. Now in metaphysics we can try in a similar Bxvii way regarding the intuition of objects. If intuition has to conform to the constitution of the objects, then I do not see how we can know anything of them a priori; but if the object (as an objectc of the senses) conforms to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, then I can very well represent this possibility to myself. Yet because I cannot stop with these intuitions, if they are to become cognitions, but must refer them as representations to something as their object and determine this object
a Objecte
b Objecte
c Object
through them, I can assume either that the concepts through which I bring about this determination also conform to objects, and then I am once again in the same difficulty about how I could know anything about them a priori, or else I assume that the objects, or what is the same thing, the experience in which alone they can be cognized (as given objects) conforms to those concepts, in which case I immediately see an easier way out of the difficulty, since experience itself is a kind of cognition requiring the understanding, whose rule I have to presuppose in myself before any object is given to me, hence a priori, which rule is expressed in concepts a priori, to which all objects of experience must therefore necessarily conform, and with which they must agree. As for B xviii objects insofar as they are thought merely through reason, and necessarily at that, but that (at least as reason thinks them) cannot be given in experience at all—the attempt to think them (for they must be capable of being thought) will provide a splendid touchstone we assume as the altered method of our way of thinking, namely that we can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have into them.*
* This method, imitated from the method of those who study nature, thus consists in this: to seek the elements of pure reason in that which admits of being confirmed or refuted through an experiment. Now the propositions of pure reason, especially when they venture beyond all boundaries of possible experience, admit of no test by experiment with their objectsa (as in natural science): thus to experiment will be feasible only with concepts and principles that we assume a priori by arranging the latter so that the same objects can be considered from two different sides, on the one side as objects of the senses and the understanding for experience, and on the other B xix side as objects that are merely thought at most for isolated reason striving beyond the bounds of experience. If we now find that there is agreement with the principleb of pure reason when things are considered from this twofold standpoint, but that an unavoidable conflict of reason with itself arises with a standpoint, then the experiment decides for the correctness of that distinction.
a Objecte
b Princip
This experiment succeeds as well as we could wish, and it promises to metaphysics the secure course of a science in its first part, where it concerns itself with concepts a priori to which the corresponding objects appropriate to them can be given in experience. For after this alteration in Bxix our way of thinking we can very well explain the possibility of a cognition a priori, and what is still more, we can provide satisfactory proofs of the laws that are the a priori ground of nature, as the sum total of objects of experience—which were both impossible according to the earlier way of proceeding. But from this deduction of our faculty of cognizing a priori in the first part of metaphysics, there emerges a very strange result, and one that appears very disadvantageous to the whole purpose with which the second part of metaphysics concerns itself, namely that with this faculty we can never get beyond the limits of possible experience, which is nevertheless precisely the most essential occupation of this science. But herein lies just the experiment providing a decisive test of the truth of the result of that first assessment of our rational cognition a priori, namely that such cognition reaches appearances only, leaving the thing itself in itself as real for itself, but uncognized by us. For that which necessarily drives us to go beyond the limits of experience and all appearances is the unconditioned, which reason necessarily and with every right demands in things-in-themselves for everything that is conditioned, thereby demanding the series of conditions as something completed. Now if we find that on the assumption that our cognition conforms to the objects as things-in-themselves, the unconditioned cannot be thought at all without contradiction, but that on the contrary, if we assume that our representation of things as they are given to us does not conform to these things as they are in-themselves but rather that these objects as appearances conform to our way of representing, then the contradiction disappears; and consequently that the unconditioned must not be present in things insofar as as we are acquainted with them (insofar as they are given to us), but rather in things insofar as we are not acquainted with them, as things themselves in themselves: then this would show that what we initially assumed only as an experiment is well grounded.*
* This experiment of pure reason has much in common with what the chemists sometimes the experiment of reduction, or more generally the synthetic procedure. The analysis of the metaphysician separated pure a priori knowledge into two very heterogeneous elements, namely those of the things as appearances and the things in themselves. The dialectic once again combines them, in unison with the necessary rational idea of the unconditioned, and finds that the unison will never come about except through that distinction, which is therefore the true one.
Now after speculative reason has been denied all advance in this field of the supersensible, what still remains for us is to try whether there are not data in reason’s practical data for determining that transcendent rational concept of the unconditioned, in such a way as to reach beyond the limits of all possible experience, in accordance with the wishes of metaphysics, cognitions a priori that are possible, but only from a practical standpoint. By such procedures speculative reason has at least made room for such an extension, even if it had to leave it empty; and we remain at liberty, indeed we are called upon by reason to fill it if we can through practical Bxxii data of reason.*
* In the same way, the central laws of the motion of the heavenly bodies established with certainty what Copernicus assumed at the beginning only as a hypothesis, and at the same time they proved the invisible force (of Newtonian attraction) that binds the universe, which would have remained forever undiscovered if Copernicus had not ventured, in a manner contradictory to the senses yet true, to seek for the observed movements not in the objects of the heavens but in their observer. In this Preface I propose the transformation in our way of thought presented in the Critique merely as a hypothesis, analogous to that other hypothesis, only in order to draw our notice to the first attempts at such a transformation, which are always hypothetical, even thought in the treatise itself it will be proved not hypothetically but rather apodictically from the constitution of our representations of space and time and from the elementary concepts of the understanding.
