Kant & Critical Theory

Kant is sometimes seen as a great divide in the history of philosophy. Many are persuaded by his argument; critical theory is one of the philosophical traditions that comes out of Kant's insights. Many are not persuaded by his philosophy, and critical theory's most serious critics often can chart their philosophical heritage to the foes of Kant.

So what did Kant do that was so important?

Kant follows both the rationalists, represented by Decartes (and others) and the empiricists, represented by Locke (and others). His basic insight he called his "Copernican Revolution". Copernicus' insight was that what seems to be the case, in fact is not the case: the sun does not revolve around the earth, but vice versa. It was a denial of the obvious. Kant's revolution was of the same sort, and it was this:he denied that the world was "out there", and independent of our experience. The whole point of his first major critical work (theCritique of Pure Reason) is that knowledge of the world is possible because the self - the transcendental self, or ego - determines the structure of our experience.

Kant argues that our minds are active in structuring our knowledge, and in structuring the world, and that structuring is not subjective, but universal and necessary.

Here's how he starts:

Kant reflects on the nature of judgment. All our knowledge is expressed as judgments. Hume divided our knowledge judgments into two types - relations of ideas and matters of fact. Kant agrees that this is roughly right, but not precise enough. He distinguishes between 2 questions:

1) an epistemological question - Does knowledge rest on experience, or not?, and

2) a semantic question - How do the meanings of the words we use to express knowledge relate to each other?

There are 2 divisions in each question:

1. epistemological - a. a judgment can be known to be true without reference to experience (eg. 5 + 7 = 12): a priori, or b. a judgment can be know to be true only with reference to experience (eg. leaves falling indicates the coming of winter): a posteriori.

2. semantic - a. a judgment is analytic if its denial produces a contradiction (eg. All bodies are extended, Every mother has a child). If an analytic proposition is true, it is necessarily true. b. a judgment is synthetic if it does more than simply explicate or analyze a concept (eg. "Air has weight"). The opposition of a synthetic proposition is always possible.

We can put these together, into a grid:

For Kant the "synthetic a priori" category is the key to everything.

But so what? What does this tell us? For Kant, it means that we have to find the structures that are in the mind already, that allow us to make sense out of the world. We don't get them from the world (like Locke thought). But since they have no content of their own, we also don't really have them innately (like Descartes thought).

In other words, Kant thought that we have a kind of grid through which we filter the chaos that comes in from the world. We make it comprehensible. That means that, when we comprehend something, we are comprehending ourselves, not the world (for we gave it all order).

Knowing the world means knowing ourselves.

So, what do we learn about ourselves? Well, it depends on what parts of the world we are considering. For instance: when we sense something, we always sense it in space and time. It always has a place in the world, and it always exists through time. But does space and time exist apart from us? Kant thinks not. We bring space and time to the world, and we can't help doing it.

There is one important consequence of this: We must be beings that construct the world spatially and temporally, but we ourselves must not be spatial and temporal. If we were, then the principles themselves would be imbedded in the world, instead of in our minds, and we're back to the original problems of skepticism. Therefore, there is the "transcendental self", which is outside of space and time, and looks at the world, itself included, through the lens of space and time. There is therefore also the empirical self, which is the result of this process.

Knowing the World

Kant already recognizes that we will not get behind our pure intuitions of space and time. In other words, we will only know our appearances, which have been constructed based on our intuitions of space and time. But there is more.

Kant begins by distinguishing between two powers of the mind: sensibility and understanding. The former is a passive power, the ability to receive impressions, while the latter is an active power, the ability to think objects by constructing a representation of them using concepts.

Each of these powers can be either pure (a priori) or empirical (a posteriori):

We don't yet know if all these representations actually represent something, but we do know that if there is a representation, it will have to be in tandem with some intuition. Remember, intuitions are passive; they are simply the ability to receive impressions. Concepts are active; the constructive ability of the mind.

Kant wants to say that there can be pure concepts, just like there can be pure intuitions. In thinking of the objective world, our thoughts necessarily take some form of organization. Remember that all the empiricists had a problem with where substance fit in? For Kant, it is an organizing concept, a structure we bring to the world to perceive it.

Kant admits that most of our concepts are learned through experience. However, some of the most basic concepts are not learned, but presupposed in every experience. We couldn't have our experience without already having these concepts. These are the concepts we must have in order to make our judgments. Kant thinks he has figured out all the concepts needed to perceive the world. There are these, and only these, and we all have them. But they are not derived from the world. They are essential for logic (these are also in the Prolegomena):

"Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind".


So, here is the perceptual series:

1. Noumena, or things in themselves
2. Constitute the phenomenal world of appearances (objects), by
3. Producing in the knower a manifold of sensations (Hume's impressions, Locke's sensations), which are
4. Apprehended through the intuitions of space and time (a priori forms of the knower's sensibility), and
5. Structured as substances in causal connections by the a priori categories of the understanding (concepts).

The relevance to critical theory should start to be obvious by now. Kantquestions the distinction between "out there" and "in here". The knowable world is not just either objective or subjective for him; everything knowable is a mixture of both. Understanding what is out there, therefore, means understanding what is in here.

Kant did not really have a theory of social construction. Our knowledge does not come from collective and contingent agreement, for him. He thinks that what we all share is transcendental, that is, universal and necessary. Lots of people question that kind of belief. But he does open the door to critical philosophy, by providing a kind of idealism which does not reduce the subjective to the objective, or vice versa, but makes it possible for us to question our own place in our knowledge.

Kant also gives us a fundamental distinction between what can be known scientifically, and what can't. Previously, everyone just assumed that reason allowed us to make a science out of everything, including ethics, social organization, etc. Kant closed the door to that, although certainly many people continued to try. It meant that we had to account for things that we all share, like our moral codes or our artistic intuitions, in a way other than scientific.