UNDERSTANDING HEGEL 2
OR: NO MORE THESIS — ANTITHESIS — SYNTHESIS

Win Corduan

Part 2 Kant and his Successors

So, I insisted last time that Kant is widely misunderstood because people read him along the same lines as Hume, who invented a method for knowledge and then applied it to the point where he was stuck with skepticism. Kant, on the other hand, started with the certain knowledge that we have and then established a method that makes this knowledge possible. Let me emphasize several points:

• If it bothers you that we can only have knowledge insofar as our faculties for knowledge permit it, I'm not sure what I can do for you. That's a physiological, theological, and epistemological given. Knowledge is mediated to us via our internal knowledge-apparatus, and there's no way of avoiding it.
  
  ---Well, actually there could be if we believed, as Gordon Clark taught, that all of our beliefs, whether true or false, are the result of God's personal revelation to us.


----Though, come to think of it, even then we still can only have knowledge by means of that particular mechanism of knowledge.

----So, I take it back. There is no way of avoiding it.

• I said last time that we shouldn't construe the basic principles of Kant's epistemology as leading to skepticism. I'm going to stand by that statement, but I also need to come clean with you: Kant certainly did leave us with a metaphysical skepticism. His Prolegomena to any Metaphysics that in the Future may Present itself as Science was, in fact, a eulogy to metaphysics. But Kant did not end up with that skepticism; he started out that way. When he stipulated that we can have certain knowledge of some things, he never included metaphysics in his set of stipulated knowable items. Thus, his skepticism on metaphysics was self-created. 


• This, then, is the difference between, say, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Kant. Aquinas and others did not rule out metaphysics from the start, but began with, what Jacques Maritain called "an intuition of being" so that there would be no arbitrary noumenal realm, closed to us by nothing other than the philosopher's intentions. 


• Kant, of course, made a gesture into the direction of accepting the reality of objective being by not letting go of the "thing-in-itself." To be sure, as we've already stated several times, we cannot know the thing-in-itself because doing so would entail the absurd notion of knowing a thing without the process of knowing it. Still, Kant insisted that the thing-in-itself had to be there. It was not just a vestigial metaphor for him; it was his reassurance that he was still in touch with reality.

Now, here comes the important point of distinction between Kant and his successors. Let us return to the example of knowledge by acquaintance. There is a flower, and I know that flower. In the background of that knowledge of the flower is the flower-in-itself, but I only know the flower insofar as knowledge of it is mediated through my mind. Kant's successors raised the question of what, if anything, the flower-in-itself contributes to our knowledge of it. They concluded that it just seemed to be a nothing-burger stipulation, which Kant would not relinquish because he was afraid of losing the objectivity of knowledge. Kant's successors did not share his Angst. Let's follow their lead and assume that you do have knowledge of the flower, even though there is no flower-in-itself.

To demonstrate their answer, let us once again raise Kant's transcendental question, but with a twist. Let's do this slowly, first by reiterating Kant's approach.

• Kant. I have knowledge of the flower. What are the conditions that make knowledge of the flower possible and certain?

• There is a flower-in-itself.
• I apprehend that flower with an empirical intuition.
• The empirical content is processed within my mind by the forms of space and time and the logical categories based on the pure concepts of the understanding.
• When this process is complete (and it actually is instantaneous), then I can have knowledge of the flower.

• Kant's Successors. I have knowledge of the flower, but I have dispensed with the useless idea of a flower-in-itself. What are the conditions that make knowledge of the flower possible and certain?

• The flower still presents itself as an object of my knowledge.
• I apprehend the flower and subject it to the various contributing faculties of knowledge.
• Then, if the flower is not located as an unapproachable entity in the external world, it, too, must be included in the constituents of knowledge supplied by my mind.
• Thus, not only are the forms and categories supplied by my mind, but the content of my knowledge as well.

Kant's successors were called the "German Idealists." Idealism here stands in contrast to "realism." Whereas realism, as it is used in this context of modern philosophy, posits an external world that exists apart from my mind, idealism dispenses with a separately existing external world and claims that all knowledge, even the apparent empirical content, has its source in our minds. 

If that supposition is true, it sure seems to leave us with incredibly cluttered minds. But is there any harm in it? Some philosophers try to use the sheer number of possible imaginary objects as an argument in itself against those who espouse a view such as this one, or, say, that of Alexius Meinong (1853-1920), who came from a different direction. But why should the number of possible ideas, images, fantasies, etc. be limited? Who decides what is the correct number and what counts as excessive? We can't do philosophy by abacus or clicker. A stronger critique of Meinong was voiced by Bertrand Russell when he pointed out that Meinong's realm of unbounded reality would contain contradictions. However, Meinong responded that there could be no contradiction since these theoretical objects could not actually subsist in the universe.   See Bertrand Russell, On Denoting

There is another problem, however, that does need to be addressed. Something must create order within all of those potential appearances. Unless there is some kind of a regulative mechanism that holds the content together and structures it, our thoughts have the potential of being totally chaotic. Kant's forms and categories cannot help the idealist because Kant left the external world as storehouse, limiting the mind's intake to one sensory intuition at a time, whereas the idealist locates it all in our minds, and if all of the possible content would present itself all at once, viz. everything that we could conceivably know or imagine would invade our consciousness in one instant --. . . well, I'm thinking of heads exploding, skulls on fire, serious incurable psychoses; again, there seems to be no limit to the frightening possibilities...-- but actually, I don't really have to worry about such a contingency if, with the German idealists, I approach the issue transcendentally. I only have to account for the knowledge that I do have, not for some bizarre scenario of cosmic cognitive overload that is not a reality. So, since my mind is (relatively) orderly, there must be an intrinsic means of regulation. Fichte came up with an idea towards that end, namely by emphasizing human beings as moral agents as well as thinkers, and that's what we'll talk about next time.