ANOTHER UNPUBLISHED PAPER FROM MY FLES

 

Reflections on

REASON AND REFLECTIVE JUDGMENT

by

Paul Guyer

Robert Paul Wolff

Department of Philosophy

University of Massachusetts at Amherst

 

                       

            Readers of the Critical Philosophy are well aware - I find myself inclined to say painfully aware - of Kant's penchant for issuing teleological judgments couched in the late scholastic language of faculty psychology. The Critical Writings are filled with assertions that Nature dictates such and such purposes for Productive Imagination, or that Reason in its Practical Employment has an interest in this or that. At times, Kant multiplies faculties of the mind like a mad phrenologist driven to feats of hypostatization by an unusually bumpy skull.

Accompanying these statements, which are legion, are dogmatic claims about the systematic completeness of the Critical Philosophy, which, Kant tells us repeatedly, is one of its distinguishing marks. Kant frequently construes the supposed completeness of his system as an evidence of its truth, as when he says, in the opening paragraph of the Transcendental Analytic, that 'The completeness and articulation of [the system of pure concepts] can at the same time yield a criterion of the correctness and genuineness of all its components.' [A6S=B90]

How, as critical, philosophically engaged readers, ought we to interpret such claims as these? How ought we to respond to them? At the outset, we can, I think, assert with absolute confidence that Kant intended to make such claims, believed them - at least in some sense of belief - and in fact set great store by them. He would have reacted quite negatively to the suggestion that they are, one and all, illegitimate echoes of a philosophical tradition which he, more than any other single author, devastatingly and permanently discredited. Nevertheless, that is patently the truth.

Consider, for example, the following passage, taken from the second paragraph of The Regulative Employment of the Ideas of Pure Reason, the portion of the CRITIQUE from which Professor Guyer draws the preponderance of his citations.

Everything that has its basis in the nature of our powers must be appropriate to, and consistent with, their right employment - if only we can guard against a certain misunderstanding and so can discover the proper direction of these powers. We are entitled, therefore, to suppose that transcendental ideas have their good, proper, and therefore immanent use, although when their meaning is misunderstood, and they are taken for concepts of real things, they become transcendent in their application and for that very reason can be delusive. [A643=B671]

On its face, this passage is doub1y absurd - first, by virtue of its invocation of a quite groundless teleology, and second by its reliance on a classification of powers or faculties of the mind for which Kant can offer no justification whatsoever.

I take it this harsh judgment would find widespread acceptance today, but it might be worth recollecting just what is wrong with faculty psychology in its teleological mode. The problem with discourse about faculties of the mind is that we have no direct access to those faculties that would allow us to identify them, differentiate them, and ascertain their normal, not to say their appropriate, functions. I can get at the liver and the kidneys, either by physical examination, by x-ray, or by autopsy. I can observe their functioning, and draw conclusions about what they do in the body, and even - in some not entirely indefensible sense - about what they are 'supposed' or 'intended' to do - this latter a harmless teleology that can be cashed either by the medical notion of healthy functioning or by the evolutionary notion of adaptability.

But neither Kant nor we can obtain direct access to the Understanding, the Imagination, Reason, Judgment, or Sensibility. Hence these titles can legitimately be employed only as the empty names of the loci of certain observable, or inferrable, activities, capacities, powers, or functions of the mind. In the CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, Kant almost always recognizes this fact. When he observes, or infers, two activities of the mind whose structures differ, he imputes them, appropriately to two distinct faculties. In some passages, Kant explicitly recognizes that faculties are merely place-holders for activities, as in the First Edition Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding, when he remarks that 'The unity of apperception in relation to the synthesis of imagination is the understanding' - a statement which is puzzling until we realize that it means: The Understanding is the empty name we assign to whatever faculty of the mind it is that brings the manifold or diversity of sense materials to the unity of apperception by means of the synthetic activity which we arbitrarily impute to Imagination.

In the central argument of the FIRST CRITIQUE, I can think of only one place where Kant relies illegitimately on his faculty psychologizing - namely, in the Metaphysical Deduction, when he argues, in backwards fashion, that the forms of unity in synthesis must correspond to the forms of unity in judgment because both judging and synthesizing are activities of the Understanding [A79=B105-6].

The teleological utterances are equally unacceptable. Faculties of the mind, even if we were able to locate them directly, could only be assigned purposes if we imagined them to be the products of a purposeful creator.

My own view is that we students of Kant must master this aspect of the Critical Philosophy - must, in William S. Gilbert's immortal words, learn up all the germs of the transcendental terms - that we must become entirely clear on the role that a teleology of mental faculties plays in the CRITIQUE and the other works of the Kantian corpus - and that we must then set it to one side as virtually without philosophical merit or promise. In short, it has always seemed to me that Kant's ebullient elaboration of the architectonic in all it effulgent complexity has no more intellectual importance than Berkeley's discourse on the virtues of tar water or Newton's fascination with astrology.

Professor Guyer, with what I can only regard as heroic patience, has chosen to take a different tack. Provoked - if that is the word - by Kant's decision to reassign the ideal of systematicity from the faculty of pure theoretical reason to the faculty of reflective judgment - a decision, one would have thought, as fraught with philosophical significance as the telephone company's decision to reassign its subscribers in the city of Worcester to the 508 area code - he undertakes, by a painstaking review of Kant's remarks on systematicity, to extract from it a philosophically interesting conclusion. It is a testimony to the acuteness of his philosophical insight and the masterfulness of his scholarship that he is moderately successful. When one is squeezing blood from a stone, a few drops will suffice. One does not expect a transfusion.

