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Transcendental Idealism: What Jerusalem Has To Say to Königsberg

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2010

Mark Glouberman
Mark Glouberman*
Affiliation:
Kwantlen Polytechnic University and The University of British Columbia
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Abstract

ABSTRACT: The Bible illuminates Kant’s distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves. The two biblical creation stories, in Genesis 1 and in Genesis 2, offer different ontological parsings, only the second of which, like Kant’s appearances, is relativized to the human case. But while Kant’s other region remains undercharacterized (it is either understood negatively, as differing from the realm of appearances, or else uninformatively, as the object of supra-human cognition), the Bible articulates quite fully the world as it is before the advent of men and women. The Bible treats this realm from the sub-human standpoint. This broadly anthropological approach to the idea of appearances clarifies transcendental idealism.

RÉSUMÉ: La Bible éclaire la distinction kantienne entre les apparences et les choses en soi. Les deux récits bibliques de la création, dans Genèse 1 et 2, offrent différentes analyses ontologiques, et seule la deuxième est, comme les apparences de Kant, relative à la condition humaine. Mais, tandis que l’autre région dont Kant parle est sans caractérisation positive (elle est soit comprise négativement comme différente du royaume des apparences ou de façon peu informative comme objet de cognition supra-humaine), la Bible décrit amplement le monde tel qu’il est avant l’avènement des hommes et des femmes. La Bible traite de ce domaine du point de vue de l’infra-humain. Cette approche essentiellement anthropologique de l’idée des apparences clarifie l’idéalisme transcendantal

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 49 , Issue 1 , March 2010 , pp. 25 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 2010

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References

Notes

1 “Im Anfang war der Tat.” Another English rendering: “In the beginning was the deed.”

2 The echo is more audible in the original German: “Die welt is die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen. …” I employ C. K. Ogden’s translation (London: Routledge, 1922). The translation, along with the original, is available at <kfs.org/~jonathan/witt/tlph.html>. Tractatus 1:1 draws out what according to Wittgenstein is implicit in Tractatus 1: “The world is everything that is the case.”

3 “… nicht der Dinge.”

4 In his later period, Wittgenstein quotes Goethe’s “In the beginning.” See M. W. Rowe, “Goethe and Wittgenstein,” Philosophy 66 (1991). Probably, then, both Goethe and John lodge in his mind at the time of the Tractatus. Pace John’s Gospel, in which God is said never to rest, Wittgenstein’s omega in the Tractatus, Tractatus 7, a call to silence and a fade to black, might even be taken as an echo of God’s rest on the seventh day of Genesis. If that is what it is, Wittgenstein is in for a surprise.

5 While the noun “deed” is of course linked to the verb “to do,” even sophisticated users of English do not see “deed” and “fact” as synonymous. I might just note that English contains the noun-making suffix “facient,” though this is a form unlikely to get anything done on Main Street.

6 Tractatus 1.2: “Die Welt zerfällt in Tatsachen.” That is: “The world divides into facts.”

7 Quotations (like this one) from the Critique of Pure Reason make use of Norman Kemp Smith’s translation (London: Macmillan, 1933), and supply the standard Akademie edition A/B page numbering. “Critique” refers throughout to this work.

8 “Bible” refers always to the Hebrew Scriptures. In quoting chapter-and-verse, I draw on the New Revised Standard Version [NRSV]. The source is The New Oxford Annotated Bible, ed. Metzger, Bruce M. and Murphy, Roland E. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar. Unless otherwise indicated, biblical quotations — for which I specify chapter and verse(s) — are from the Book of Genesis.

9 Kuehn, Manfred, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 26CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The irony in the fact that the pronunciation of the first syllable of the name in Hebrew is a long “e,” as in “Emanuel,” is not neutralized by the phonetics of Kant’s German.

10 I quote from p. 7 of James W. Ellington’s translation (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977).

11 The epigram in full: “In vetere novum latet, vetus in novo patet.” “The New [Testament] is latent in the Old, the Old [Testament] is patent in the New.”