***
COMMENTARY
In the B Preface, Kant is most concerned to state as carefully and cogently as he can just how metaphysics might be transformed or revolutionized and finally put onto “the secure path of science.”
To that end, the crucial theme of a thinker’s “revolution in way of thought” that Kant has already traced in his discussions of the authentic a priori objectual sciences of mathematics and natural science or physics, is now picked up again, deployed as an analogy, and then extended to the aspirational science of metaphysics.
This happens in one of the most densely-packed and justly famous passages not only in the Critique of Pure Reason but also in all of philosophy, which I have already partially quoted in my remarks on The Motto (CPR Bii), but that in fact extends over seven pages of the B edition German text, including no less than three important footnotes.
For purposes of expository clarity, I’ll break the complete passage into distinct three parts, and then comment on each part separately.
(I) How to Solve The Problem of Cognitive-Semantic Luck, and Kant’s Copernican Revolution as Restricted to Human Intuition
Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the object must conform to our cognition, which would agree better with the requested possibility of an a priori cognition of them, which is to establish something about objects before they are given to us. This would be like the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, when he did not make good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions if he assumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the observer, tried to see if he might not have greater success if he made the observer revolve and left the stars at rest. Now in metaphysics we can try in a similar way regarding the intuition of objects. If intuition has to conform to the [physical—R.H.] constitution of the objects, then I do not see how we can know anything of them a priori; but if the object (as an object of the senses) conforms to the [mentalistic—R.H.] constitution of our faculty of intuition, then I can very well represent the possibility to myself. (CPR Bxvi-xvii)
As I spelled it out in my discussion of the A Preface, The Problem of Cognitive- Semantic Luck is this:
If we assume that rational human a priori cognition is possible, then how can we adequately answer the skeptical worry that the correspondence between our a priori cognition and its abstract, non-empirical objects or truth-makers is anything other than a massive coincidence, a correlation that is merely accidental or contingent, which therefore could just as easily have failed to obtain?
Kant’s response to The Problem, we’ll remember, is that if we assume that our minds conform to the objects—whether according to Empiricism, Cartesian Rationalism, or Leibnizian Rationalism—then the worry cannot be adequately answered.
More precisely, cognitive-semantic luck, i.e., cognitive-semantic accident,or cognitive-semantic contingency, even if buttressed by a non-deceiving 3-O God, undermines the possibility of genuine a priori knowledge.
Only if it can be shown that there is an inherent or intrinsic, hence non-accidental and non-contingent, connection between our a priori cognition on the one hand, and its abstract, non-empirical objects or truth-makers on the other, can The Problem be adequately solved.
And the only philosophical hypothesis that guarantees this inherent or intrinsic cognition-to-world connection is The Conformity Thesis of transcendental idealism:
Asymmetrically and necessarily, all the ontic forms or structures of the proper objects of human cognition—namely, manifestly real natural objects—are isomorphic to the mentalistic forms or structures of our innate cognitive capacities.
In this context, The Conformity Thesis specifically restricts human cognition to human intuition, that is, our finite, animal sensory intuition in outer or inner sense, which is inherently constrained by our subjective non-empirical formal representations of space (for outer sense) and time (for inner sense).
So, substituting “intuition” for “cognition,” The Conformity Thesis reads:
Asymmetrically and necessarily, all the ontic forms or structures of the proper objects of human intuition—that is, manifestly real natural objects—are isomorphic to the mentalistic forms or structures of our innate cognitive capacity for human intuition, that is, to our subjective non-empirical formal representations of space and time.
As I also pointed out in my discussion of the A Preface, Kant had made this particular philosophical discovery by 1769, and first published it in his Inaugural Dissertation in 1770.
Moreover, this philosophical discovery is none other than Kant’s famous or notorious “Copernican Revolution” in metaphysics, namely, what I’ve been calling transcendental idealism for sensiblity.
But Kant’s Copernican analogy, itself, is semantically dense and somewhat convoluted.
As many commentators have noted, on the face of it, Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” in metaphysics appears to be a reverse Copernican Revolution.
Copernicus started with the classical Ptolemaic thesis that the celestial system, including the sun, revolves around the earthly observer, and then, in order to solve the problems faced by the Ptolemaic system, and in order to accommodate the experimental facts and phenomena, hypothesized that instead the earthly observer revolves around the sun—hence Copernicus reasons from a subject-centered or egocentric system of relations to an object-centered or allocentric system of relations.
But, so this line of interpretation goes, Kant argues in precisely the reverse direction, from an object-centered or allocentric system of relations (by analogy, the conformity of rational human mind to the objects) to a subject-centered or egocentric system of relations (by analogy, the conformity of the objects to rational human mind).
So if that line of interpretation is sound, then on the face of it, the “similar way” in which Kant reasons is in fact the mirror image or enantiomorph of Copernicus’s own reasoning, not its straight analogue.
