Kant's Theory
Immanuel Kant is one of the most important of the modern philosophers. In my opinion, his importance lies more than anything else in his epistemology, whereby he attempted to take empiricism to its logical conclusions. (For those who don't do a lot of philosophy, epistemology simply means "our ideas about how we can know things." Empiricism is the epistemological view that says that all knowledge comes through the senses in some way or another.) His formulation of how we know, what we can know, and what we can't know, has fundamentally shaped modern thought on these subjects ever since. He provided a strong philosophical foundation for the empiricist Agnosticism that much of our culture tends to take for granted today.
Kant's basic theory goes like this: Information about objective reality only comes through the senses. But sense data is a big, unorganized mess. Our minds give order to that data and so create the appearance of the ordered cosmos that we see. Our minds impose categories--like space, time, number/quantity, and other logical categories--on the chaos of sense data, and the world we know is created out of that. Sense data is like someone throwing at us a bunch of wires, bits of metal, glass, and other things, all piled in a heap. But then someone comes along and puts the whole thing together and builds a car--that is like our mind, with its categories, organizing sense data into the world we know. The end result of this is that we really know nothing at all about the objective world outside of our minds. All the characteristics we can gather from what we experience (quantity, color, taste, sound, shape, spatial extension, temporal extension, etc.) have been imposed on that experience by our minds. So what we are really experiencing is the creation of our own minds, not the true, objective world. The latter we can never know, for we cannot get beyond or outside of our own mental categories.
Kant was very interested to distance his view from a view called idealism. He was thinking of the theory of idealism put forward by another Enlightenment philosopher, George Berkeley. Berkeley had proposed that, actually, everything that exists is either mind or the perceptions of mind. In his view, there is no such thing as "external matter" conceived of as some reality that exists outside of the experience of minds. He based this conclusion on many of the same arguments Kant would later use. He pointed out that all our concepts--color, texture, sound, taste, smell, shape, distance, extension, and therefore space and time--only make sense when understood as perceptions of minds. The color red, for example, is meaningless apart from the idea of someone seeing red. Taste is meaningless without the idea of someone tasting something. Even something like shape, which seems objective, implies a perceiving mind, for shape depends on extension (this part of object A is at some distance from that part of object A), which implies a perceiver in relation to whose viewpoint things can be in different places. Without some viewpoint connected to someone viewing, there would be no meaning in talking about point A being in a different place from point B, for the viewpoint of the viewer provides the grid on which different places can exist. There is no characteristic of matter whatsoever that is intelligible without, for its context, the idea of a perceiver perceiving it.
Berkeley concluded from all of this that the idea of "matter" as some entity existing apart from the experience of minds is meaningless gibberish, and so is non-existent. Berkeley's critics accused him of denying the existence of the external world. Berkeley replied that he was not denying the existence of the external world, but merely describing more accurately what the external world is--not an entity existing apart from the experience of perceivers, but an entity existing by means of such perception. "To be is to be perceived." But Kant was not convinced. He didn't like the idea that there is no world external to the experience of minds. He wanted to maintain the idea of such a world. But he also agreed with Berkeley that all our perceptions and experiences are of things created by our own minds. Therefore, he concluded, a mentally external world exists, but we can know nothing at all about it. Here is Kant describing all of this in his own words, from his classic work, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (First Part, Section 13, Remark 2, from the public domain translation by Paul Carus, provided by Wikisource under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, found here):
Whatever is given us as object, must be given us in intuition. All our intuition however takes place by means of the senses only; the understanding intuits nothing, but only reflects. And as we have just shown that the senses never and in no manner enable us to know things in themselves, but only their appearances, which are mere representations of the sensibility, we conclude that "all bodies, together with the space in which they are, must be considered nothing but mere representations in us, and exist nowhere but in our thoughts." Now, is not this manifest idealism?
Idealism consists in the assertion, that there are none but thinking beings, all other things, which we think are perceived in intuition, being nothing but representations in the thinking beings, to which no object external to them corresponds in fact. Whereas I say, that things as objects of our senses existing outside us are given, but we know nothing of what they may be in themselves, knowing only their appearances, i. e., the representations which they cause in us by affecting our senses. Consequently I grant by all means that there are bodies without us, that is, things which, though quite unknown to us as to what they are in themselves, we yet know by the representations which their influence on our sensibility procures us, and which we call bodies, a term signifying merely the appearance of the thing which is unknown to us, but not therefore less actual. Can this be termed idealism? It is the very contrary.
Long before Locke's time, but assuredly since him, it has been generally assumed and granted without detriment to the actual existence of external things, that many of their predicates may be said to belong not to the things in themselves, but to their appearances, and to have no proper existence outside our representation. Heat, color, and taste, for instance, are of this kind. Now, if I go farther, and for weighty reasons rank as mere appearances the remaining qualities of bodies also, which are called primary, such as extension, place, and in general space, with all that which belongs to it (impenetrability or materiality, space, etc.)---no one in the least can adduce the reason of its being inadmissible. As little as the man who admits colors not to be properties of the object in itself, but only as modifications of the sense of sight, should on that account be called an idealist, so little can my system be named idealistic, merely because I find that more, nay, all the properties which constitute the intuition of a body belong merely to its appearance. The existence of the thing that appears is thereby not destroyed, as in genuine idealism, but it is only shown, that we cannot possibly know it by the senses as it is in itself.