12 Arthur Melnick, review of Henry Allison’s Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, in The Philosophical Review XCIV (1985): 135, emphasis in original! Didn’t Kant substantially revise the first edition of the Critique? Which, one therefore wonders, are “the very arguments” that Melnick refers to? More pointedly, Melnick is claiming to know what the idealist doctrine is independently of the arguments for it. But the meaning of a conclusion of a deductive argument is in part given by the reasoning for it. The way out of the circle of interpretation here requires greater latitude and more ingenuity than Melnick allows. At any rate, at least one of us can’t be right.

13 In The Origins and Implications of Kant’s ‘Critical’ Philosophy (Lewiston: Mellen, 1990)Google Scholar, I make a concentrated interpretive assault on transcendental idealism from the (standard) dialectical standpoint. The conclusion to which I am driven is that interpreting along such lines generates readings on which what Kant advances, though it makes good inter-theoretic sense, is incapable of being justified.

14 Arguably, the empiricism/rationalism typology derives from Kant, whose architectonic mode of thinking enforces an artificial-looking drill ground precision of alignments and contrasts. Kant is writing the history Whiggishly, according to the slogan pre-Kant ergo propter Kant. Kant of course cast a giant shadow over subsequent philosophy. Post-Kant ergo propter-Kant.

15 Some interpreters offer non-standard dialectics, citing, for instance, Christian Wolff, or Alexander Baumgarten, as keys to Kant. But these departures from the current mainstream, motivated by Kant’s references too, attract the same remarks.

16 Kant directly answered an attack by Johann August Eberhard, a follower of Leibniz, challenging the originality of the “critical” position. The lengthy response, sarcastically titled “On a discovery according to which any new critique of pure reason has been made superfluous by an earlier one,” turns out to just to muddy the waters further. Kant’s part in the exchange, along with an excellent discussion of the debate, is available to English readers: The Kant-Eberhard Controversy, trans. and ed. Allison, Henry E. (Baltimore: Johns-Hopkins, 1973)Google Scholar.

17 There is, as I shall explain, an internal reason for the Bible’s not keeping the two separate. Nonetheless, the porosity of the line leads interpreters astray.

18 See Schmidt, Claudia M., “Kant’s Transcendental, Empirical, Pragmatic, and Moral Anthropology,” Kant-Studien 98 (2007): 151-82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The article contains a wealth of useful citations and textual references.

19 I will use “im-mediate” (and related forms) and “given‑ness” to keep alive the technical Kantian senses. I will also use “intuitional” in preference to “intuitive,” since the latter has a strong connotation inapplicable to Kant’s intent.

20 The idea of an active intellect is a constant in Descartes’s thinking. In the early and unfinished Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Rule Twelve, Descartes writes: “[I]n so far as our external senses are all parts of the body, sense-perception, strictly speaking, is merely passive” (I p. 40). In the mature Principles of Philosophy: “[A]ll sense-perception involves being acted upon” (1.23 II p. 201). From this last he infers (ibid.): “[I]t cannot in any way be supposed that God perceives by means of the senses.” (In quoting Descartes, I make use of Cottingham, John, Stoothoff, Robert, and Murdoch, Dugald, trans., The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985] and vol. II [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984],)Google Scholar

21 It’s illuminating to examine what the pioneering modern analytic interpreters of Kant say in this connection. Jonathan Bennett: “A non-sensible intuition would presumably be a capacity for acting informatively, whatever that may mean.” (Kant’s Analytic [London: Cambridge University Press, 1966], 55-6Google Scholar). Bennett elsewhere (Kant’s Dialectic [London: Cambridge University Press, 1974], 19Google Scholar) describes the idea as “a full-scale catastrophe.” P. F. Strawson describes the active mode of intuition as “a mode of awareness in which the faculty of awareness was not affected by the object because it created its own object” (The Bounds of Sense [London: Methuen, 1966], 254Google Scholar). “Kant,” Strawson proceeds to observe (ibid.), “frequently remarks that we are unable to comprehend [the] possibility [of intellectual intuition]”; to which he acidly adds: “an important reservation.” Both interpreters are aware of the importance that Kant attaches to the idea of an active intellect in the frame of transcendental idealism; both find that the notion is gibberish; and both are unsympathetic to transcendental idealism. The anthropological reading which I am working towards throws out the bathwater (the active intellect) without ipso facto throwing out the baby (transcendental idealism).