The central question, as Professor Guyer quite properly insists, is whether Kant can produce some argument for the claim that complete systematicity of the natural laws produced by the understanding is a condition of the possibility of subjective consciousness. If Kant could plausibily maintain that we cannot even be conscious unless our experience is sufficiently regular to ground the search for systematic unity, then he could cash the teleological assertions about tasks set for Reason by Nature in a genuinely interesting way.

Professor Guyer and I disagree about whether Kant has something resembling a cogent argument for the claim that subjective consciousness presupposes a synthesis governed by the a priori rules labelled the categories. But we are, I take it, in complete agreement that regardless of the status of the argument of the Deduction, Kant cannot plausibly ground analogous claims for the Ideal of systematic unity of the totality of our knowledge of nature. Nevertheless, as is so often the case when one is puzzling over the Critical Philosophy, Kant manages to raise philosophically interesting questions even in the least promising precincts of his conceptual terrain. What is at stake in this issue of systematicity?

As I understand Professor Guyer, he thinks there are two things. The first is the relation of the Causal Maxim, which Kant attempts to establish in the argument culminating with the Second Analogy, to particular causal laws. The Second Analogy asserts, in effect, that there must be valid causal laws to be found which assert necessary connections among the events that constitute the experienced world. But the proof - assuming for the moment that it is sound - is not constructive. That is to say, at best it demonstrates the existence of causal laws, but does not specify procedures for identifying them. Kant does not, in fact, have much to say about the problems of justifying induction and grounding scientific explanation that have occupied philosophers of science during the past century and a half. Nor does he ever make clear in what way the synthesizing activity of the understanding confers necessity on particular scientific judgments. We know from the Introduction to the METAPHYSICAL PRINCIPLES OF NATURAL SCIENCE that he thought all true science must be mathematical in form, and that might encourage us to impute to Kant some version of the story that scientific theories are uninterpreted formal systems which, as a whole, have been set in relation to the world. Thus, the discussion of systematicity might be construed as an attempt to specify the criteria by which we can identify the correct structure of scientific laws.

If that is in fact what Kant had in mind, then it seems to me not at all a bad move on his part. The effort in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to produce a logic of induction that could justify individual causal judgments by appeal to bodies of observational reports proved less promising, in the end, than the alternative idea of treating formally organized systems of scientific laws as the units to be justified or rejected.

The second issue that Guyer sees Kant as raising is how to justify the heuristic or methodological principles of scientific inquiry. Why ought we to construe the unification of previously disjoint bodies of scientific laws as an advance in our understanding of nature? Why is it a step forward for Newton to identify a single set of premises from which both the laws of terrestrial motion and the laws of celestial motion can be derived? Was it scientifically appropriate for Einstein to devote the latter part of his life to a search for a unified field theory uniting Relativity Theory with the theory of electro-magnetic phenomena, a major goal of contemporary physics? And, more fundamentally still, what ground, if any, do we have for supposing that such unifications are waiting to be achieved?

Something that looks curiously similar to the Kantian theme of conditions of the possibility of experience has surfaced recently in the cosmological speculations of such theoretical physicists as Stephen Hawking. In his recent book, A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME, Hawking repeatedly invokes what modern physicists call the 'weak anthropic principle.' Hawking writes:

The weak anthropic principle states that in a universe that is large or infinite in space and/or time, the conditions necessary for the development of intelligent life will be met only in certain regions that are limited in space and time, The intelligent beings in these regions should therefore not be surprised if they observe that their locality in the universe satisfies the conditions that are necessary for their existence.

Somewhat later, discussing what is now called string theory, Hawking again invokes the anthropic principle to explain why only four of the ten or twenty-six dimensions required by the theory are actually flattened out into what we call space-time, rather than being curved in upon themselves into a space of very tiny size. The answer, he suggests, lies in the laws governing gravitational attractions between bodies. In three dimensions, the attraction between two bodies is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. In four dimensions, it is inversely proportional to the cube, in five dimensions to the fourth power, and so forth.

'The significance of this,' Hawking exp1ains, 'is that the orbits of planets, like the earth, around the sun would be unstable: the least disturbance from a circular orbit ••• would result in the earth spiraling away from or into the sun. In fact, the same behavior of gravity with distance in more than three space dimensions means that the sun would not be able to exist in a stable state with pressure balancing gravity. It would either fall apart or it would collapse to form a black hole••• On a smaller scale, the electrical forces that cause the electrons to orbit round the nucleus in an atom would behave in the same way as gravitational forces. Thus the electrons would either escape from the atom altogether or would spiral into the nucleus. In either case, one could not have atoms as we know them.

It seems clear then that life, at least as we know it, can exist only in regions of space-time in which one time and three space dimensions are not curled up small.

                                                            [Hawking, pp. 164-5]

This talk of curled up dimensions and black holes may seem a far cry from Kant's concerns with systematicity, but perhaps we can see the anthropic principle as a descendant of the Critical Philosophy's central theme, which is that reflections on the conditions of the possibility of knowledge in general yield at least conditionally a prior conclusions about the requisite structure of an acceptable theory of nature.