I should be glad to know what my assertions must be in order to avoid all idealism. Undoubtedly, I should say, that the representation of space is not only perfectly conformable to the relation which our sensibility has to objects---that I have said--- but that it is quite similar to the object,---an assertion in which I can find as little meaning as if I said that the sensation of red has a similarity to the property of vermilion, which excites this sensation in me.
So here is where Kant has become very influential. Most people today, at least those immersed in Western culture and Western thought, take it for granted that all our knowledge comes through the senses. They would claim that we cannot know anything in any other way. But what about logic? Can we gain knowledge through an application of logic to our concepts? For example, consider the idea that the past is infinite--that is, that there was no beginning to the universe, but that it has always been going on, that no matter how far back you went in a time machine, you would never run into a beginning of time because there is no such beginning. I submit that the concept of an "infinite past" is logically absurd. It is absurd because it contains a contradiction--the concept of "infinite" contradicts the concept of "past". The "past" is that part of the timeline that we have already got through. But an "infinite", in terms of number or quantity, is by definition something that can never be got through. If you try to count to infinity, for example, you will never arrive. So an infinite past would be a length of time that could never be gotten through, it could never be completed, and yet the "past", by definition, is a length of time that has already been gotten through, it is already completed. Yes, we are adding to the past as we move into the future, but that part of time which is already the "past" is already through. So an "infinite past" would be a length of time that both cannot be gotten through and also has already been gotten through--a manifest contradiction. But contradictions cannot exist, for, by definition, being excludes non-being, and all beings exclude their opposites. Whatever is, by definition it is what it is and isn't what it isn't. So the conclusion of logic is that an infinite past cannot exist, and therefore the past must be finite--that is, it must be limited.
Now the Kantian empiricist responds in this way: "OK, I'll grant that the concept of an 'infinite past' is contradictory and therefore illogical. But that doesn't tell us at all about the real world. It only tells us about our concepts. We're just playing around with ideas inside our own heads. Such logical games can tell us nothing about objective reality, which exists outside our heads and our concepts. So such logical analyses provide us with no knowledge. Knowledge can only come through the senses, not through logic."
My First Objection to Kant
Now here's where I want to provide a fundamental critique of the Kantian view. I want to make two objections, the second more important than the first.
My first objection is that, if the Kantian is right, then he is indeed right that our logical analyses provide no actual knowledge of the objective world. But it also follows that our senses provide no knowledge of the objective world. Kant himself admitted as much, and my experience suggests that the more perceptive among the modern empiricist Agnostics will also admit as much when pressed. But I think they often fail to live up to the full implications of this admission. So I think this conclusion needs to be pressed. If this Kantian empiricist view is right, then nothing at all, neither logic nor our senses nor anything else, gives us any knowledge of reality. Logic gives us no knowledge of reality because it only provides an analysis of the concepts in our heads and doesn't touch the real, external world. And our senses provide us with no knowledge of reality because they never actually give us any access to the external world. Kant appears to say at first that they do grant such access, but then he takes it all back by affirming that it is the categories of our minds ordering the sense data that really is the source of everything we actually know and experience. Space, time, extension, quantity, shape, taste, color--in short, everything at all in our experience and knowledge--is a creation of our minds. It is not what the external world is really like. We know nothing at all about the external world. You can be sure that Kant did not reach this conclusion because he wanted to. He would have liked to have shown us how we can have actual knowledge of reality. But he rightly recognized that his way of thinking about how we gain knowledge made that impossible. Empirical sense data, without adding anything else, even logic, to it, can tell us absolutely nothing about reality. I look across the room and see an apple on the table. How do I know that there really is an apple on the table? Perhaps it is an illusion. How do I know that if there is an apple on the table, it isn't also true at the same time that there is NOT an apple on the table? Only logic could make that inference. But if I cannot even deduce that from my experience, if I cannot even, by my experience, exclude the opposite, then my experience tells me nothing, for there is nothing there that can be translated into any concept that could possibly have any meaning to me. If all I've got, literally, is empirical sense data to go on ultimately, then all I can know, literally, is nothing at all. And if all the characteristics that make up our idea of what a physical object is--color, shape, size, etc.--only exist as experiences of our minds, as Kant says, and cannot be attributed to objects in the external world, then we can really have no idea at all of what a "physical object" is or is like. The very phrase, "physical object", becomes simply a meaningless collection of sounds.
I think it is worth bringing this out because I think it is missed by a lot of people who like to think like empiricist Agnostics and deny that logic can tell us about reality. Even those more acute thinkers who will grant this in principle seem to forget it in the practice of their lives. They keep going on as if they know something about the world, while denying in theory that they do. They seek to gratify their curiosity, they argue with people, they hold opinions, they act on their opinions and seem to feel they are doing something meaningful in some way, they do science--all of which must be ultimately meaningless if their epistemology is correct.