22 The question on the side of X is, then, “What is it to be a bat?,” not “What is it like to be a bat?” Certainly (and pace Thomas Nagel) one cannot properly address the phenomenological question without also, and even prior, addressing the ontological one. Being a bat, for all we know, may be the same as being a stone. The pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes is reported to have said that horses, had they the power to draw, would depict their gods as equine, and oxen depict theirs as bovine. For the same reason, this mockery is open to criticism and, I believe, is ultimately unsuccessful.

23 The three questions are posed in the Critique itself. See A804-8055/B832-833. The claim that all reduce to the fourth question can be found in the Jäsche Logic, first published in 1800.

24 I borrow the phrase from Bruno Latour, who in Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar, characterizes anthropology as “empirical metaphysics.”

25 This might be so of some human communities, or it could conceivably come to be so. The point is that the acceptability would be a matter of social permission.

26 To be sure, the crusading anti-scientific rhetoric of many Bible-thumpers, coupled to a widespread preparedness to endorse scientific charlatanry, does nothing to facilitate secular open-mindedness. But neither party here is in a position to play holier-than-thou.

27 I go along here with the usual reading, since I am making a point against the thinking of those who subscribe to this reading. But the text does not represent God as awarding dominion to men and women, giving them something that otherwise they would not have had. The claim about being dominant has exactly the same character as, and is another clause in the same sentence as, the claim about being fruitful and multiplying. God does not in any interesting sense confer or bestow on men and women the power to reproduce. Being what they are, men and women are thusly empowered. (As to “filling up the Earth,” the Bible-writers will have had a lot of experience of human civilization and its mastery of a good deal of Nature.)

28 I will modify this below, and modify it in a fashion that makes the Bible’s position quite philosophical in character. That is, I will reconstitute this claim as a conceptual one. In its present form, it looks like a factual generalization.

29 The claim about man’s intermediacy is found in Part 4 of The Meditations (II p. 38). Descartes does use the principle that if a real distinction can be made intellectually between A and B, God can in actuality separate A from B. But the argument for the real distinction between mind and body is independent of the appeal to God. It had better be independent, since Descartes’s God is not constrained even by the laws of logic, and hence can separate qualities from substances, so that from the standpoint of what God can set apart, mind might be (as Locke suggested that it is) a quality of matter.

30 One can imagine a scripture — an ecological one — saying that we should try to minimize the difference by comporting ourselves thus-and-so. But such a scripture too would begin with the sense of difference. It’s not that animals will not react to our requests for a change in behaviour — though that is true too. It’s that they do not have to change.

31 Readers not co-opted by philosophy will note that God’s control, though it beggars ours, is, like ours, not total. So just as we are like God, God is like us.

32 I emphasize that the part of the Bible on which I am focusing, the primeval part including the creation stories, is usually regarded as the most straightforwardly committed to the extra-human.

33 The first use of “good” is in verse 4. But verses 1 and 2 of Genesis 1 make up a section heading.

34 The NRSV has “good and evil.” Here and throughout, I have substituted “bad” for “evil.” “Bad” both lexically and conceptually, is more accurate. “Evil” calls up active malevolence. But the Bible is speaking when it speaks of “bad” of a feature that it regards as unavoidable in the human world, and that it does not at the end of the day want the world to be clear of. I will explain this more fully below.

35 Why isn’t God a suitable companion for the man? The text is telegraphing that God is just a narrative device. It should not be responded that God is spirit, not flesh. For in Genesis 3, which continues Genesis 2, God is described as “walking in the garden” (8).