Yet in a footnote six pages later, Kant says explicitly that
[T]he central laws of the motion of the heavenly bodies established with certainty what Copernicus assumed at the beginning only as a hypothesis, and at the same time they proved the invisible force (of Newtonian attraction) that binds the universe, which would have remained forever undiscovered if Copernicus had not ventured, in a manner contradictory to the senses yet true, to seek for the observed movements not in the objects of the heavens but in their observer. (CPR Bxii)
In other words, Kant’s Copernican analogy is in fact focused on Copernicus’s explanation of “the observed movements” of the celestial system, especially including the sun, which, Copernicus shows, are determined by factors “not in the objects of the heavens but in their observer.”
So in this respect, both Copernicus and Kant argue from an object-centered or allocentric system of relations to a subject-centered or egocentric system of relations, and his Copernican analogy is a straight analogy after all, and not a reversed analogy.
There are also two deeper points here.
First, as we saw above, for Kant a thinker’s scientific “revolution in way of thought (Denkart)” is always also a thinker’s “revolution in way of thinking (Denkungsart),” namely, a revolution in her moral character, which Kant later identifies with the self-organizing, goal-directed, individual constitution of a person’s causally efficacious power of choice or will, and thus it is also an existential revolution in a person’s heart, will, or way of living.
In other words, a thinker’s metaphysics and the moral meaning of that person’s life are essentially connected.
Therefore metaphysics, ethics, and the meaning of life cannot ultimately be detached or insulated from one another, as if they were nothing but a heap of distinct professional academic “Areas of Specialization,” aka AOSs, listed on someone’s Curriculum Vitae, uploaded as a .pdf to their departmental website.
Second, Kant also thinks that there is a deep analogy between the kind of experimental reasoning that natural scientists engage in, and his own Kantian abductive a priori subjunctive conditional approach to real metaphysical reasoning via transcendental idealism.
This is a deeply important point, because it is often claimed—for example, by Hegel—as a fundamental criticism of the Critical Philosophy, that although in order to vindicate metaphysics and set it on the secure path of science, Kant uses transcendental idealism to explain the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge in mathematics, natural science or physics, and metaphysics, nevertheless he provides no explanation of the possibility of transcendental knowledge itself, and therefore he cannot ultimately vindicate his real metaphysics.
But this Hegel-inspired line of criticism is misguided, even despite its longevity.
Correctly or incorrectly, Kant does provide an explanation of the possibility of transcendental knowledge, in terms of sound Kantian abductive synthetic a priori subjunctive conditional reasoning.
If Kantian real metaphysical reasoning is transcendental synthetic a priori reasoning, and if transcendental synthetic a priori reasoning is a special form of sound abductive synthetic a priori subjunctive conditional reasoning, and if sound abductive synthetic a priori subjunctive conditional reasoning yields authentic synthetic a priori knowledge, then by the same token, Kantian real metaphysical transcendental synthetic a priori reasoning yields authentic synthetic a priori knowledge.
In this connection, it’s equally deeply important to see that the Copernican analogy isolates only the first phase of a Kantian abduction, which adds a hypothetical antecedent general empirical natural causal law proposition NCL—which is derived by induction, together with the creative and imaginative insight of some individual natural scientist, in whom “[genius] gives the rule to nature” (CPJ 5: 308, boldfacing in the original)—to the complete set of schematized synthetic a priori Principles of the Pure Understanding.
These principles, in turn, collectively specify the basic transcendental structure of the manifestly real actual natural world, and thereby determine the smallest restricted class of logically possible worlds, namely, the class of experienceable worlds, each member of which has the same basic transcendental structure as the manifestly real actual natural world, and is also consistent with the truth of the general conception or theory Γ, i.e., the set of propositions [X1, X2, X3, … NCL, … Xn].
Then Kantian abduction completes its first stage by advancing, via the synthetic a priori subjunctive conditional Γ[X1, X2, X3, … NCL, … Xn][]→ Y, to the truth of a factual proposition Y.
By contrast to this first phase of reasoning, however, the experimental phase in Kantian abduction isolates the second phase of reasoning, in which the truth of Y is tested against the manifestly real facts of the natural world.
In the third phase of a Kantian abduction, it is inferred that, amongst all the good possible natural scientific explanations of Y, the general conception or theory Γ[X1, X2, X3, … NCL, … Xn] yields the best natural scientific explanation of Y.
And then in the fourth and final phase of a Kantian abduction, it is inferred that, amongst all the good possible philosophical explanations of Y the complete set of schematized synthetic a priori Principles of the Pure Understanding, together with Γ[X1, X2, X3, … NCL, … Xn], together with transcendental idealism, yields the best possible philosophical explanation of Y, namely the transcendental explanation,or “transcendental proof,” of Y.
So every Kantian natural scientific abduction, via synthetic a priori subjunctive conditionals, is also, at least potentially, the basis of a Kantian philosophical abduction, via transcendental proof.
I’ll come back again to these crucial methodological points shortly, in my remarks on (III).
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