What We Can Learn from Kant's Mistakes

Immanuel Kant was born on Earth Day, April 22, three-hundred years ago. The son of a saddle-maker, he eventually became one of Europe's most famous philosophers. A year-long string of conferences and celebrations have been scheduled in Germany to commemorate the event.
In the United States, not so much.

The director of the Einstein forum in Potsdam, German, Susan Neiman, recently wrote a piece for the New York Times about the abiding importance of Kant's thought. It carries the title "Why the World Still Needs Immanuel Kant."  Neiman is the author of a recent book called What We Can Learn from the Germans, so she ought to know what she's talking about.  But I could find very little in the article to convince me that Kant's ideas are worth examining in any great detail.

Her comments can be stated without much fuss: Kant "proved" that freedom, justice, and the world beyond our senses exist.  (Was there ever any doubt?)

"Kant [she writes] was driven by a question that still plagues us: Are ideas like freedom and justice utopian daydreams, or are they more substantial? Their reality can’t be proven like that of material objects, for those ideas make entirely different claims on us — and some people are completely impervious to their claims. Could philosophy show that acting morally, if not particularly common, is at least possible?"

A passage like this strikes me as borderline nonsense. Children begin to develop a notion of freedom the first time they're sent to their room for some foul deed, and they find that they've lost some of that freedom. The concept of justice follows soon after, as they begin to brood over the fact that their big sister "started it all" yet suffered no consequences. Acts of freedom and conscience are a commonplace in the lives of most adults.

In the eighteenth century the concepts of fellow-feeling and the "moral sense" developed in England, France, and elsewhere. Kant, to his discredit, rejected those concepts. He argued that a truly moral act could never be a pleasant one. If you helped an elderly man across the street and felt good about it, shame on you! In Kant's worldview, goodness was basically a synonym for duty. But who is to determine where our duty lies? And how can this devotion to duty be squared with the idea of personal freedom? And where does the genuinely moral element come in?  

But Kant is mostly known these days for his analyses of how the mind works.  Here, too, confusion reigns. Yet we can learn something from Kant's missteps. For example, the distinction he makes between analytic and synthetic judgments is worth looking into. In the former judgment, the predicate is contained in the subject. In the later, the predicate adds something to the subject. The distinction here is sound, but the words Kant uses to describe it are not. An analytic judgment isn't really a judgment at all, but simply an analysis. When we analyze something, we take it apart, separating and identifying its constituent parts. When we judge something, we assert that the thing, considered as a whole, has some sort of value.

Philosophers tend to love analysis yet are wary of judgment. Why? Because judgment is always personal. There is no way to "prove" that the Mona Lisa is beautiful (I don't care for it much myself) or that the Russian Revolution was a good thing. But the notion that 2 + 2 = 4 follows  of necessity once we've agreed to work in the decimal system of numbering. It's already part of the scheme. It's an "analytic judgment." However, it's equally "true" that 2 + 2 + 11 ... if you happen to be calculating in base three.

Kant went on the posit two realms of judgment, one of them "prior to" experience, the other following upon experience. He was eager to locate a domain of truths that weren't merely reiterations of  the presuppositions involved, but had transcended, somehow, the rough and tumble of experience. He referred to such truths as acts of a priori synthetic judgments, and many Kant enthusiasts today consider this transcendental realm as Kant's great gifr to the world.  

I find it amusing that neither of the examples of such thought given in the Encyclopedia Brittanica actually possess the required attributes of the form:

Synthetic a priori proposition, in logic, a proposition the predicate of which is not logically or analytically contained in the subject—i.e., synthetic—and the truth of which is verifiable independently of experience—i.e., a priori. Thus the proposition “Some bodies are heavy” is synthetic because the idea of heaviness is not necessarily contained in that of bodies. On the other hand, the proposition “All husbands are male” is analytic because the idea of maleness is already contained in that of husband.

Some bodies are heavy? Well, a body would typically be described as something that has weight, so the remark is analytic. It doesn't meet the requirements.

All husbands are male? Here in the 21st century, we all know this to be factually untrue.

Kant himself considered mathematical processes as "synthetic," Heaven knows why.

 

The most glaring errors to be found in Kant's work are those that pertain to the differences between the world in which we live and our impressions of that world. It almost goes without saying that such impressions are always incomplete, provisional, and tinged with error. Kant make a great fuss about this fact, however, even going so far as to suggest that many elements of our experience derive not from the world we inhabit but from the architecture and tools supplied by our own brains.

The French intellectual and novelist Madame de Staël,  author of the first popular analysis of German culture to reach a wider Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century, wrote:

The leading imperative forms of our understanding are space and time. Kant demonstrated that everything we per­ceive is subject to these two forms. He concludes that they are in ourselves and not in external objects, and that in this sense it is our understanding that imposes laws upon external nature rather than receiving them from it.

From this and other silly notions arose the idea that we can never actually form clear and adequate impressions of the things around us. The only things we can know "for sure" are the impressions themselves, locked within our heads. Kant referred to these impressions as "phenomena," and in the course of time a field of study has developed—phenomenology—devoted to exploring the ins and outs of these purely mental bits of data.

The entire field is illusionary.

Just a few years ago, MIT published a monograph titled Phenomenology in which we:

Sometimes there can be mere appearance; it looks like the turtle is dead but it turns out it was just playing dead ... But we are able to have mere appearance because experience is fundamen­tally reliable; we know the turtle is in fact alive, because we now see it swimming away, or we pick up what we think is a turtle only to discover the lifeless solidity of rock... Phenomenology does not study mere appearance; it studies the true appearance of things.

The author somehow fails to notice that "true" appearance differs here from "mere" appearance by further investigation, not of a phenomenological event inside our head, but of a real event out in a pond. We improve our understanding of the world by going out into it. 

The kernel of Kant's thought that needs to be explored and developed is the judgment, through which we assert the goodness, truth, or beauty of a thing. Or more strictly, of an event.

Value is of the essence of reality. We can defend our values, perhaps eloquently, but we can't "prove" them, because they apply to aspects of the world we share with others, rather than closed systems of our own devising. And others may react to the same things differently.

Kant describes his mission, near the start of his Critique of Pure Reason, as one of distinguishing a "pure" from an "empirical" cognition.  Underlying such an impulse is the desire for some sort of depth and transcendence, and these are things we can all aspire to. But such enlightenment cannot be gained through the pursuit of logical purity. Rather, the quest leads us through the muck of experience, guided by our conscience, taste, fellow feeling, curiosity, and judgment.

One of Kant's admirers wrote recently in the Times Literary Supplement that "it's easy to find Kant mystifying or off-putting unless you have the time, patience and sympathy to discover and properly reflect on his remarkably original work."

I have the time, patience, sympathy. I have reflected for years, on and off. Nothing good has come of it. I'm going birding.