36 In the woman the man finally finds a counterpart with whom he is fully at home. Here, the sexual sense of familiarity comes to the fore. The man calls her “woman” (2:23). So affinity comes in degrees.

37 Let me offer a directly relevant piece of evidence for the highest estimate of their subtlety. Human beings are created in Genesis 1 on the afternoon of the sixth day. Then they are (28) given a blessing. The sub-human animals are created on the same day, in the morning. This conveys the idea that human beings are animals like the others; animals with a difference of course, but still animals. Now on the fifth day, the fish that God creates are (22) also given a blessing. Since the sub-human animals are closer to human beings than fish, this is prima facie baffling. Nor does the text spell out explicitly what similarity it sees. But there is a relevant similarity, and the similarity reveals what “good” means as it is applied in the early chapters (and thereby gives us a line on what the Bible denominates “bad”). Fish, created on the fifth day, can move naturally everywhichway in their watery habitat. They “need” a blessing because they do not have a set way; they are not hard-wired to do what they do, as the sun is to move in its orbit, etc. So the fish can go wrong. As the Bible-writers know, this is of course only figuratively the case of the water-dwellers. But it is literally true of men and women. So the text both works to undermine the view that men and women are extra-natural by having them created on the same day as the (other) animals, while at the same time explaining in non-theological terms (like the fish) what it sees as a vital differentiator. That it looks backwards from day six to day five for the differentiator again indicates that the human difference is not anchored in the extra-natural. As to the meaning of “good”: the term, we see, means something like “governed by principles that fix their behaviour.” So only things not governed by such principles (fish, figuratively; men and women, literally) need a blessing. For since they do not travel on rails, they can deviate. To eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good-and-bad is to move from obedient subordination to autonomy.

38 Following the precedent of the Authorised Version, the NRSV translates as “cattle” a Hebrew word that has the sense of “large land mammal.” (English “behemoth” derives from the Hebrew word.) I think that “cattle” is conceptually misleading, especially in regard to Genesis 1:24, since in common parlance the word denotes domesticated animals. It is also objectionable because there is in the Bible a Hebrew word (transliterated: “bakar”) expressly for cattle.

39 In the Hebrew, “man” is prefixed by the definite article. “The man” would be more accurate.

40 Observe that the event described would never naturally be described as catastrophic for the comet, any more than the eradication of smallpox would be described as a disaster for the virus. The asymmetry indicates that the description is not of the happening “in itself.” Who prays for the lion that doesn’t catch its prey? It’s the antelope that gets the cheers if it flees, the tears if it gets caught.

41 This is of course perfectly Darwinian: the whole is benefitted by the reduction of the weak and the increase of the strong.

42 It might be objected that a brake pad is a particular. But this just shows that more analytic refinements are needed. A brake pad is a functional entity, and in that sense is not a full particular. We do not care which brake pad we buy to replace a worn one, just as we do not care which of a bunch of trees (of a certain sort) that the landscaper has in his lot gets planted in our yard. Friends cannot be replaced in this way.

43 This, albeit indistinctly, is the message of the Book of Job. “Where were you,” God thunders at Job, “when I laid the foundations of the world?” (38:4) In effect: “The world of Genesis 1 contains no particular men or particular women. So particular men and particular women, if harm comes to them from interaction with that world, have no ground for complaint. The design of that world involves no flaw for being compatible with such harm to the men and women who come to be in Genesis 2. In the world of Genesis 1, humanity is never harmed.”

44 Consistently with this, it is easy to appreciate that Kant’s use of the plural, “things‑in‑themselves,” needs to be justified. For a different, more text-based, line of argumentation that the ontology of facts in the Tractatus is monistic, see “Tractatus: Monism or Pluralism?,” Mind LXXXIX (1980): 17-36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 The Observer Weekend, 26 January 1964. The Investigations, Part I, ends at section 693.