My Second Objection to Kant
But this is not, I think, the most important objection to the Kantian theory. The most important objection is that it is plainly wrong. Its error consists in a simple forgetfulness with regard to the definition of words. The Kantians--and George Berkeley before them--are quite right in pointing out that all our concepts--color, shape, texture, distance, extension, divisibility, quantity, etc.--are, well, concepts. That is, they are ideas that exist in the minds of thinking and perceiving beings. But then the Kantians make their fallacious move--they draw a distinction between our concepts about reality and reality itself, asserting that since all we know is the former, we can never know the latter. Do you see the fallacy in drawing this distinction? Think about it for a moment before reading on, and see if you can figure it out before I tell you what it is.
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OK, did you figure it out? The fallacy, of course, is that reality itself is also a concept, just like all the other concepts. It is just as much an idea in our minds as any other concept. So the distinction between our concepts and reality itself is a false distinction. There is no reality outside our concepts, by definition, since reality is itself one of those concepts. The whole Kantian skeptical conclusion rests on the assumption that because we can never get beyond our concepts, we can never get to that which is outside those concepts, namely reality itself. So our concepts block us off from reality, leading to the conclusion that we can know nothing at all. But if reality itself is a concept, then just the opposite is true. Experience of (and analysis of) our concepts does give us true knowledge of reality, because these concepts are nothing else than reality itself. It turns out that George Berkeley had already given us the answer to Kant's skepticism decades before Kant ever wrote, when he pointed out that it is a fallacy to worry about idealism leaving out the external world. Idealism is only leaving out the external world if we assume an idea about what the "external world" is contrary to what the idealist view thinks it is--that is, if we assume that the "external world" is something that exists outside of our concepts, outside of the experiences of minds. But since reality itself is a concept, it is contradictory gibberish to talk about a reality that exists outside of our concepts. So even though we can know nothing beyond our concepts, we have lost nothing of reality, for concepts are reality. They are simply one and the same thing. The "reality" that Kant thought lies forever beyond our knowledge turns out to be itself unreal, nothing but a phantom born of confusion in how we are using our words.
It is easy to be confused by such phantoms of language, because language can be used in ways that create illusions or impressions that don't correspond to reality. I think of comic literature like Alice in Wonderland, where much of the humor is carried on by playing around with the illusions of language. Or we can think of the example with the cats that is often used in philosophy classes: "I can prove to you that a cat has nine tails. No cat has eight tails. One cat has one more tail than no cat. Therefore, since 8+1=9, one cat has nine tails." Of course, the problem here is a trick in the use of language. Some classic arguments against the existence of God are based in such fallacious use of language. For example, some Atheists argue that there cannot be an all-powerful being, because such a being could not make a rock so big that he couldn't lift it. "If he can lift the rock, then it's not a rock so big that he can't lift it, so he can't create such a rock. But if he can't lift it, then he can't lift it, so there is something he can't do. Either way, there has to be something he can't do, so he cannot be all-powerful." The problem with this argument is simply that the arguer is assuming that the word can't always implies a lack of power. But this is not the case. Sometimes something is impossible to someone because of a lack of power, but other times the impossibility lies not in a lack of power but in the absurdity of the concept. The reason why God can't make a rock so big he can't lift it is not because he lacks power, but, on the contrary, it is because he has all power. Being all-powerful, he can't make a rock more powerful than himself, which would be a contradiction. Similarly, God cannot make a square circle, not because he lacks power, but because the concept of a square circle is meaningless gibberish. But because the word "can't" often implies a lack of power, we neglect to consider whether the present argument is such a case, we just assume it is, and so we fall into the fallacy.
It seems like we must be out of touch with external reality if all we can know are our own concepts. But this seeming is just an illusion. It comes from having a false impression of what a concept is and what the external world is. We vaguely imagine someone's head, and concepts floating around in that head, and then we imagine a world outside of that head. But the idealists don't deny the existence of objects outside of people's heads; they deny the existence of objects outside of people's perceptions and concepts. The very concept of outside is itself a concept. So, by definition, there is nothing outside concepts. Therefore, a logical analysis of concepts can give us true knowledge of actual reality. We are not limited to the empiricist way of knowing things. If logic excludes an "infinite past" because the concept involves a contradiction, then we know that an "infinite past" does not and cannot exist. We know something true (and very important) about the real world.
So recognizing Kant's fallacy here can help us get beyond the false empiricist epistemology that has cut off from modern culture and much of modern philosophy a very important source of knowledge about the real world. By adopting this false epistemology, we have blinded ourselves and doomed ourselves to an unresolvable skepticism. But it is all unnecessary, for our epistemology is based in nothing other than a simple fallacy. Once we realize this, we can get back to exploring the real world using all of the resources at our disposal.
For more, see here, here, and here. It is evident that recognizing the inextricability of reality from the concepts and experiences of minds points to a view of reality in which mind is fundamental, as opposed to a view where mind is somehow an eventual by-product produced by non-mind. To see how all of this relates to arguments for the existence of God, see chapter three of my book, Why Christianity is True, including the section on "Deeper Philosophical Issues".
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